ABSTRACT
Jews were subject to a variety of re-imaginings during the Romantic period, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Table Talk anecdotes about Jews provide perhaps the most striking dramatization of the changes. In a discussion of attempts to convert Jews, Samuel Taylor Coleridge demonstrates the need for better treatment of Jews and better education. In so doing, he implies that the only reason Jews remain Jewish is ignorance and a reasonable antipathy to Christians. Coleridge repeatedly invokes a fixed Jewish identity, a national character of greed, obstinacy, criminality, and inalienable difference. Coleridge's shifting attitudes towards Jews follow a pattern that recurs both on the individual level and in the larger scope of British literature. A similar parallel between English Jews and American Muslims involves the way singular historical events seem to inspire sudden representational developments that are actually part of longer trends.
