page_title: Stereotypes of Jews
section_title: English literature
hierarchical_section_title: Stereotypes of Jews / In literature / English literature
caption_attribution_description: English: A Jew Broker by Thomas Rowlandson, 1789
context_page_description: Stereotypes of Jews are generalized representations of Jews, often caricatured and of a prejudiced and antisemitic nature. The Jewish diaspora has been stereotyped for over 2,000 years as the scapegoat for a multitude of societal problems such as: Jews always acting with unforgiving hostility towards Christians, Jews' religious rituals which are thought to have specifically undermined the Christian Church and state, and Jews' habitual assassinations of Christians as their most extreme deeds.
  Common objects, phrases and traditions which are used to emphasize or ridicule Jewishness include bagels, playing violin, klezmer, undergoing circumcision, kvetching, haggling and uttering various Yiddish phrases like mazel tov, shalom, and oy vey. Other Jewish stereotypes are the rabbi, the complaining and guilt-inflicting Jewish mother, often along with a meek and nerdy nice Jewish boy, and the spoiled and materialistic Jewish-American princess.
context_section_description: Although Jews were expelled from England in 1290, stereotypes of them were so ingrained and so durable that they persisted in English society as was evidenced by presentations in English literature, drama, and the visual arts during the almost four-hundred-year period when virtually no Jews were present in the British Isles. Some of the best known stereotypes come from English literature; these include characters such as Shylock, Fagin and Svengali. Negative stereotypes of Jews were still employed by prominent twentieth-century non-Jewish writers such as Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
caption: A Jew Broker by Thomas Rowlandson, 1789.
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