n 1844, Aguilar wrote The Perez Family, a long tale or short novel, for “The Cheap Jewish Library,” — a series of publications “Dedicated to the Working Classes” intended for readers of modest means who were mainly, but not exclusively, Jewish. The Perez Family, in which she eschews the strong, interlocking narrative structure and romantic historical setting of The Vale of Cedars in favour of an episodic fiction that allows her to address directly the various religious, cultural, social and economic problems faced by contemporary British Jews. The Perez family lives in Liverpool, one of two cities outside London with a center for London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews.
The story opens on a brief description of the modest Perez family cottage “in one of those close, melancholy alleys in the environs of Liverpool,” to which the family had had to withdraw after a fire gutted their previous dwelling and Perez’s business ran into difficulties. Unlike the homes of their neighbours, however, it is clean on the outside and neat and well-kept on the inside. In addition, “the garden was carefully and prettily laid out, and planted with the sweetest flowers” (87) – thanks to its being tended by the paterfamilias Simeon Perez himself, who had been persuaded to do so by Sarah, a niece the family had taken in after the death of her mother left her in the care of her profligate father in London. Gardening, the narrator comments, “gave Perez an occupation which interested him, though he might never have thought of it himself,” since “both local and national disadvantages often unite to debar the Jews from agriculture” and “cause them to herd in the most miserable alleys of crowded cities.” Perez, however, “found pleasure in his new employment” and “in the delight it was to his poor little daughter Ruth,” blinded in the fire that had swept the family’s previous home, “to sit by his side while he worked, and inhale the reviving scent of the newly turned earth” (97). So much for the commonly alleged uncleanliness of Jews and their aversion to working the land.
The title-page of an American 1847 edition of The Perez Family. Courtesy of the Hathi Trust Digital Library and the Ohio State University Library.
Unlike the usual portrait – since Shakespeare’s Shylock — of the harsh Jewish male, who lords it over his daughter and prevents her from reaching out beyond the closed Jewish community, Perez is a kind, loving man, devoted to his family. He refuses cut off or condemn his eldest son Reuben, who, ambitious and eager to join the wider world around him, refused to be part of his father’s watch-making business because he to make his way in the wider Christian-English world. Reuben’s wife Rachel, who remains completely, unquestioningly faithful to her Jewish faith, shares her husband’s basic humanity, but she finds herself deeply disturbed when she overhears him ask a companion: “What is it to be a Jew but to be cut off from every honourable and manly employment? To be bound, fettered to an obsolete belief which does but cramp our energies, and bind us to detestable trade. No wonder we are looked upon with contempt” (92). A loving parent, Perez urges patience and forbearance. Even as he lies dying and Reuben, who had been sent to Manchester by his employer, fails to come, he neither denounces nor condemns his so.
“Rachel, my own dear wife, do not weep thus; he will come yet, and if he do not, oh, may God bless him still! Tell him there was no thought of anger or reproach within me. My first born, first beloved, beloved through all – for wayward, indifferent as he is, he is still my son – perhaps if he tarry until too late, remorse may work upon him for good, may awaken him to better thoughts and if our God in His mercy detain him for this, we must not grieve that he is absent.” [99]
Reuben, who in Aguilar’s story represents the talented and energetic young Jew attracted to the wider non-Jewish world, does finally come back — to inform his family that he has become betrothed to the daughter of a fellow-clerk at his place of employment. His deeply religious younger brother Simeon is outraged: “Jeanie Wilson — a Christian! Reuben, Reuben how have you fallen? But it is folly to be surprised; I knew it would be so.” And he recalls how Reuben never sought him out or let himself be approached for weeks at a time, being too busy “herding with strangers alone; following them alike in the store and in the mart —loving what they love, doing as they do—and like them scorning, despising, and persecuting that holy people who once called you son — forgetting your birth right, your sainted heritage, throwing dishonour on the dead as on the living, to link yourself with those who assuredly will, if they do not now, despise you. Shame, foul shame upon you!” (122).
Reuben does not respond to anger with anger: “I have done nothing for which to feel shame! nothing to dishonour those with whom I am related,” he insists quietly. “If they feel themselves dishonoured, let them leave me; I can meet the world alone.” To Rachel’s appeal to her sons to “profane not the Sabbath of your God with this wild and wicked contention,” Simeon retorts that he “will own no apostate for my brother. [. . .] Others may regard him as they list, if he have given up his faith, I will not call him brother.” For his part, Reuben responds “calmly” to his brother’s hostile attack: “I have neither the will nor occasion to forswear my faith. Mr. Wilson has made no condition in giving me his daughter, except that she may follow her own faith, which I were indeed prejudiced and foolish to deny. He believes as I do—to believe in God is enough—all religions are the same before Him.” To his questioning his sisters Leah and Ruth and his youngest brother Joseph as to whether they will “all refuse to love my wife,” and his urgently assuring them that “you will not—cannot [refuse] when you see and know her,” Leah replies tearfully, “As your wife, Reuben, we cannot feel indifference towards her. Yet if you had brought us one of our own people, O how much happier it would have made us!” Reuben responds with an expression of the broad interfaith tolerance he has espoused:
And why should it, my dear sister? Mother, why should it be such a source of grief? I do not turn from the faith of my fathers: I may neglect, disregard those forms and ordinances which I do not feel at all incumbent on me to obey, but I must be a Jew, I cannot believe with the Christian, and I cannot feel how my marriage with a gentle, loving, and most amiable girl can make me other than I am. We are in no way commanded to marry only amongst ourselves. [122-23]
To the credit of his mother Rachel, his sisters, and his wise, hard-working cousin Sarah who had become part of the Perez family and who quietly loves Reuben herself, it proved indeed “impossible to see and not to love his gentle wife” (129.
In Aguilar’s narrative, it soon turns out, however, that the religion of Reuben and Jeanie is not much more than a vague Deism. “He called himself, at least to his mother, a son of Israel but all real feeling of nationality was dead within him – yet he was not a Christian, nor was his wife, except in name. They believed there was a God, at least they said they did.” The matter was not pressing. As “life smiled on them, He was not needed, and so they lived without Him” (123). Jeanie’s death, however, following her giving birth to their child, leads the stricken and troubled Reuben to seek out his cousin Sarah, with whom he had always felt a shared bond, and to open his heart to her — at the same time declaring he now realizes that his longstanding attachment to her was in fact love. He confesses that at first he was drawn to Jeanie “because I thought a union with a Christian would put a barrier between me and the race I had taught myself to hate, would mark me no more a Jew.” However,
“even when life seemed all prosperous around me, there was still a void within — I was not happy. I had returned to virtue, turned aside from all irregular and sinful pursuits, kept steady in business and in doing kind acts towards men; more still, I had a gentle being who so loved me that she forced me into loving her more than when I first sought her. . . Yet still, still, even when I did love my fair and gentle wife, when she lavished on me such affection it ought to have brought but joy, I was not happy. I was away from all who knew my birth and race; the once hated name, a Jew, no longer hurt my ears; courted, flattered, admired, . . . there was still that gnawing void. I tried to believe with my Jeanie and her father. But I could not. I attended their church at times, I listened to their doctrines, I read their books; but no, no, God’s finger was upon me. I could not believe in any Saviour, any Redeemer, but Himself.”
Meantime Jeanie, who, “when we married, thought little of such things,” had fallen in with a “good and holy man, a pious minister of her own faith,” and become a devout Christian. As she gradually declined after her confinement, “I heard her call aloud for help and mercy from Jesus, not from God” (151-52).
His wife’s death, though it caused him pain and heartbreak (153), reinforces his gradual release from infatuation with the larger Christian world. Aguilar’s ambitious, free-thinking Reuben returns to the fold, no fanatic, to be sure, but contrite, and once again a good Jew, soon to be married to his beloved cousin Sarah. The lesson is that in the end, Jews must remain faithful to their religion and their people, even while maintaining, as Sarah especially is frequently described as doing, warm and generous relations with their Christian neighbours and fellow-citizens. Indeed, in matters of faith, as Rachel, the most loving and forgiving of mothers, insists, “we ought to keep ourselves yet more distinct, now that we are mingled up among those who know God and serve Him, though not as we do” (123). This is not, by any means, to say that Jews should shut themselves off from their Gentile fellow-citizens or think any the less of them because they are not Jewish. Rachel is as troubled — if anything even more troubled — by the fanaticism of Reuben’s younger brother, Simeon, as by the older brother’s desire to be free of the constraints of Judaism and the stigma attached to it in the Christian world. Much as Simeon had adored his father and had all his father’s “honesty and honour, all his energy and love for his ancient faith,” they were different in one important respect.
Perez could bear with, nay, love all mankind – could find excuse for the erring, even for the apostate, much as he abhorred the deed; could believe in the sincerity and piety of others, though their faith differed from his own; but Simeon could not feel this. Often, even in his childhood his father had to reprove him for prejudice; as he grew older his hatred against all those who left the faith, or united themselves in any way with other than Israelites continued violent. Prejudice is almost the only feeling which reason cannot conquer – religion may, and Simeon was truly and sincerely religious; but he loved his faith better than he loved his God. [106-07]
.In the end, however, Simeon too is brought around to the moderate position for Jews that is clearly advocated by the narrator – i.e. maintaining both close and friendly communication with the Christian society into which they have been received and which has become their home and their distinction from it. On returning from London, Simeon relates, he was taken very ill. Fortunately, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Morton
had me conveyed to his house, instead of leaving me to the care of heartless strangers at the public inn — had a physician to attend me, nursed me as his own son — would read and talk to me, even after he knew I was a Jew, on the spirit of religion, which we both felt. Never shall I forget the impressive tone and manner, with which he said when parting with me, ‘Young man, never forget this important truth — that heart alone in sincerity loves God, who can see, in every pious man, a brother, despite of difference of creed. That difference lies between man and his God: to do good, and love one another is man’s duty unto man — and can under no circumstances and in no places be evaded. Learn this lesson, and all the kindness I have shown you is amply rewarded. [171]
Remarkably enough, the female Jewish characters in Aguilar’s tale — Rachel, Leah, Ruth, and Sarah — do not have to learn this lesson. Following Mr. Morton’s precepts seems to come naturally to them. The same is true of the female Christian characters in the story. It is the two younger Jewish males who need to work their way out of the rigid and, to the narrator, false alternatives of total exclusiveness and assimilation.
Created 1 July 2020