I don't mean to beat the topic into the ground, but I thought it would be worthwhile to do a little research into the screenwriter's intentions. Google turned up this piece from December 2007, and it sounds like I was fairly close the mark in my guess that the portrayal was meant to show Fagin as a Jew who had suffered from prejudice. A sample:
Dickens based the character on a notorious Jewish fence called Ikey
Solomons, and he supplied the novel's illustrator, George Cruikshank,
with ample clues for a good likeness. He gave him red matted hair and
beard, long black nails, a sizeable nose and 'among his toothless gums
a few such fangs as should have been a dog's or rat's'. 'A Jew seldom
thieves,' explained a contemporary report, 'but is worse than a thief;
he encourages others to thieve?… if a robbery is effected, the property
is hid till a Jew is found, and a bargain is then made.' Dickens was as
guilty as anyone of this anti-Semitic reflex. At one point we meet
another Jew, 'younger than Fagin, but nearly as vile and repulsive in
appearance'.
'Fagin is a Jew,' Dickens later explained,
'because it is unfortunately true, of the time to which the story
refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was Jewish.' A
complaint from a reader prompted Dickens to delete some instances of
the J-word between the serial launched in Bentley's Miscellany in 1837
and later editions. But the insignia of his cartoon Jewishness stayed:
he slinks, stoops, rubs his hands. We watch him 'creeping beneath the
shelter of the walls and doorways?… like some loathsome reptile'. . . .
[Sarah] Phelps, the writer of more than 50 episodes of EastEnders, came to
Oliver Twist with a more or less clean slate. Having seen Oliver! but
not read the novel, she was 'uncomfortable' with Dickens's
anti-Semitism. Her response has been to make his Jewishness more
explicit than in any previous portrayal. This Fagin wears a yarmulka
and, while the boys eat the sausages he prepares with his toasting
fork, he doesn't. Nor does he send potential snitches to the gallows.
'The point about Fagin is he has to be a survivor,' Phelps argues. 'The
19th century was pretty hostile to Jews. Fagin is a fence because there
is no other job for him to do. He arrives in London with the sound of
the hooves of the Cossacks ringing in his ears. The reason he's here is
the tidal wave of European history.'
Read more. A little unfair to accuse Dickens of anti-Semitism, I think, after explaining his reasoning and how he tried to clean up his act. But still, it's an interesting piece for those watching the movie.
Recent Comments