Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2012

Spicer provides an overview of the contribution of Jewish entrepreneurs to the British film industry from its beginnings through to the present. He argues that film was an open and rapidly expanding industry that offered exciting opportunities in production, distribution and exhibition for individuals regardless of class, background or ethnicity; it thus provided an arena in which Jewish traditions of risk taking, independence and ambition could thrive, though not without courting anti-Semitic prejudice. As the industry contracted from the 1950s onwards there were less opportunities, but nevertheless the Jewish presence remained strongly represented. Overall, he argues, the shape and contours of British cinema as it evolved are inconceivable without acknowledging the Jewish influence.

Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in early 1933 the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation produced a film version of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1925 novel Jew Suss. Whilst British censors would not allow any film to openly criticize the Nazi policy of persecution of Jews, it was clear to both the British Jewish and mainstream British press that the historic events depicted in the narrative had a wholly modern resonance. The task of this article is to trace this press discourse in order to understand the contours of the Jewish reception of Jew Suss’ British release. With particular attention devoted to commentary supplied by the Jewish press, the article examines a distinctly Jewish concern with the film as an article of propaganda. Not only was alarm expressed that the film might disseminate anti-Semitic prejudice, its potential to be read as a tendentious promotion of particularist interests was also a catalyst for anxiety. The unease associated with this latter factor should, it is argued, be understood in the context of the widely articulated contemporary trope of the cinema as a Jewish monopoly.

This article extends the term ‘British cinema’ to include the exilic productions of British artists and writers in Hollywood just before and during World War II. During the 1930s, British writers, film-makers and actors were lured to Hollywood as both an asylum from the threat of war and to make films that guaranteed creative opportunities, international distribution and acclaim far beyond what the cashstrapped British film industry could afford. As the Nazi threat in Europe escalated throughout the decade and Britain was increasingly threatened, the cultural bridge this artistic exile represented developed a political purpose. British artists were joining their nation’s propaganda efforts to win the sympathy and support of the United States. The British novelist Phyllis Bottome contributed to that effort, determined to see her 1937 bestseller, The Mortal Storm, produced in Hollywood. A prime example of a work that is both eminently British in its creative origins and focuses on the Jewish question remains The Mortal Storm by Frank Borzage, the 1940 blockbuster MGM film based on Bottome’s novel.

At key moments in modern British social history, works of art have been used to consolidate national identity by celebrating ‘Englishness’, while defining Jews as dangerously alien. British heritage cinema was implicated in this process after World War II, with David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948) and Noel Langley’s adaptation of Trilby (1894). When the latter became Svengali (1954), it recast the evil Jewish mesmerist’s victim as an innocent German girl – an egregiously offensive development less than ten years after the Holocaust, but one that British Jews were in no position to protest in the political climate of the Cold War.

My intention in writing this article is twofold. First, I aim to consider a small group of representations of British Jewish girlhood, and second, I attempt to expand the discourses through which Jewish girlhood has up until now been theorized, by considering Jewish girls beyond the confines of American spheres of representation. Representations of Jewishness have almost exclusively focused on the United States. This article considers how Jewish girls are represented in another context: that of British cinema.