Last night I finished my 28th Trollope novel, Nina Balatka. It is set in Prague, and it is about a young Christian woman who is engaged to a Jewish man.
I suspect that Trollope's treatment of Jewish characters is akin to his treatment of Irish characters: it seems pretty grim to present-day readers even though he is making an effort, at least some of the time, to push back against stereotypes. Ezekiel Breghert, in The Way We Live Now, faces down overt antisemitism. He is so much more gentlemanly than the ostensible gentlefolk of the Longstaffe family.
Nina Balatka is surrounded by people in a hurry to tell her that her engagement is a terrible idea. Like a lot of Trollope novels, this one focuses on decisions about marriage: why do people get married? What are the most important factors in their decisions? Should those be the most important factors? Can we make any reliable predictions about happiness in marriage?
Nina's fiancé Anton is driven to suspicion by the lies of Nina's extended family and their trusted servants, and Nina tells herself she should have known that he, being Jewish, would eventually be suspicious. Trollope seems to be asking an interesting question: how much of a stereotype is self-fulfilling prophecy? And how is it that Christians can behave badly, in ways that clearly violate their own moral code, and still view themselves as superior? This book includes the second Catholic priest I've encountered in a Trollope novel, and he is -- unexpectedly -- much more gentle with Nina than any of her Christian relatives have been.
Spoilers for a book from 1867: Nina and Anton marry and resettle themselves in Frankfurt, which was reputedly more accepting than Prague. The internet tells me that in the 1930s about 5% of Frankfurt's population had Jewish heritage, so let's hope the happy couple and their children found a welcome there. (Let's also hope their great-grandchildren left before things went south, since otherwise their outlook might have been bleak.)
One last interesting note about this book: Trollope published it anonymously. He had written a bunch of novels by the mid-1860s, and he didn't want to rest on his laurels. Would people read it if they didn't know it had been written by Anthony Trollope? The answer, alas, was no.
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