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This book examines texts by English writers from Bede to John Milton that focus on Jews who are accommodated—that is, those who have found lodging in a host country. Insofar as they are accommodated or housed, the Jews depicted in early English texts offer a geography of Jewish identity that departs from what may be a more familiar linkage of Jews and space in antisemitic literature: the Wandering Jew legend. That legend, whose mobile protagonist embodies the territorial upheavals of the Jewish diaspora, only became popular in Europe during the seventeenth century. Before that time, English literature featured not the wandering but the accommodated Jew. The book demonstrates how space both fosters and troubles the antisemitism at work in English texts by engaging in both historical contextualization and close formal analysis of their representation of physical locations. It uses as a conceptual springboard the Hereford world map in order to develop further its methodology.

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century debates over the readmission of Jews, when the English shifted from telling stories about Jewish houses to contemplating the accommodated Jew in earnest. During this period the link between Jews and materiality acquired new urgency in England, as the participants in Oliver Cromwell's Whitehall Conference pondered making a place, literally, for Jews on the island. This chapter examines both the appearance in England of a climate amenable to readmission and the resistance to such possibility, focusing on Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel's campaign for readmission through both polemical writings and his own prominent residence on the Strand, as well as Protestant polemicist William Prynne's collection of evidence favoring keeping Jews out of England. The chapter concludes by analyzing John Milton's position on readmission which he expressed in his 1671 play Samson Agonistes, with particular emphasis on his use of architectural figures to address issues of tolerance, Christianity, and Judaism. Instead of the house, however, Milton's preferred metaphor is Solomon's Temple.

This book has investigated the antisemitism at work in English texts, showing that such texts contain offensive fantasies about a supposed “Jewish” menace that stand in tension with counternarratives about an English Christian reliance on, desire for, and similitude to the “Jewish” materialisms Christianity claims to reject. Representations of the accommodated Jew thus reveal both an offensive politics of rejection and an ideological embrace of the Jew as a tool for accommodating the English to their messy urban materialisms. This coda discusses the implications of the book's findings for later English images of the Jew as they appear in Charles Dickens's novel Oliver Twist. It argues that Oliver Twist complicates received notions of the Jewish house through the juxtaposition of scenes of locking, containment, and enclosure with the portrayal of unwieldy and transgressive flows, circulations, and currents. It also considers how interaction with Jews prompts a reform in Dickens, leading him to offer an account that radically departs from the antisemitic images of Oliver Twist.