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In an 1886 piece of travel journalism written for the London-based periodical The Jewish Chronicle, the Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy records some brief, witty observations on the history and current conditions of the Jewish ghetto at Florence. By writing from the narrative perspective of a self-identifying English Jew, Levy addresses in “The Ghetto at Florence” a history of Jewish exclusion and confinement represented by the ghetto, while also using this site to engage her complex attitudes towards Jewishness in the mid-1880s, in London. Rather than an accurate history of place, however, what is foregrounded in her article is self-reflexivity about ways of seeing and the effects of memory. This paper examines her uses of imaginative representation, race science, and the photographic gaze to attempt a tactile and affective encounter with the ghetto. In occupying a vexed space between extreme openness to imagined historical resonances alongside ironic detachment from the inadequacies of the present moment, she embodies the characteristically isolated subjectivity of the flâneur. She does so while contemplating the role of Jewishness in using the past to make sense of modern identity.
January 2015: Richa Dwor is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester. Her research centers on Anglo-Jewish literature and culture of the nineteenth century and has appeared in interdisciplinary publications including The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Literature and Theology, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. Her monograph, Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing, is forthcoming from Continuum/ Bloomsbury Academic in 2015.