Jewish Stereotypes In Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, And Edith Wharton

In early-twentieth century American fiction, Jewish stereotypes often focused on Jewishness as a racial phenomenon. Texts attributed distinct personality traits and physical characteristics to Jews on account of their biological difference from gentiles. Further, Jewish stereotypes frequently portrayed Jews as social infiltrators and outsiders who threatened the status quo. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edith Wharton, among other early-twentieth century American authors, also used Jewish stereotypes as a device to accentuate their works’ social commentary and to emphasize their protagonists’ desirable, American traits. Taken together, these three writers’ Jewish stereotypes exhibited patterns in their presentation of Jewishness, in their tropes’ focus on Jewish physical and social attributes, and in their text’s differentiation between Jewish and gentile characters. First, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wharton all used Jewish stereotypes that presented Jewishness as a racial, biological phenomenon. For instance, in The Sun Also Rises and The House of Mirth, Jewish characters

In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Robert Cohn personified the inverse of the non-Jewish protagonist, Jake Barnes, who typified Hemingway’s ideal manhood and values. Jake, for example, sustained injuries while fighting in the Great War that rendered him impotent. Cohn, conversely, did not deploy to war. He only engaged in combat while boxing at Princeton, and he only sustained one injury while fighting: he “got his nose permanently flattened.” Unlike Jake’s combat and injury, which maimed him, Hemingway noted that Cohn’s injury actually “improved his nose” and appearance. Further, in contrast to Jake’s wound, which left him physically emasculated, Cohn was “physically sound but emotionally emasculated,” another clear inversion of Jake and Robert’s characters and