Analysis of Dickens’ Anti-Semitism Sentiment in Oliver Twist(英语论文).docVIP

Analysis of Dickens’ Anti-Semitism Sentiment in Oliver Twist Anti-Semitism is traced back to ancient times in Europe, when Christian European nations’ distain, detestation, and hatred for the Jewish people began to burst out, and during the long historic period a collective subconsciousness of Christian Europeans gradually came into being that the Jewish people were dissenters that were born with ugliness, wickedness, and greed. As a matter of fact, Judaism, the religion of the Jewish people, is the parent of Christianity, but on account of various historic factors Christianity reformed some of the teachings of Judaism and was soon separated from Judaism, developing into a new independent religion. Thereafter, the two antagonistic religions were landed into a long fierce dispute over which nation was the people of the God, and, worse still, Christians launched relentless persecutions and slaughters against the Jewish people. They even accused Jews of murdering Jesus, which was the heaviest and most effective blow on the Jewish people as the image of Jews was so badly damaged that they became the incarnation of Satan, the evil, in the eyes of the other nations in Europe. A typical example that confirms this is that during the Black Death (a violent epidemic disease of bubonic plague, which swept all Europe during the 14th century) some people believed it a plot by Jews to poison the entire Christian world, and many Jews were killed by panicked mobs. Literature mirrors social reality, and the abovementioned reality, in return, have directly influenced the writing mode of European literary works and it, to some extent, became a fixed mode of European literature to associate Jews with negative values and devil-like images, as is seen in lots of famous European literary works. To name a few, Chaucer attributes Jews to be murders of Christian children in Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare has successfully created a selfish, covetous and wicked Jewish loan shark in Merchant