Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime. And by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity. Oliver Twist is Charles Dickens’s second novel, and was first published as a serial. Oliver Twist is notable for its unromantic portrayal by Dickens of criminals and their sordid lives, as well as for exposing the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century. Scholars at home and abroad highly appreciate his realistic techniques. In 1987, Gwen Watkins published Dickens in Search of Himself: Recurrent Themes and Characters in the Work of Charles Dickens. By analyzing Dickens’ main novels and depicting some essential figures, Watkins pointed out some realistic themes and characters in Dickens’ novels such as “the crime of being born” (Watkins, 1987:95). In 2002, Lyn Pykett’s Charles Dickens paid enormous tribute to him by indicating Dickens’ lofty literary status as a realistic author. Since its appearance, Oliver Twist has attracted the attention of scholars from a wide variety of critical fields: psychoanalysis, deconstruction, historicism, formalism and so forth. In the preceding research, studies on this novel usually concentrate on the realistic theme: crime and poverty that contact with the Victorian times. 

However, Oliver Twist does not disclose objective truth absolutely. Dickens has been accused of following anti-Semitic stereotypes because of his portrayal of the Jewish character Fagin in Oliver Twist. Paul Vallely wrote that “Fagin is widely seen as one of the most grotesque Jews in English literature, and the most vivid of Dickens’s characters” (Vallely, 2005:6). Nadia Valdman, who wrote about the portrayal of Jews in literature, argues that “Fagin’s representation was drawn from the image of the Jew as inherently evil, that the imagery associated him with the devil and with beasts” (Valdman, 2005:36). The novel refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as the Jew, while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is rarely mentioned. In 1854, The Jewish Chronicle asked why Jews alone should be excluded from the sympathizing heart of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed. Dickens who had extensive knowledge of London street life and child exploitation explained that he had made Fagin Jewish because “it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew” (Howe, 1990:108). Dickens commented that by calling Fagin a Jew he had meant no imputation against the Jewish faith, saying in a letter, “I have no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public or private, and bear my testimony to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them” (Edgar, 1952:37). 

Some critics also turn to Dickens’ limitations as a realistic writer who focuses his prejudice on the Jewish people. Early in 1958, Lauriate Lane published Dickens’ Archetypal Jew (Lane, 1958) that depicted a Jew Fagin who pointed out Dickens owned racial prejudices towards Jewish people due to the demonization of Fagin. In 1959, Harry Stone’s “Dickens and the Jew” narrated some typical Jews in Dickens’ works which demonstrated that the Jewish images in Dickens’ early work reflected his prejudice to the Jewry (Stone, 1959:56). Fred Kaplan edited one book Oliver Twist: Authoritative Text, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism (Kaplan, 1993) that introduced some reviews and criticisms to Dickens’ achievements and limitations. Susan Meyer also asserted that “because the negative representation of the Jew is so implicated in Dickens’s passionate social critique, it is a novel from which the Anti-Semitism is inextricable” (Meyer, 2005:239). 简析狄更斯《雾都孤儿》中的反犹主义(2):http://www.chuibin.com/yingyu/lunwen_206331.html