The English “Jew Bill” of 1752 and Laurence Sterne’s Fears of Circumcision

Recently, I published an article on the Jews in Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy.¹ The novel seemed to be obsessed with circumcision. Sterne was alert to the general mania that accompanied the so-called “Jew Bill” of 1752 to give a select number of Jews naturalization. Newspapers and street speakers stirred up fears that, should Jews gain citizenship, they would force all Englishmen to undergo circumcision. The novelist looked with scorn at the popular anti-Semitism stirred up by the debates,² but used the occasion to mix into his novel traditions pertaining to circumcision and castration. Tristram Shandy, whose name alludes to Aristotle’s dictum, post coitu tristam est (after coitus there is sadness), had his upper nose crushed by forceps at delivery. A few years later the maid allows him to pee out the window; the casement falls and little Tristram has his lower nose crushed.

Sterne identified with Tristram, and

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contemporary readers had difficulty separating the man from his works. Arriving from obscurity in Yorkshire to become the talk of London, Sterne played up this confusion. His correspondence, when the novel was appearing, may be indicators of the novelist’s unconscious.

In January, 1760, Sterne reacted to criticism that Tristam Shandy wantonly encourages female unchastity. He declares his motivation for writing is “not to be fed, but to be famous.”³ The letter moves into anxiety deriving from fears about masculinity: “An author is not so soon humbled as you may imagine — no, but to make the book better by castrations, that is still sub judice, and I can assure you, upon his chapter, that the very passages and descriptions you propose that I should sacrifice in my second edition are what are best relished by men of wit, and some others whom I esteem as sound critics — so that, upon the whole, I am still up, if not above fear, at least above despair, and have seen enough to shew me the folly of an attempt of castrating my book to the prudish humors of particulars. I believe that short cut would be to publish this letter at the beginning of the third volume, as an apology for the first and second.”

Resistance turns to defiance, even aggression. Why should Sterne see the charge striking at his maleness? The answer is that the pen/penis runs through literary history, as does the notion that an author’s books are his offspring, so threats to them are attacks against maleness.

In April, 1760, in a letter to David Garrick, the pain is displaced from penis to finger. He writes “Dear Sir, — ’Twas for all the world like a cut across my finger with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood — give it a suck — wrap it up — and thought no more about it.”⁴ Then the associations lead him towards something more ambiguously expressed: “But there is more [that] goes [in]to the healing of a wound than this comes to — a wound (unless it is a wound not worth talking of — but by the bye, mine is) must give some pain after.” This threat derives from a sore place where creativity and potency meet, and where the figure of a threatening and protecting father collides with anxieties over criticism.

In this same letter to Garrick, Sterne rejects rumors that he is planning to give Tristram a tutor based on Bishop Warburton: “The report might draw blood from the author of Tristram Shandy — but could not harm such a man as the author of the Divine Legislation.”⁵ This passage is tied to what happened when Moses tried to enter Egypt with his uncircumcised son, Gershom. An angel stood in the road; the prophet was stunned, but Moses’ wife circumcised the baby; the angel stood aside.⁶ In this dream-like text, Warburton becomes the angel, Sterne the infant and Moses, and the public the female-circumciser.

Once Sterne is established with a steady income, the “castration complex” disappears from his letters. But the anxiety is present always, lurking in the last books of the novel, in events such as Tristram’s impotent journey through France,⁷ Uncle Toby’s futile wooing of Widow Wadman, and the “truncated” conclusion, which is nothing but “a cock and bull story.”

¹ Norman Simms. “The Missing Jews and Jewishness in Tristram Shandy” The Shandean 4 (1992) 135-152. The background details to the argument put forward here are noted and referred to in this article.

² Samuel Richardson, another novelist, for instance, wrote to Elizabeth Carter on 17 August 1753 of “the foolish, the absurd Cry” raised in the past few years against the Jews; cited by T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben O. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: The Claredon Press, 1971), p. 549.

³ The letters are edited by Sterne’s daughter, Lydia Sterne de Medallc and published in The Works of Laurence Sterne (London: George Rutledge and Sons, n.d.), p. 561.

⁴ Works, p. 562.

⁵ Warburton’s Divine Legislation of Moses was one of the key texts in trying to accommodate Christianity (the Law of Moses transformed into the New Testament of Jesus) to Deism. Warburton was therefore a controversial figure in the debates over orthodoxy in mid-century.

⁶ How Sterne came to know of these rabbinical midrshim and debatos is explained in my article; see Note 1 above.

⁷ Arthur Cash calls Tristram Shandy “the first novel in our literature which gives a central place to the theme of impotence” (Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London and New York: Methune, 1986), p. 258, n. 160).

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