Some of My Best Friends...

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Fagin is noted for being one of the few Jewish characters of 19th century literature, let alone any of Dickens's pieces. Fagin has been the subject of much debate over antisemitism both during Dickens's lifetime and up to modern times. In an introduction to a 1981 Bantam Books reissue of Oliver Twist, for example, Irving Howe wrote that Fagin was considered an "archetypical Jewish villain."[4] The first 38 chapters of the book refer to Fagin by his racial and religious origin 257 times, calling him "the Jew", with just 42 uses of "Fagin" or "the old man". In 2005, novelist Norman Lebrecht wrote that "A more vicious stigmatisation of an ethnic community could hardly be imagined and it was not by any means unintended." Dickens claimed that he had made Fagin Jewish because "that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew".[5] He also claimed 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 (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them..."[6]


4 Dickens, Charles (22 January 1982). Oliver Twist (A Bantam classic). Bantam USA. ISBN 0553210505.
5 Lebrecht, Norman (29 September 2005). "How racist is Oliver Twist?". La Scena Musicale. http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/050929-NL-twist.html. Retrieved 2009-02-08.
6 Johnson, Edgar (1 January 1952). "4 - Intimations of Mortality". Charles Dickens His Tragedy And Triumph. Simon & Schuster Inc. http://dickens.ucsc.edu/OMF/johnson.html. Retrieved 8 February 2009.