Just when you think there’s little out there that can take you by surprise, along comes the very latest iteration of the so-called “Jewish question”: widespread -- and impassioned -- public speculation as to whether Downton Abbey’s newest character, Martha Levinson, the mother of Lady Cora Crawley, is -- or is not -- Jewish. Casting a gimlet eye on the way in which she speaks her mind, holds her fork, relishes her food and swans around swathed in fur and baubles, some fans of the show read Levinson’s behavior and appearance as that of a nouveaux riche American while others interpret it as Jewish.
Apparently, I’m among those historians. Unbeknownst to me until a colleague brought it to my attention, my book, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America, was enlisted in support of the position that Martha Levinson is Jewish, through and through. Imagine that?!
The book, which explores the relationship between clothing and the moral imagination in modern America, does refer to a number of late 19th and early 20th century critiques of sartorial excess, including an editorial that appeared in the American Jewess of 1899 titled “Jewels No Longer Synonymous with Jewess.” Ironically enough, its ringing declaration that the American Jewish woman no longer had need for “glittering tinsels” because she had come instead to appreciate the “rich tints of her coloring and the brilliancy of her eyes” reinforced, rather than diminished, the connection between jewelry and Jewesses.
Can Martha Levinson be far behind? I’m not so sure. Scholarship is one thing, television quite another, and leapfrogging between them is not quite as simple as it may seem.
All the same, what with the considerable to-ing and fro-ing over the presence or absence of Jews at Downton Abbey, you have to wonder what’s at stake. Then again, perhaps it’s merely a new kind of parlor game.
