A central argument of this study is that the racial construction of ‘the Jew’ in English literature and society is far from being a fixed, mythic stereotype as is commonly thought. On the contrary, we have shown that writers do not passively draw on eternal myths of ‘the Jew’ but actively construct them in relation to their own literary and political concerns. This active remaking of Jewish racial difference resulted in a bewildering variety of contradictory and over-determined representations of ‘the Jew’ which were particularly threatening to those who would wish to exert a sense of control and order over an increasingly unmanageable ‘reality’. It was in these terms that a more general crisis of representation could be reflected in a semitic discourse which constructed ‘the Jew’ as both within and without; a stranger and familiar; an object of esteem and odium; a progressive universalist and a racial particularist.