The paper shows the ways in which the figure of the “jew” in contemporary British fiction by writers of Asian and Caribbean origin relates to the construction of the Other in a multiethnic and multicultural society. With the dissolution or delegitimization of the nation-state, the rise of fundamentalism, and the changing views of the British nation, the archetypal protean alien raises basic cultural and literary issues. This paper aims to demonstrate that the figure of the “jew” has been appropriated in postcolonial and postmodern discourse in order to test culturally ascribed, attributed, or assumed “fake” identities, and in so doing often perpetuates anti-Semitic stereotypes or uses them as “screens” for negative self-images.
In these texts the figure of the “jew” is used in the exposure of race prejudice, a kindred fake or mask that reflects discrimination and social hypocrisy. The postmodern figure of the “jew,” then, would be a metaphor for the problematics of passing and for the complexities of color and race in social masks, something that must make us reconsider Fanon’s model in Black Skin, White Masks. While the Jew is significant in collective memory of immigrant experience that marks the possibility of different and multiple identities within British society, the figure of the “jew” has also been taken as a model of hybridity that has proven to be complex and problematic.