• Fragment of an Address to the Jewsについて

• Nora Crook “Fragment of an Address to the Jews”

• 斎藤勇, 市河三喜 著「巻頭の冩眞版について」

• 透過光画像との比較 / Comparison between the transmitted photograph and the original image

Fragment of an Address to the Jewsについて

"Fragment of an Address to the Jews"は、東京大学総合図書館の貴重図書として所蔵されているパーシー・ビッシュ・シェリー（Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822）の手稿です。この資料は、1902（明治35）年に土井晩翠（1871-1952）がイギリスに赴いた際、Richard Garnett（1835-1906）を訪問し受け取ったものとされています。総合図書館には、土井家と縁のある中野好夫（1903-1985）の意向により中野家から寄贈されたと伝えられています。

この手稿をデジタル化しインターネットで公開するにあたり、本学大学院総合文化研究科のアルヴィ・宮本・なほ子先生に多くの示唆に富んだご助言をいただきました。特に、これまで総合図書館ではこの手稿に"A manuscript, written in his own hand"あるいは"パーシィ・ビッシュ・シェリー草稿"というタイトルを付与していましたが、アルヴィ・宮本・なほ子先生の呼びかけによりNora Crook先生（Anglia Ruskin University）、Michael Rossington先生（Newcastle University）、鶴見太郎先生（本学大学院総合文化研究科）との検討が進められ、"Fragment of an Address to the Jews"というタイトルで公開することとなりました。

また、この手稿に関しては、1923（大正12）年に発行された雑誌『英文學研究』（東京帝國大學英文學會編）の別冊第二「シェリ研究」に、斎藤勇先生（1887-1982）の論考と、市河三喜先生（1886-1970）の翻刻テキストが掲載されています。今回、斎藤勇先生、市河三喜先生それぞれのご遺族から電子化及び一般公開のご許可をいただき、この論文も公開することができました。"Fragment of an Address to the Jews"と併せてどうぞご利用ください。

“Fragment of an Address to the Jews”

“Address to the Jews” is the only known manuscript in the hand of Percy Bysshe Shelley outside the UK, Europe, and the US, apart from a few letters. It came to Japan in the latter part of the Meiji era, when Japanese literary scholars were discovering the Romantic Poets and “Japonism” in the West was at its zenith. The manuscript has descended to its present owners, always by inheritance and gift, never by purchase, in this order: Shelley (1792–1822), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), their son and daughter-in-law, Sir Percy Shelley (1819–1889), his wife Jane (1820–1899), Richard Garnett (1835–1906), the scholar-poet Tsuchii Rinkichi (Doi Bansui) (1871–1952), his family, and the University of Tokyo. There is only one other known Shelley manuscript with a comparable provenance, a Shelley notebook in the Library of Congress, Washington DC, which also arrived at a research library through a gift from Richard Garnett¹.
    Tsuchii met Garnett during his three-year sojourn in Europe (1901–4). It is not known how they met, but Garnett, recently retired (1899) from a distinguished career as Keeper of Printed Books at the British Library, London, was then enjoying an active retirement at his home in Hampstead, corresponding, writing, and cultivating literary friendships. As a young man, Garnett had been chosen by Shelley’s son and daughter-in-law, Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, to edit Relics of Shelley in 1862, a selection of unpublished poems and prose from the Shelley archive, the first since Mary Shelley’s last edition of her husband’s works (1847). Garnett remained a valued adviser and friend of the family. At some point before 1899, Sir Percy, Lady Shelley, or both, gave Garnett four of Shelley’s working notebooks as a reward for his services,² together with a few loose manuscript leaves containing brief fragmentary drafts. One of these must have been “Address to the Jews.” Garnett gifted it to Tsuchii in January 1902.
    Garnett and Tsuchii had many interests and sympathies in common, quite apart from a mutual love of British Romantic poetry (Tsuchii had partly translated Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry). Both were linguists, scholars of Greek, and poets. Tsuchii had been a student of Koizumi Yakumo (Lafcadio Hearn), at the Imperial University of Tokyo, which could not fail to have interested Garnett.³ In one of two cordial letters written to Tsuchii after Tsuchii’s return to Japan, and donated by Tsuchii’s family along with the MS., Garnett expresses his support for Japan in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5. (This was the majority opinion in Britain at the time.)
    If the circumstances of the gift are unusual, the contents of the manuscript are even more so. “Address to the Jews” is a fragment of a prose dramatic monologue in the form of an epistle or a speech. Shelley adopts the persona of an enlightened Jewish intellectual and patriot of the early nineteenth century, who exhorts his fellow Jews to unite to restore the Jewish nation and to rebuild the City of Jerusalem. The idea of restoring the Jews to their ancient homeland had some currency in the early nineteenth century. Napoleon in 1799 had allegedly promised this restoration to Jews if they supported his unsuccessful campaign to conquer Syria, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. Some British evangelical Christians looked forward to the return of the Jews to Jerusalem as a fulfilment of the Biblical prophecy that this would bring about the Second Coming of Christ on earth.⁴ But Shelley takes an entirely different line. He does not portray Jews as helplessly mourning their lost land, unlike Byron in Hebrew Melodies (1815), nor does he present the restoration of the Jewish nation as something for Western nations or Christian sects to take the initiative in promoting. Rather, it is something for Jews to achieve by their own efforts.
    The persona that Shelley has invented in “Address to the Jews” is a composite character who holds apparently incompatible opinions. It is not clear whether he is supposed to be addressing Jews worldwide, or a particular group of Jews such as British Jews. This imaginary Jew has qualities of both the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Jesus, two Jews who had been rejected by their orthodox communities. At times he sounds like Spinoza, who was a profound influence on Shelley, and who was expelled from the congregation of Amsterdam in 1656 for heresy. Shelley’s Jewish persona talks of God, but his God seems to be a non-supernatural God, indistinguishable from the workings of nature and the events of history. The persona is a necessitarian, who believes that change in society happens not because of God’s intervention in human affairs but because of all the events and human actions that have led up to such change. He says that God’s promise of salvation in the Jewish scriptures refers to the reestablishment of the Jews as a nation and the prosperity and virtue that will result, not to a life after death. All of this sounds very like Spinoza’s God. Yet, strangely, the persona also sounds at times like an orthodox Jew. His goal, he says, is the restoration of the historic “free republic of the Jews according to the Mosaic law.” To strongly traditionalist Jews (part of his implied audience or readers) this would sound as though the speaker is advocating a return to the laws of the ancient Jews, and to a state ruled by a priesthood, something that Shelley would have detested. But to his enlightened and secular Jewish readers the phrasing would mean nothing more than that the restored state should be a republic, not a monarchy, which Shelley would have heartily approved of. Both groups would be reminded that the ancient Jewish nation began as a self-ruling community, not subject to the autocratic rule of one man. The speaker, in short, is a skilful orator who tries to win over his audience by initially entering into their point of view in order to induce them to share his own views. Shelley claimed that this had been the practice of Jesus Christ (whom he admired as a reformer and poet, not as the Son of God). Christ’s apparent deceit, Shelley said, was justified, because it was motivated by the desire to make the minds of his listeners receptive to truth.⁵
    The speaker also has a practical plan of uniting the scattered Jews and channelling the wealth of rich Jews towards funding this mass movement. At this point he begins to sound like a leader issuing a manifesto or a rousing proclamation. This is of some significance, because it places the fragment within the context of the early phase of the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), in which Byron later joined, and for which cause he died in 1824. Although it is not possible to date the composition exactly, its paper has a watermark (a dolphin with the letters ANT.FORTI C.) of a kind not found in the Shelleys’ papers before they moved to Pisa in early 1820. Shelley might have started it as early as January 1820, or as late as September 1821, shortly before beginning to write Hellas, his own lyrical drama about the Greek War of Independence. Internal evidence favors a composition time nearer to the later date than the earlier.⁶
    Hellas also contains a Jew among its cast of characters, the immensely wise, prophetic, and philosophical Ahasuerus, whom the Ottoman Sultan summons, only to learn that he will in the end be defeated. The speaker refers to political events in the Middle East current in 1820–1822, and considers the weakness of the Ottoman Empire as an opportunity for the Jews to regain their nationhood. However his address is not a call to arms, unlike the Greek leader Alexander Ypsilantis’s proclamation of Greek Independence against the Ottoman Empire in March 1821, which the Shelleys enthusiastically supported.⁷ Military action is envisaged towards the end of the fragment, but Shelley’s Jewish speaker seeks in the first place to rouse his listeners from a state of slothful indifference to their dependent state, and to awaken in them the desire for a real change in their situation.
    Shelley was fascinated, like other Romantics such as Coleridge and Byron, by mythic and legendary Jews, particularly the Wandering Jew, a figure of medieval legend who is doomed to wander the earth until the Second Coming, punished for cursing Jesus Christ. In Queen Mab, Shelley used this figure to protest angrily against the Christian religion and political tyranny. The Ahasuerus of Hellas does not wander, or curse Christianity, but he, too, speaks truth to powerful despots. These Jews belong to Shelley’s poetical works. They have little in common with the real Jews that Shelley would have met in England and Italy. He shared in the anti-Jewish prejudices of his class, the land-owning English gentry. Apart from an idealistic young Brazilian, Bernardino Pereira, an admirer of Queen Mab, with whom he enjoyed a brief friendship in 1813–1815, the Jews he met were mostly money brokers and bankers through whom he raised loans.⁸ Only with the Jewish speaker of “Address to the Jews” does he come near to considering the Jews as a people who, like the Greeks, and indeed like all peoples, have aspirations towards self-determination and independence. That is another feature that makes this fragment remarkable.
    There is, though, one other case of Shelley writing as though he were a Jew. This is a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, known as “The Arch of Titus,” and believed until 1995 to be a descriptive piece about a Roman monument.⁹ It is another fragment of a monologue, also spoken in the voice of a contemporary Jew. This Jew tells his fellow countrymen that the Arch of Titus in Rome, built to celebrate Titus’s destruction of the city of Jerusalem and its temple, is now decaying. The power exerted by ancient Rome over the Jews is no more. Professor Tokoo, in conversation, expressed the view that the two might be part of the same composition, and I agreed, though this cannot be proved.¹⁰ “The Arch of Titus” looks back at the destruction of the City of Jerusalem; “Address to the Jews” looks forward to its rebuilding. They are written in the same style of handwriting and ink, and are on the same Dolphin / ANT.FORTI C. paper. But there is nothing that physically connects the two manuscripts, such as blots from one to the other. Shelley was not able to complete either work, whether because the role he adopted (a non-Jew speaking as a Jew, urging fellow-Jews to liberate themselves) collapsed because of its self-contradiction, or because he was diverted to write Hellas, or for some other reason.
    Further research might help to explain why Garnett gave this particular manuscript to Tsuchii. It seems, on the face of it, a puzzling choice. Its subject would no doubt have seemed timely, in the aftermath of the first Congress of the World Zionist Organization (1897), newly founded by Theodor Herzl. Garnett might have thought that it showed Shelley’s uncanny foreknowledge of an important political issue of the early twentieth century. But whether the two men had an interest in contemporary Jews and their aspirations is not known. We can safely say only that, for Garnett, Shelley was a poet and thinker who belonged not just to English-speaking poetry lovers but to the whole world. And he knew that Tsuchii would treasure the gift.
    “Fragment of an Address to the Jews” was barely known to twentieth-century Western Shelley scholars.¹¹ Before on-line cataloguing it was difficult to know that it existed. Only four copies of the 1923 Shelley Memorial Volume by Members of the English Club are listed on WorldCat: one at Oxford University, one (Edmund Blunden’s presentation copy from Saito Takeshi) at Ohio University, one in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, and one in the Honnold/Mudd special collections at Claremont Colleges, California. Nor do catalogue descriptions say what it contains. That the manuscript came to be known a little more widely in the West after the 1980s is very largely due to the friendship of Tokoo Tatsuo and the scholar-editor Donald H. Reiman, who met each other through their work at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Professor Tokoo’s valuable indexes on the contents of Shelleys’ notebooks in the Bodleian, published by Kyoto Prefectural University’s Journal Humanities in 1982 and 1984, made possible Dr. Reiman’s multivolume editorial project, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts (1986–1997), a project comprehending the transcribing and annotating of all Shelley’s notebooks in the Bodleian, and to which Professor Tokoo and I were both contributing editors. Dr Reiman introduced us at Oxford, and this introduction was a factor leading to my eventual coming to Japan, meeting Professor Alvey, and being allowed to inspect the manuscript by the University of Tokyo Library. It is pleasant to think of contacts between Japanese and Western Shelley scholars continuing to bear fruit over a hundred years after the meeting of Garnett and Tsuchii. 

Nora Crook
Anglia Ruskin University
Cambridge CB4 1PT

Select Short Forms Bibliography

¹Library of Congress, MS. 13, 290.

² “Richard Garnett,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry <http://www.oxforddnb.com>; Shelley’s Ghost, 148, 152–57, 163.

³ Harata, “Bibliography”; https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bansui_Doi; additional research by Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey.

⁴ See Caroline Franklin, “Some Samples of the Finest Orientalism.” Romanticism and Colonialism, 1780–1830, ed. Timothy Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 237.

⁵ Shelley expressed this view in “On Christianity” (1817), Shelley, Prose I: 262.

⁶ For more details see “Jewish Orations.”

⁷ MWS, Letters I: 186–87, 188. The Shelleys translated Ypsilanti’s “Cry of War to the Greeks” (Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 5, fols. 91, 34); see BSM 22, Part 2, ed. Alan M. Weinberg (1997): 238–245.

⁸ “Land of Promise,” 265. For a thoughtful discussion of Shelley’s prejudice, see Scrivener, “Ahasuerus,” 134–36.

⁹ “Arch of Titus,” Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, fol. 207. The corruption of the existing published text, dating from 1832, was revealed by E. B. Murray (BSM 21: 497).

¹⁰ For more details see “Jewish Orations.” Conversation held 7 January 2006, Uji-City, Japan.

¹¹ The few Western scholars other than Reiman who refer to it before Crook and Tokoo’s “Jewish Orations” (2010) include Emily Sunstein in Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (1989), Eugene Murray in Introduction, Shelley, Prose (1993), and Bryan Shelley, in Shelley and Scripture (1994). All three were correspondents of Reiman and/or researchers in the Bodleian library.

斎藤勇, 市河三喜 著「巻頭の冩眞版について」

　東京帝國大學英文學會編『英文學研究』別冊第二
　シェリ研究　The Shelley memorial volume
　研究社, 1923.2刊　　掲載

『英文學研究』別冊第二として刊行された「シェリ研究」に掲載された論文「巻頭の冩眞版について」をPDFでご覧いただけます。なお、以下のとおり二次利用の条件が異なっています。二次利用を行う場合は、以下に明示する条件に沿ってご利用ください。

• 斎藤勇「巻頭の冩眞版について」－"Fragment of an Address to the Jews"の論考（p.2-3は印刷のかすれにより文字が判読しづらい箇所があるため、別途デジタル化したものを最終ページに挿入しています。）
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• 市河三喜「巻頭の冩眞版について」－"Fragment of an Address to the Jews"の翻刻テキスト
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• 表紙，標題紙，巻頭に掲載された図版（Fragment of an Address to the Jews），目次

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