Victorian poetry and religious diversityJudaism [1842]), and the first history of the English Jews by an English Jew
(in Chambers' Miscellany [1847]). She also published short stories on
Jewish topics, such as Records of Israel (1844), and a very successful novel,
The Yale of Cedars; or, The Martyr (1850). Aguilar came from a Sephardic
background, she never married, and she often supported her family
through her teaching and writing. Many critics have suggested that her life
in the largely Christian environments of Hackney, rural Devon, and
Brighton instilled in Aguilar a desire to create better understanding through
Jewish-Christian literary relations. She had a broad knowledge of Christian
literary writings, and she often called on those works as a way to engage
readers and augment her own Jewish literary authority - an authority that
was always suspect in Christian culture. Where poets affiliated with
Christianity could appropriate the New Testament rhetoric of Christian
universality into their poetic forms and voices (and thus claim their own
poetic universality), Aguilar - a committed Jewish woman - chose to use
many of the same formal conventions of English poetry to challenge
specifically the idea that Jesus Christ (and, by extension, Christian
theology) was universally accepted. Much of Aguilar's fiction and poetry
seeks to recast Judaism as a deeply spiritual and loving religion in concerted
response to the anti-Judaic rhetoric that argued that Judaism was a religion
of the letter and the law rather than the spirit. Unable to claim a specifically
Christian female poetic identity upon which so many of her Christian
colleagues based their poetic eminence, Aguilar had to seek other grounds
for claiming authority so that she could command the attention of both
Christian and Jewish readers.
The full title of her poem is "Song of the Spanish Jews during their
'Golden Age,'" and it immediately locates Jewish identity in a particular
historical context. The "Golden Age" appears in the epigraph attributed to
the Victorian cleric Henry Hart Milman's popular account of Jewish
history published in 1829: "It was in Spain that the golden age of the Jews
shone with the brightest and most enduring splendour. In emulation of
their Moslemite brethren, they began to cultivate their long disused and
neglected poetry: the harp of Judah was heard to sound again, though with
something of a foreign tone." This epigraph suggests Aguilar's awareness of
the many Christian interpretations of Jewish history that were produced in
the Victorian era. By absorbing Milman's highly regarded work into her
poem, Aguilar bolsters her own literary authority in addressing the
Christian members of her audience. Nevertheless, by choosing a collective
"we" to represent the Spanish Jews of pre-Inquisition Spain, Aguilar offers
a specific address contemporary Sephardic Jews in England who might
make a special identification with this collective voice. Further, Aguilar's
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