Part one of term paper
Was Charles Dickens being anti-Semitic when portraying the character Fagin as "the Jew", in his classic story Oliver Twist, or was he merely painting an accurate portrait of the 19th Century Jew in England? Some critics seem to believe so. Though there are no indications of neither anti-Semitic nor racist slurs throughout the story, Dickens' ...

Part two of term paper
... thieves. Fagin, a thief, is described by Dickens as "a very old shriveled Jew, whose villainous and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair"(Dickens 87). This common depiction of the Jew was accompanied by the stereotype that they had big noses and lured orphaned children into their filthy dens and turned them into derelicts. He was a thief because he did not have any skills, nor was he welcome anywhere. On the other hand, to describe Fagin in any other light would h ...