Charles Harpur’s epic, The Witch of Hebron (1867), constitutes his most sustained engagement with Biblical tradition and Jewish identity. The poem describes the meeting of a Rabbi with the ‘Witch of Hebron’, a character of Harpur’s invention who experiences a series of metamorphoses after making a pact with the devil. In this paper, we analyse Harpur’s poem as part of the longer tradition of Jewish naturalisation in English literature. Harpur himself had attempted to enter this tradition in his early career, when he attempted a tragic drama on King Saul (c. 1838), which was intended to include a representation of the Biblical ‘Witch of Endor’. How does the invented ‘witch’ of his late epic fit into this tradition? What is the significance of the central characters’ Jewish identities in the poem? We answer such questions under the three heads of civil religion, secularism, and toleration, revealing how Harpur uses Jewish material in The Witch of Hebron to revise the radical settler republicanism of his youth.
Marc Mierowsky is a scholar of literature, law, empire and Judaism, who holds an ARC DECRA Fellowship and a Lectureship in English at the University of Melbourne. He is currently working on a global literary, legal and cultural history of Jewish naturalization during the period of the British empire’s expansion (1680-1850). Marc is an associate editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe ed. Nicholas Seager (Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2022) and co-editor with Nicholas Seager of Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress [Roxana] (OUP, 2024). With Sarah Balkin, he is the author of Comedy and Controversy (CUP, 2024). His book A Spy Among Us: Daniel Defoe’s Secret Service and the Campaign to End Scottish Independence will appear with Yale University Press in 2025.
Michael Falk is a computational literary scholar at the University of Melbourne, where he co-ordinates the Digital Studies program. He specialises in Romantic Literature, AI and the History and Theory of Digital Humanities. He is the author of Romanticism and the Contingent Self (Palgrave, 2024).