Life, Confession and Execution of the Jew and Jewess, The, Gustavus Linderhoff, and Fanny Victoria Talzingler,
[Judaica]. (Anonymous). The Life, Confession and Execution of the Jew and Jewess, Gustavus Linderhoff, and Fanny Victoria Talzingler, who were hung in Ashville, North Carolina, Oct. 27, 1854, for the triple murder of Abner, Benjamin, and Charles Ecclangfeldt, three orphan children, who were left to the guardianship of the villain Linderhoff, together with twenty thousand dollars. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Buffalo: A.R. Orton, 1855.
Slim 8vo.; four full-page wood-cuts; self-wrappers, sewn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Offprint of this nineteenth century anti-Semitic resetting of Macbeth; paginated [21]-50. Wright 1549a, 1856 edition, no copies located. NUC and Singerman 1441, one copy each of the 1856 edition; not mentioned by McDade. Each of the five short chapters developing this tale of greed, murder, and betrayal opens with an epigraph to set the tone: four are, appropriately, from Macbeth, and one is cited as “Bohemian: Soane.” The story is this: the penniless gentile Claus Ecclangfeldt loved a minor heiress whose father threatened to cut her off without a cent if she married her lover. In the hopes of skirting the spirit of threat but obeying its letter, they had three sons together, but never married. The father, not to be cheated by a technicality, left her nothing at his death. She died soon after, and Ecclangfeldt, now himself fatally ill, took his children to live with Dr. William Walker, in Melville, North Carolina, where he settled in to die. While there he learned of a $20,000 inheritance which he immediately willed equally among his sons, whom he entrusted to the care of his Jewish cousin Gustavus Linderhoff Talzingler and his lover, Fanny Victoria, just before his death. At his final meeting with Talzingler he lamented the fact that his children will be raised by a Jew. Up to this point Talzingler has been painted as a greedy, if not dishonest, pawnbroker, referred to almost exclusively as “The Jew.” He intends to keep his oath to provide for the three orphans, but when his shop and home burn to the ground, he is thrown into a moral quandary: without insurance, he is broke; his three charges hold among them $20,000. His lover, Fanny—“The Jewess,” herself wanted by the law—vigorously exhorts him to murder the children in cold blood. She assures him that there are dozens of ways to accomplish the deed without being caught, but Talzingler is physically and morally squeamish. He stands by as she stabs each, in turn, to death, and pleads, in vain, for the life of the youngest; inevitably he helps to conceal her crime. The bodies are soon discovered, and the treacherous pair are apprehended and immediately lynched.
The Jew and Jewess shares with Macbeth the momentum the female protagonist generates for her evil deeds, performed in the presence of an avaricious but faint-hearted man. However, the structure, language, and title of this contemporary morality tale are grotesquely plotted to introduce an anti-Semitic strain.
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