La belle juive

The "belle juive" is commonly portrayed as a lone, young, and beautiful Jewish woman in a predominantly Christian world.

[3] The belle juive is shaped by her relations with adjacent characters, most commonly by a Christian love interest or a villainous Jewish father.

[4] There are two main categories of the belle juive; the first is “positive”, and describes her as noble, intelligent, pure and loyal, perhaps linking her to the Virgin Mary, or to the general principle of Christian martyrdom.

She takes care of Ivanhoe throughout the novel and is even gracious enough to give his future wife a fond farewell with her departure, intending to live as the Jewish equivalent of a nun.

The belle juive archetype has been argued to reveal antisemitism and misogyny on the part of the creator, for although the characters and the specific approaches to them varies with each appearance, the common thread shared by all is the Jewess’ basic function as an erotic symbol of the other, the strange and the forbidden, who is singular in her vulnerability and damning seductiveness.

An example is the 1904 short novel Zhidovka (Жидовка) by the Russian author Alexander Kuprin, in which the poor living conditions of Jews in the Pale of Settlement are a main theme.

[11] In such a gloomy area the protagonist encounters a Jewess, whose hardly describable Biblical beauty is being further accentuated by the contrast with the surrounding grime and depression.

To find such a figure in this lost, forsaken corner of the Pale appears like nothing short of a miracle to him, and after extensively pondering on the miraculous survival of the Jewish people among all these near-mythological extinct civilizations, the ethnic Russian protagonist is brought back to himself: "What am I," he muses, "yesterday's savage and today's intellectual... beside this living enigma, perhaps the greatest and most inexplicable enigma in the history of mankind?"

With the same irreproachable pure delight shone the gloomy Judith, the sweet Ruth, the tender Leah, the beautiful Rachel and Hagar and Sarah.

Looking at her, you believe, feel and see just how these people go in their mind-darkening genealogy towards Moses, climb to Abraham, and higher and higher––directly to the great, terrible and vindictive biblical God!