Once Christian, Benjamin famously smelled opportunity in Scott’s romance of the Jewess in Ivanhoe to inaugurate a whole literary industry of the Noble Semitic-Exotic, beginning with a daily look in the mirror and extending to Eva the charismatic Jewess of Tancred, who draws her infatuated Christian into the depths of Hebrew mystery in the Holy Land so that he would receive an epiphany with an angel on Mount Sinai.
