The Semiotics of Jewishness in Polanski's Oliver Twist

Among Dickens’s novels, Oliver Twist is the one that has been most frequently adapted for the screen. However, the remarkable appeal of this highly popular narrative has always had to come to terms with the controversial representation of Fagin, the notorious receiver of stolen goods, who is a Jew. The most memorable example of the tensions arising from the coexistence of the utmost villainy and Jewishness in the same character is provided by David Lean’s 1948 adaptation of the novel, with Alec Guinness as Fagin. Though still considered an unsurpassed masterpiece, the film ignited bitter reactions in the audience when it was first shown in post-war Berlin. Both in the Dickensian text, illustrated by George Cruikshank, in Victorian times and to this day, Jewish identity appears to be a problematic cluster of signs that is incessantly revisited in distinct socio-political contexts and intertextually rewritten along different anthropological perspectives. As a reaction to Dickensian textuality, Victorian ideology and previous screen versions, Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (2005), which casts Ben Kinsgley as Fagin, has further enriched the debate on Jewishness and its representational stereotypes. The paper compares Dickens’s textual representation of Fagin with Lean’s and Polanski’s visual/verbal construction of the villainous Jew, by means of a multidisciplinary approach which combines the tools of Media Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis with the insights provided by cultural studies. It reflects on how the translation of semiotic artefacts across different media and over history is a critical activity that creatively reinvents the past for the modern age.