Swift Studies, 35 (2020), 106-151
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: JUDAEOPHOBIA IN SWIFT’S PORTRAYAL OF THE YAHOOS IN GULLIVER’S TRAVELS Shanee Stepakoff, University of Maine at Farmington1
For nearly three centuries, scholars have debated the sources for Swift’s portrayal of the Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels. In this essay, I argue that Swift’s representation of the Yahoos was informed by personal and cultural anxieties about Jews as a quasi-racial, ethnoreligious group. Further, I present evidence that Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels is replete with anti-Semitic tropes. In creating the Yahoos as a symbol of the degenerate aspects of human nature, Swift deliberately or unconsciously relied on these age-old Judaeophobic projections. The attitudes towards Jews that permeated his milieu heavily informed his representation of these aspects – more heavily, in fact, than attitudes towards any of the other groups that have been put forth as sources for the Yahoos. I begin by reviewing existing theories about Swift’s sources for the Yahoos. I then present extensive evidence to support my argument that Judaeophobia was at the heart of Swift’s portrayal. Next, I explore the sociopolitical context for Swift’s use of anti-Jewish canards. Finally, I briefly consider the factors that have led previous scholars to disregard the clear evidence for the presence, and, indeed, the ubiquity of such canards throughout Part Four of the Travels. The Sasquatch Debbie Argue maintains that Swift based the “Yahoo” on a mythical creature known as the “sasquatch” that was part of North American indigenous folklore. She asserts that the physical characteristics, diet, and behavioural traits of the Yahoo are similar to those reported for the sasquatch: “Both have large lips … and the backs of the hands of both entities are hairy.” Argue devotes particular attention to a month-long visit by four Native American chiefs to England in 1710: “The sachems [chiefs] were entertained at the highest levels of society”; she maintains that there was probably “social and 1
I thank Professor Daniel Gunn, Department of English, University of Maine at Farmington, for his careful reading and helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. I am also grateful to the editors of Swift Studies for their editorial guidance.