Today is the day my novel, Rebecca of Ivanhoe, is being published, and it is also the day that the Forward, the nation’s largest Jewish newspaper, published my essay on whether real-life philanthropist and educator Rebecca Gratz was the inspiration for Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott’s original novel, Ivanhoe. As I wrote in the essay:
Rebecca Gratz, who, like Sir Walter Scott’s Rebecca, was known to be a great beauty, lived at the same time as Scott. And like the fictional Rebecca, who gave her heart to the Christian knight Ivanhoe but doesn’t marry him in the end, Rebecca Gratz may also have fallen in love with a non-Jew (she writes in one letter of a man whom she loved but could not marry).
Historians also know that Rebecca Gratz had impressed the writer Washington Irving by helping to care for his sickly fiancé. It is also known that, in 1817, Irving visited Sir Walter Scott at his home in Abbotsford, Scotland, and apparently sang Gratz’s praises to the British writer.
Even though the connection has never been verified, historians have said that the character of Rebecca in Ivanhoe was the first favorable depiction of a Jew in British fiction. And it is certainly true that Rebecca Gratz’s life exemplified the independent and courageous spirit that Sir Walter Scott’s Rebecca is known for.
The entire essay can be found here. And for those of you who haven’t read Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, take heart: In my book, I include a number of flashbacks about Rebecca’s experience in the original story.
