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TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE is rife with unapologetic anti-Semitism, often voiced during trips by American writers to Europe. On a 1901 visit to Russia, for example, as Louis Harap reminds us in The Image of the jew in American Literature, Henry Adams writes that the first sight he saw as he looked out of his sleeping car window one morning was "a Polish Jew ... in all his weird horror"; writing home from Warsaw on that trip, Adams noted that the Jew "makes me creep" (338). In an 1896 description of vacationers at a fashionable English resort, Henry James writes, "There were thousands of little chairs and almost as many little Jews, and there was music in an open rotunda, over which the little Jews wagged their big noses" (Embarrassments 93).' Sometimes comments like these emerged about Jews in the United States, as well. Frank Norris penned an unflattering portrait of "the little Jew" in his novel Vandover and the Brute, and reified Jewish stereotypes in other works, as well (Vandover 136-40; Pit 56-57, 9, 96-97, 102, 103; McTeague 37, 40, 50, 92, 93, 168, 169, 222-23). Meanwhile Henry James was as repulsed by Jews in New York as Henry Adams had been by Jews in Poland and Russia. In The American Scene in 1907, for example, James reports being disgusted by what he called the "swarming" Jews of New York. They reminded him of "snakes or worms" (28). Even a William Dean Howells, known for embracing a robust vision of American democracy and championing the talents of Abraham Cahan, was not immune to voicing anti-Semitic slurs in his writing (Harap 383). (To his credit, when a Jewish reader wrote him objecting to one such stereotype that appeared in a portion of The Rise of Silas Lapham serialized in Century Magazine, Howells' response was to strike that passage from the novel before it was published.) In popular fiction and dime novels of the last decades of the nineteenth century, even more than in the work of canonical authors, virulent anti-Semitism was ubiquitous, as Harap has ably shown (303-33, 334-41 ). Against this backdrop, Mark Twain's efforts to challenge anti-Semitism stand out in sharp relief. Twain's most famous attempt to discredit anti-Semitism is, of course, his 1899...