Is Heathcliff Jewish? Emily Brontë’s Revolutionary Novel of Repression and Reversals

“The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him: they crush those beneath them.”

– Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, published first under the alias, Ellis Bell, has appeared on movie screens at least nine times, most recently in a 2026 version directed by Emerald Lilly Fennell and starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, an Australian of Basque descent who boasts a dark complexion that makes him suitable to play dark-skinned Heathcliff. Previously, the role belonged largely to men with white skin— Laurence Olivier, Timothy Dalton and Ralph Fiennes. All miscast. But the Spanish actor Jorge Mistral took the part in a Spanish-language adaptation by Luis Buñuel from 1954. Before Buñuel directed his Wuthering Heights, there were two Indian versions, both in Hindi, with the main characters indigenized.

Filmmakers have not tired of the tangled plot or grown impatient with the two star-crossed Shakespearean lovers, Heathcliff and Catherine, who cries out not long before she dies, “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks.” She adds, “I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure…but as my own being.”

The latest cinematic version has brought out the culture vultures, including Rosemary Counter, who writes in Vanity Fair that Emily “may have been autistic, antisocial, agoraphobic, and/or anorexic. She may have been a lesbian, or in an incestuous relationship with her brother.” Forget it! Counter adds, “In any case, the author of Wuthering Heights—arguably the horniest Gothic novel ever written—was probably a virgin with a vivid imagination.” Pleeasse!

Sister Charlotte, who knew Emily better than anyone else, noted that she had a “spark of honorable ambition,” and that, like her siblings, the “mode” of her writing was “not what is called ‘feminine.” Charlotte added that books written by women and published under their real names were likely “to be looked on with prejudice.” The sisters took aliases and thereby aimed to undermine and survive the onslaughts of the patriarchy. Emily died in 1848, a year after Wuthering Heights was published; she never knew the fame that would accrue to her novel or herself as an author.

Over the past century—a silent film version screened in 1920— movie audiences have watched over and over again, ad infinitum, albeit with variations, a narrative about two lost souls who love one another too much for their own good, and who rain down disaster on one another and on those around them. No Jane Austen-like happy ending for Catherine and Heathcliff, or for the two main families who inhabit the novel, the Earnshaws and the Lintons. After Heathcliff dies, Hareton Earnshaw marries Cathy Linton; finally, generational conflicts are put to rest and the two houses come together as one.

Yes, there are more characters than one might want or like, but Emily aimed to convey a sense of family history and family feuds and offer a sense of redemption.

To ask, “Is Heathcliff Jewish?” might provoke cultural disturbances akin to the kinds of friction that the protagonist himself generates at Wuthering Heights after he’s snatched from the streets of Liverpool and flung into the untamed Yorkshire moors where he’s exploited, abused, beaten and treated as an inferior.

The tables are soon turned.

The short answer to the question, “Is Heathcliff Jewish?” is an emphatic “No,” though that hasn’t stopped Emily Brontë scholars from suggesting that he is in fact Jewish, or at least that he has “Jewish roots.” That’s what Professor Sharon Lynne Joffe argues in a recent issue of Brontë Studies, the Journal of the Brontë Society, which was founded in 1893 and still going strong. Joffe writes that Brontë “incorporated nineteenth-century stereotypes of Jews into her character,” and that she “would have been familiar with these stereotypes through her reading of Blackwood’s Magazine.”

Not so fast, professor. Joffe takes a leap of faith–not a logical step–and adds that “Heathcliff’s physical characteristics, his initial inability to speak English, his lineage, and his eventual success support my contention that Brontë used Jewish stereotypes to create Heathcliff.” Nothing in the novel itself supports the notion that he’s Jewish, though like Jewish characters in fiction and Old Testament figures like Jonah, he’s the Outsider. Of course, Jews aren’t the only literary outsiders.

Nor does it help Professor Joffe’s case to summon Blackwoods to support her claims. My own reading of that magazine and others from the Victorian era, including Punch and Cornhill (I was conducting research for my book about British literature and the British Empire) taught me that editors, publishers and writers used racial stereotypes to describe anyone and nearly everyone on the planet, including the “wild” Irish. The word “wog, and the letters WOG, which stood for “Worthy Oriental Gentleman,” were used to describe the French, the Italians, the Indians from India and anyone with brown or black skin who didn’t speak proper English. Racism and anti-Semitism lurked at the heart of an empire where the sun supposedly never set.

In the page of the novel, Heathcliff is called all kinds of names:  “gipsy” (Roma in today’s lingo), “Afreet” (a dangerous figure in Islamic cultures) and a “Lascar” (a East Indian sailor who worked on English ships). But he’s never called a Jew, Jewish or Semitic. In chapter four, readers learn that Mr. Earnshaw, the master of Wuthering Heights, encounters “in the streets of Liverpool…a dirty, ragged black-haired child” who speaks “gibberish that nobody could understand.” Gender and ethnicity unknown. The child is initially referred to as an “it,” and neither masculine nor feminine. Earnshaw sees “it starving, and homeless and as good as dumb,” and refers to “it” as a “poor, fatherless child.” Adopted and brought to Wuthering Heights in Yorkshire, which is as much a character with a personality as any of the humans.

Once it’s apparent that “it” is “a sullen boy,” he’s called “Heathcliff.” The name fits. After all, the orphaned child from Liverpool, becomes a creature of the wild and rugged moors. An archetype of man in “the open air,” to borrow a phrase Herman Melville uses to describe Captain Ahab, he’s unlike the gentlemen who appear in the stuff drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s novels. If Heathcliff takes on the identity of an anti-hero, Wuthering Heights, like Moby-Dick, becomes an anti-novel; a revolutionary work that deconstructs and reconstructs the very form of the novel itself as a genre. Multiple narrators and a non-linear narrative break the paradigm.

Emily’s older sister, Charlotte Brontë —the author of Jane Eyre— noted that Heathcliff was “a man’s shape animated by demon life – a Ghoul,” and that her sister’s book was “half statue, half rock…hewn in a wild workshop with simple tools and of homely materials.” She described Heathcliff as a “little black-haired swarthy thing, as dark as if it came from the Devil.” That sounds racist to me. In Charlotte’s eyes, Wuthering Heights wasn’t a proper novel, though she allows that it evolved into something powerful that was “savage, swart, sinister.” That’s not like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility.

For Charlotte, the question about the novel that was meant be answered wasn’t so much Heathcliff’s ethnicity, but rather the ethics of the novel itself that’s haunted by a “horror of great darkness.” The phrase echoes Melville talking about the “blackness” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories. (If Melville had written an English novel, it would have been Wuthering Heights.) At the end of Charlotte’s preface to Emily’s tour de force, she writes, “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know; I scarcely think it is.” She could have asked the same question about Mary Shelley’s monster in the Gothic novel, Frankenstein.

Charlotte added insightfully, “This I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master…something that works for itself.” Like Moby-Dick, Wuthering Heights has a mind of its own.

Bronte’s novel has usually been called a love story and a tale of revenge. Indeed, Heathcliff is determined to punish those who treat him badly, as well as everyone who is in his eyes guilty by association with his foes, including his wife, Isabella, whom he drives mad with psychological warfare. But the novel is also an epic about reversals, repression and resistance. Published a year before the revolutions of 1848, which shook the capitals of Europe, Wuthering Heights reflects the zeitgeist of the Age of Revolution, which began in 1776, with the outbreak of the American Revolution and that exploded again with the French Revolution of 1789 and that culminated in 1848. Wuthering Heights begins in the 1770s and ends at the start of the 19^th century. Revolutionary in form as well as in content, it breaks all kinds of literary boundaries. No wonder it has survived for nearly two hundred years. Not the new movie. Toss it in the bin to be rewound.

Heathcliff would have found himself at home in the company of French revolutionaries such as Robespierre and Danton and Napoleon, too. He would also have enjoyed the company of the English romantic poets, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. At a critical point in the narrative, he observes, “The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him: they crush those beneath them.” Brontë uses the word “grind” repeatedly. It paints a picture.

In Wuthering Heights, repression doesn’t automatically lead to resistance. It can lead, as in the case of Heathcliff to tyranny. The Brazilian author, Paolo Freire, makes an observation similar to Heathcliff’s in his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968, another year of revolution. For Freire, pedagogy is the essential element that turns the oppressed into rebels. A pedagogy for the oppressed is precisely what Heathcliff is denied, even as he becomes an educated, wealthy gentleman–albeit still a tyrant. Charlotte claimed that Emily observed the world around her and that her “imagination found material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine,” adding, “having formed these beings she did not know what she had done.”

But she might have. Heathcliff’s remark about slaves and tyrants, grinding down and crushing, suggests that she understood his sentiments, perhaps shared them and meant to express them through her own unequivocal voice of anger and defiance.

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