The Vale of Cedars

Grace Aguilar (1816 -1847) was an English novelist and writer on Jewish history and religion. She published in the United States in 1842 Spirit of Judaism, in defense of her faith and its professors, and in 1845 The Jewish Faith and The Women of Israel. She is, best known for her novels Home Influence (1847) and A Mother's Recompense (1850). The Vale of Cedars, or the Martyr: A Story of Spain in the Fifteenth Century was written in 1835. Set during the Spanish Inquisition, The Vale of Cedars focuses on the plight of a beautiful young Jewish woman struggling with her desire for a gentile knight and enduring persecution for resisting conversion to Christianity. The heroine does not desire conversion to Christianity. She longs to be freed from her life of disguise. She yearns to embrace Judaism publicly. Aguilar uses a metaphor for Anglo-Jews who, in early Victorian England, had to choose between religion and citizenship.