"Unlike other novelists of the early nineteenth century, Honoré de Balzac created important literary characters who were Jewish. Although his Jews display the common stereotypic traits of evil and avarice, Balzac was not a facile anti-Semite. Because of his own eccentric endowments, both as a man and as an artist, he saw more in the Jew than did most of his literary and social contemporaries. The Jews he portrayed were not the unidimensional minor characters commonly found in earlier literature. Rather, they were complex men and women who played major roles in his novels"--From the introduction.