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By Root 1105 0

” All Benjamin’s defining features were given the most negative spin possible. The easygoing smile that Benjamin habitually wore was, in Levi, a “perpetual grin, which though meant for a smile, was but an acquired contortion to hide the evil workings of the spirit within.” Benjamin’s teeth, which he displayed every time he laughed, became “a malicious looking set of strong white teeth, which seemed as if they were formed to bite and worry his species.” Benjamin’s firm mouth was transmuted into a “hardened and audacious expression” that made Levi “an object of disgust and aversion.” Moodie’s local readers, instantly linking the fictitious Levi with the real Benjamin, would have learned that their newspaper editor was “a living, laughing, impersonation of gratuitous mischief ” and a “sort of moral hyena.”

Benjamin cannot have enjoyed the ridicule, particularly after it received even wider circulation when “Richard Redpath. A Story” was reprinted in the Toronto Star. Ten years later, it was reprinted yet again as part of a collection of Susanna’s work entitled Matrimonial Speculations. There is no record of how much Susanna’s attack wounded him; few issues of the 1840s Intelligencer have survived. The rule of thumb amongst Upper Canadian editors of the time was that, if you dished it out, you had to be prepared to take it, too. Benjamin had shrugged off other insults, such as the British Whig’s description of him as “the slandering Belleville Jew.” He had also taken steps to shield his family from overt prejudice by having most of his fourteen children baptized at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church. (There would not be a synagogue in Belleville for another hundred years, but Benjamin carefully noted the births of his first eight children in the back of his Hebrew prayer book). He himself would be baptized a few months before his own death in 1864, and he was buried in St. Thomas’s graveyard.

There was an obvious logic to the Moodies’ decision to make a friend of Baldwin and an enemy of Benjamin, but their behaviour showed their hopeless lack of political smarts. As the 1840s drew to a close, it began to dawn on Susanna and John that Robert Baldwin’s friendship was not going to assist John. Baldwin had no local roots in Belleville, and he had far too much on his mind to worry about the town’s ineffective sheriff. After his defeat in Hastings in 1842, Baldwin changed constituencies and ran elsewhere for the rest of his career. With dogged loyalty, John Moodie continued to regard him as his patron. He wrote to him regularly, offering him advice on land and judicial reform. “My family—none of my children have forgotten you—still speak of you with great affection,” he assured Baldwin in 1845. “Friends are scarce in these times, and we cannot afford to lose any.” When Susanna gave birth to a fifth son in 1843, he was named Robert Baldwin Moodie. However, Baldwin did nothing to secure a new job for John where he might escape his persecutors. John yearned to be registrar of the Niagara region, but Baldwin was unwilling or unable to satisfy Moodie’s petitions for help.

In contrast, George Benjamin, now a key player in Belleville, nursed his grudge against the Moodies. By now, Mrs. Moodie was a writer to be reckoned with: she was the most important and prolific contributor to the Literary Garland, her battle songs from the 1837 Uprising were still whistled on the streets of Upper Canada, and her sharp tongue was legendary within Belleville. Buoyed up by success, Susanna blithely assumed that her literary contretemps with Benjamin was par for the course in a life of letters. She even took a mischievous delight in her character Levi’s wickedness. “I don’t know what we should do without Benjamin Levi,” remarks a character in the story. “He keeps us all alive.” She was too taken with her creation to reconsider either the substance or the tone of her depiction. In 1854, she boasted to her London publisher that, “The Jew Editor is a true picture drawn from life which so closely resembles the original that it will be recognized by all who ever