Of all his works, one continues to be current (largely thanks to Lionel Bart).Oliver Twist. Of his characters in Oliver Twist, one has come under close scrutiny - Fagin.
Oliver Twist has been made into film many times - Fagin being played by Lon Chaney in the silent version, but things really hit the fan when David Lean made his version in 1948 Alec Guinness played a very stereotypical Fagin and was the subject of much criticism. He wore heavy make-up, including a large prosthetic nose, elsewhere described as a vast proboscis, to make him look like the character as appeared in George Cruikshank's illustrations in the first edition of the novel.
The Jewish Chronicle is clear what the effect was. “Fagin, the miserly fence whom Charles Dickens describes in his novel, Oliver Twist, as a ‘merry old Jew’, and which Alec Guinness turned into a gutteral, long-nosed figure who could easily have decorated the pages of the Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer.”
It was not released in the United States until 1951, with seven minutes of profile shots and other parts of Guinness's performance cut.
The film was banned in Israel for anti-Semitism., but ironically it was also banned in Egypt for portraying Fagin too sympathetically, according to Wiki.
A complete reversal of fortunes for Fagin came with the musical Oliver. Played by Ron Moody, who is Jewish, Fagin is a comic character with a major role in the film. Unlike Fagin in Dickens book he survives, and is seen dancing off into the sunset with his sidekick, the Artful Dodger.
In an interview with Michael Freedland in the London Jewish Chronicle in 2010 Moody said “I couldn't possibly have played the role if it was seen as anti-Semitic. I knew in my Jewish bones, he was a funny character, who would get laughs, because I played him anarchistically."
It was also noted in the interview that Moody has a love of Jewish Liturgical Music (Chazzanut), and certainly if you listen towards the end of “You’ve got to pick a pocket or two” there is a definite chazzanish influence.
The film won him an Oscar nomination.
Jasper Rees in a excellent article in the Telegraph in 2007 said “Since Alec Guinness, in David Lean's 1948 film, and Ron Moody, in Oliver! 20 years later, set the template, a succession of actors - from George C. Scott via Richard Dreyfuss to Ben Kingsley - has had to find a way of encapsulating Fagin's sheer dastardliness while somehow soft-pedalling the small matter of his ethnicity……
Moody's disarming twinkle, memorialised in Carol Reed's 1968 film, helped to dispel some of the unease surrounding the character. In the stage version he is even spared the gallows because no audience wants to see the character who sings You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two swinging from a rope."
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