By PATRICIA COHEN


“You must realize that money making is one thing, religion another, and family life a third,”Mr.Voysey matterof- factly tells his son Edward, who is appalled to learn that his father has been operating a pyramid scheme for decades with his clients’money.

Mr.Voysey - the affably corrupt character in Harley Granville-Barker’s 1905 play “The Voysey Inheritance” - is one of Bernard L.Madoff’s literary predecessors, and his compartmentalized view of the world may suggest how Mr.Madoff, a philanthropist and a pillar of the financial world and Jewish life, enmeshed family and friends in what federal authorities are calling a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

The accusations against Mr.Madoff may seem so outlandish and outsize that only a literary imagination could have dreamed him up. And indeed, where businessmen, psychologists, theologians and prosecutors have so far come up short in explaining the human emotions and drives behind the Madoff enterprise, literature and drama have provided plenty of models.

“It’s almost verbatim the story of‘The Voysey Inheritance,’which was written 100 years earlier,”said Neil Pepe, the artistic director of the Atlantic Theater, which staged the play in 2006.“It’s about the nature of business, whether they’re bending the rules or following them.”

David Mamet, who adapted“Voysey”for The Atlantic, explained in a New York Times interview at the time why he was initially drawn to the play.

“What is capital?”he said.“How does society work? What is money?On the one hand you can say money is meaningless: it doesn’t really exist, and so everything is really all about trust. You can also say that means it’s all about crime.”

As Voysey puts it, his clients’security lies not in pieces of paper but in“my financial ability.”

To the elder Voysey, Mr.Pepe noted, such practices“are an accepted form of behavior.”That is why he is so exasperated with Edward.“Oh... why is it so hard for a man to see clearly beyond the letter of the law,”Mr.Voysey says, later adding,“We must take this world as we find it, my dear boy.”

That is clearly the world that Anthony Trollope is portraying in his 1875 novel,“The Way We Live Now.”In his autobiography Trollope writes that this satiric novel was inspired by the corruption eating away at British society, a“dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places.”

His shady financier, Augustus Melmotte, is at the center of a huge scam, selling shares in a railroad that doesn’t exist. He is widely regarded as the financial sector’s presiding genius,“the very navel of the commercial enterprise of the world,”and his ruin, as Lord Alfred observes in the novel,“would be the bursting of half London.”Many of Melmotte’s attributes can be found in some of the real-life rogues who preyed on credulous British investors in that period.

Comparing Melmotte to Mr.Madoff, Catharine R.Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University, said:“There’s the same ‘do I have a deal for you’ and the same lust for money. He’s very smart, he has no compunction about swindling everybody, and he’s socially ambitious.”

John Guare, author of“Six Degrees of Separation”and“The House of Blue Leaves,”also thought first of Melmotte when asked about Mr.Madoff’s literary parallels. Even as the scandal is breaking, Mr.Guare noted, Melmotte wins a seat in Parliament. (In the end he commits suicide.)

People like Melmotte“are just missing a moral gene,”Mr.Guare said.

Perhaps another way of making sense of the charges against Mr.Madoff is by looking at the gullibility of the vast network of people seduced by returns that are too good to be true.

After hearing about the scandal, Ilan Averbuch, an Israeli artist, took down a tattered storybook he has had since childhood, a collection of Jewish folktales about the mythical people of Chelm, a city populated by supposedly wise souls who are actually foolish.

In one, the townspeople decide to illuminate their city on dark nights by capturing the full moon, which they see reflected in a large barrel of water. They seal the top so it cannot escape. On a night when there is no moon, the town opens the barrel. When the lid comes off, the moon is gone.

Imagine that, they cry. A thief has stolen it.