A character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity. Such is not the recompense which Providence has deemed worthy of suffering merit. . . . A glance on the great picture of life will show that the duties of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated; and that the internal consciousness of their high-minded discharge of duty produces on their own reflections a more adequate recompense, in the form of that peace which the world cannot give or take away.18
On that lofty note, “the sacrifice of passion to principle,” Scott concluded his belated introduction, and Rebecca emerges as even more of a moral heroine than one might have thought, precisely because she is not married to the hero. What Scott did not say was what he had said in the novel, that the marriage had a larger significance than the union of man and wife. Attended by noble Saxons and Normans, the elaborate nuptials are “a pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt the two races.”19 This marriage between the “two races,” Saxon and Norman, was so successful that the distinction between them is now invisible. Left out of the marriage, of course, is that other “race,” the Jews. For them there is no “peace and harmony.” On the contrary, Rebecca and Isaac feel obliged to leave England to seek refuge abroad—an ominous anticipation of the expulsion of the Jews a century later.
Ivanhoe was even more successful than the Waverley novels. It sold ten thousand copies in the three-volume edition in a fortnight and remained a bestseller throughout the century. Six plays based on it appeared within a year of its publication and many more in later years, as well as several operas, including one by Rossini (which Scott saw in Paris in 1826 and complained that the story was mangled and the dialogue nonsense). In 1849, Thackeray published a spoof, Rebecca and Rowena, with Rowena a shrew jealous of her husband’s feelings for Rebecca, and Ivanhoe, something of a drunkard, going off to fight for Richard. Eventually, after Rowena’s death, he is free to marry Rebecca. But even that marriage is melancholic. “I think,” the final sentence reads, “these were a solemn pair and died rather early.”20 “Solemn” or not, Rebecca the Jewess is unquestionably the heroine of the parody. Scott may have thought it inappropriate to have her marry Ivanhoe, but Thackeray did not. Nor did their readers. A Jewess, proud and resolute in her Jewishness, was thought to be a fit spouse for the hero, a Christian and a veteran of the Crusades.
If Ivanhoe belongs to the genre of the philosemitic novel, it is not the familiar mode of philosemitism. Judaism itself—its sacred texts, revered ancestors, rites and rituals—hardly figures in it. Nor is there any suspicion in the novel (or, for that matter, in Scott’s life) of anything like the Hebraism, millenarianism, or veneration for the Old Testament that motivated other philosemites.y It is Rebecca’s character, her determination to remain Jewish rather than the specific substance of that Jewishness, that qualifies her as the heroine of the novel, even as it disqualifies her as Ivanhoe’s wife. So, too, it is the character of the Jewish people, nobly rising above oppression and persecution, that gives the novel its distinctively philosemitic tone.
Tancred
In Ivanhoe, the Templars are returning from the Third Crusade after attempting to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims. In Tancred, more than six centuries later, an English gentleman goes to Jerusalem for “The New Crusade” (the subtitle of the book), not for conquest but to explore “the great Asian mystery” that has eluded Christianity all those years.
In 1844, when Disraeli published the first of his trilogy of novels, of which Tancred was the third, he had been in Parliament for seven years, had written a dozen novels, half-a-dozen political tracts, and delivered countless speeches. Coningsby was his political testament, a repudiation of the Tweedledum-Tweedledee characters (the Peelite Conservatives) who had captured the Tory Party and were reducing it to a party of “Tory men and Whig measures.” The “New Generation” of the subtitle was the Young Englanders who sought to preserve the venerable institutions of Crown and Church.z If Coningsby was the prototype of the political novel, Sybil, the following year, was the archetype of the social novel. Carlyle coined the phrase, “the condition-of-the-people-question,” but it was Disraeli who publicized and dramatized it under the slogan, “The Two Nations,” the subtitle of Sybil.
The last of the trilogy, Tancred: The New Crusade, was the spiritual part of the trilogy. It appeared in March 1847, nine months before Disraeli’s memorable speech on the admission of Jews to Parliament. Two years later, he wrote a preface to the fifth edition of Coningsby that would have been more appropriate in Tancred. Reflecting upon the proper nature of Toryism, he saw the Church as the instrument for the “renovation of the national spirit.” He was then moved to “ascend to the origin of the Christian Church”—Judaism.
The modern Jews had long labored under the odium and stigma of medieval malevolence.... The Jews were looked upon in the middle ages as an accursed race, the enemies of God and man, the especial foes of Christianity. No one in those days paused to reflect that Christianity was founded by the Jews; that its Divine Author, in his human capacity, was a descendant of King David; that his doctrines avowedly were the completion, not the change, of Judaism.... The time had arrived when some attempt should be made to do justice to the race which had founded Christianity.”23
That “race” first appears in Coningsby in the person of Sidonia. The aristocrat Coningsby is inspired by a stranger to defy the wishes of his grandfather and undertake the difficult task of national renovation. The stranger, Sidonia, is also an aristocrat, but of a different order, a scion of that “unmixed race,” the “aristocracy of Nature.”24 Descended from a “very ancient and noble family of Arragon,” the Nuevos Christianos (Marranos) who had secretly practiced their Jewish faith before being exiled, Sidonia made his fortune during the Napoleonic wars and emigrated to England where he could openly profess his faith.aa It is there that he meets Coningsby, infecting him with the ideals that would transform English politics.
Sidonia reappears in Tancred, bearing the message “All is race; there is no other truth.”25 Like Coningsby, Tancred (Lord Montacute), the only son of the Duke of Bellamont, finds himself at odds with the political establishment, including his own father.ab Repelled by the materialistic, soulless culture in England, he refuses to enter Parliament, telling his bewildered father that he wants instead to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the “sepulchre of my Saviour,” to find out “what is Duty, and what is Faith? What ought I to Do and what ought I to Believe?”27 A family friend suggests that he call upon Sidonia, the famous Jewish banker, who might show him the inadvisability of that plan. “I am born in an age and in a country,” Tancred informs Sidonia, “divided between infidelity on one side and an anarchy of creeds on the other; with none competent to guide me, yet feeling that I must believe, for I hold that duty cannot exist without faith.” Was it so unreasonable, he asks, to do what his ancestors would have done six centuries earlier? Sidonia listens to him sympathetically and replies, “It appears to me, Lord Montacute, that what you want is to penetrate the great Asian mystery.”28
From London to Jerusalem—it is not only another world but another time-order that Tancred enters.ac To penetrate the mystery of the East was to understand its history, which was an integral part of the present. The richness of that history becomes evident to him as he wanders from the garden of Gethsemane toward Bethany.
Before him is a living, a yet breathing and existing city, which Assyrian monarchs came down to besiege, which the chariots of Pharaohs encompassed, which Roman Emperors have personally assailed, for which Saladin and Coeur de Lion, the Desert and Christendom, Asia and Europe, struggled in rival chivalry; a city which Mahomet sighed to rule, and over which the Creator alike of Assyrian kings and Egyptian Pharaohs and Roman Caesars, the Framer alike of the Desert and of Christendom, poured forth the full effusion of his divinely human sorrow.30
Fatigued by his walk and lulled by the sound of
the fountain, Tancred falls asleep and awakens to find a young woman standing before him, richly garbed and bejeweled, her face “the perfection of oriental beauty.” Their conversation quickly establishes the fact that he is Christian and she Jewish, which prompts them to reflect upon the similarities and differences of their religions. The woman concludes that they have one thing in common: “We agree that half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew. . . . Which do you think should be the superior race, the worshipped or the worshipper?”31 Tancred is about to answer, but she has vanished. She is later identified as Eva Besso, the “Rose of Sharon,” the daughter of the Jewish banker to whom Sidonia had written a letter of introduction on behalf of Tancred.
Much of the novel is an adventure tale in an exotic setting, differing from that genre only because the characters are so intellectual and articulate. The adventures are brought about by Eva’s foster-brother, Fakredeen, an unscrupulous and clever Syrian who is plotting to bring all of Palestine under his control. In the course of the Syrian’s intrigues, Tancred is taken prisoner, wounded, and finally released, all the while engaging with his captor in animated discourses about their respective faiths. At one point, Tancred confesses his disappointment not with the physical constraints in which he finds himself but with his own spiritual condition. His presence in the Holy Land, he had thought, would bring him a sense of communion with the Holy Spirit. “But since I have been a dweller within its borders, and poured forth my passionate prayers at all its holy places, and received no sign, the desolating thought has sometimes come over my spirit, that there is a qualification of blood as well as of locality necessary for this communion, and that the favored votary must not only kneel in the Hold Land but be of the holy race.”32 Was he, he worries, not of that blood, an unwelcome visitor to this land? Was it only a morbid curiosity or aristocratic restlessness that had brought him here? He reassures himself. He has every right to be there, because it is the Creator, his Creator, that sanctified that land. He is not like the Indian Brahmin visiting Europe out of curiosity, a Europe that has no relation to him. The Holy Land has the most intimate relation to him, as a Briton.
Vast as the obligations of the whole human family are to the Hebrew race, there is no portion of the modern populations so much indebted to them as the British people.... We are indebted to the Hebrew people for our knowledge of the true God and for the redemption from our sins.... I am not a traveling dilettante, mourning over a ruin, or in ecstasies at a deciphered inscription. I come to the land whose laws I obey, whose religion I profess, and I seek, upon its sacred soil, those sanctions which for ages were abundantly accorded.33
In the final scene of the book, in the garden of Bethany where they had first met, Eva expresses some of the doubts Tancred had earlier voiced. Had their heroic aspirations been dissipated, had they been dreaming about an unattainable end? “Your feelings,” she tells him, “cannot be what they were before all this happened; when you thought only of a divine cause, of stars, of angels, and of our peculiar and gifted land. No, no; now it is all mixed up with intrigue, and politics, and management, and baffled schemes, and cunning arts of men. You may be, you are, free from all this, but your faith is not the same. You no longer believe in Arabia.”ad “Why, thou to me art Arabia,” he insists. “Talk not to me of leaving a divine cause; why, thou art my cause, and thou art most divine.” She persists. “There are those to whom I belong, and to whom you belong.... Fly, fly from me, son of Europe and of Christ!” Why should he fly, he protests? He is a Christian in the land of Christ. He will not leave until she agrees that “our united destinies shall advance the sovereign purpose of our lives.” If only she declares her love for him, he will sever the “world-worn bonds” that constrain them. That she cannot do. Her head falls upon his shoulder, he embraces her, but her cheek is cold, her hand lifeless. He sprinkles her with water from the fountain, she opens her eyes, sighs, and looks about her in bewilderment. At that moment noises are heard, people come trampling toward them, there are shouts calling for Lord Montacute, and the party appears. “The Duke and Duchess of Bellamont had arrived at Jerusalem.”34
That memorable last sentence of the book comes as a shock to the reader. What are the Duke and Duchess doing in Jerusalem, and what does their arrival signify for Tancred and his “divine cause”? For that matter, what exactly is his cause? Does the arrival of the Duke and Duchess mean that that the established order is reasserting itself, fettering Tancred yet again with those “world-worn bonds”? Or does their presence in Jerusalem mean that they finally understand and sympathize with their son’s aspirations? Most critics find fault not only with the denouement but with much of the latter part of the book, for Tancred never makes it clear what that “divine cause,” the “new crusade,” is. Disraeli, one might suspect, had simply given up toward the end, unable to resolve the problem he himself had raised.
Disraeli himself had no such doubts, no second thoughts about the spirit or intent of the novel. Some of the more audacious sentiments in it, uttered by Sidonia and Eva, were voiced by Disraeli himself in Parliament later that year, when he insisted that Jews, professing a “true religion,” were the “authors” of Christianity.35 He stopped short of saying then, what he did in Tancred, that “Christianity is Judaism for the multitude, but still it is Judaism.”36 Thirty years later, as Prime Minister much involved with the “Eastern question,” he told his friend Benjamin Jowett, the Greek scholar and Master of Balliol, that Tancred was the favorite of his novels.37
If there is a problem about the meaning of Tancred, the solution may be found in another book by Disraeli, not a novel, written four years later. In the midst of his biography of George Bentinck (his friend and ally in the protectionist faction of the Tory Party), Disraeli inserted a quite gratuitous chapter, which does not even mention Bentinck, entitled “The Jewish Question.” That chapter, an essay really, is nothing less than a paean to the Jewish “race” which, “sustained by a sublime religion,” survived the hatred and persecution of centuries and produced gifted Jews in every sphere of life: “No existing race is so much entitled to the esteem and gratitude of society as the Hebrews.” So far from being guilty of the crucifixion, they could proudly claim Jesus, “born from the chosen house of the chosen people,” as one of them. Indeed, Jesus, the chapter concludes, is “the eternal glory of the Jewish race.”38 It is only in the next chapter that Disraeli explains that the views espoused in the earlier one were not, in fact, those of Bentinck, who had supported the bills admitting Jews to Parliament solely on the principle of religious liberty.ae39
They were, however, very much the views of Disraeli—and of Tancred. This was the “great Asian mystery” revealed to Tancred in the “holy land” of that “holy race”—the eternal, transcendent quality of Judaism even in the age of Christianity. And this was the “new crusade” to which Tancred had dedicated himself, a crusade not by Christians against Muslims but by a Christian and a Jew united in a “sovereign purpose.” Eva, the Jewess, may have faltered in the end, but Tancred, the Christian, did not. Nor did Disraeli, who embodied in himself the Jew and the Christian and who was steadfast to the end—a politician/novelist who was also the quintessential philosemite.
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot read Tancred shortly after its publication. It was “very thin,” she complained, much inferior to Coningsby and Sybil.af She disapproved of Disraeli’s Young Englandism but even more of his theory of race. So far from the purity of races being a condition of their superiority, it was a cause of their degeneration and, ultimately, of their extinction.
The fellowship of race, to which D’Israeli [sic] so exultingly refers the munificence of Sidonia, is so evidently an inferior impulse which must ultimately be superseded that I wonder even he, Jew as he is, dares to boast of it. My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews, and is almost ready to echo Voltaire’s vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of thei
r early mythology and almost all their history is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus, but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein He transcended or resisted Judaism. The very exaltation of their idea of a national deity into a spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other oriental tribes. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.41
That was in 1848. In 1876, Eliot was to produce a novel that was almost as “exultingly” in favor of that “fellowship of race” as Sidonia himself.ag Her novel differs from Disraeli’s in one crucial respect. Tancred’s crusade is cast in a universalist mode, a united Christianity and Judaism sharing a common purpose. Eliot and her hero Daniel Deronda have no such illusions. It is a national, not universal, sovereignty they seek for the Jews in Palestine, a “separate” nation that would incorporate universal ideals, to be sure, but that would be embodied in a distinctively Jewish state.
Like Deronda, Eliot had to undergo an initiation into Judaism. Born into a low-church Anglican family, inspired in her youth by an Evangelical teacher, and then converted to an agnosticism bordering on atheism by English Positivists and German Young Hegelians, she came to an appreciation of Judaism relatively late in life. She had already produced translations of such notable iconoclasts as David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Baruch Spinoza, when she met, in 1866, a young Jewish emigré, Emanuel Deutsch, who inspired her to rethink all of her old views. Encouraged to learn Hebrew, she read some of the ancient and medieval classics of Judaism, as well as modern commentaries. That extraordinary process of self-education and reevaluation was reflected, ten years later, in Daniel Deronda.ah
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