As Eliot was initiated into Judaism by Deutsch, so her hero is by Mordecai, a clerk in a Jewish bookstore where Daniel happens to be browsing. Asked whether he is Jewish, Daniel tells him he is not. Yet Mordecai senses him to be one “of our race.” Sickly and contemplating his death, Mordecai comes to see in Daniel a disciple who will carry on his vision of Judaism and his aspirations for the Jewish people. He himself, he explains, came to that vision not in England, where he was born, but while studying abroad where he was exposed to both Jewish and Christian culture.
Then ideas, beloved ideas, came to me because I was a Jew. They were a trust to fulfil, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration, because I was a Jew, and felt the heart of my race beating within me. They were my life; I was not fully born till then.... They [the medieval sages] had absorbed the philosophy of the Gentile into the faith of the Jew, and they still yearned toward a centre for our race. One of their souls was born again within me, and awaked amid the memories of their world. It travelled into Spain and Provence; it debated with Aben-Ezra; it took ship with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the Crusaders and the shrieks of tortured Israel.44
It is that soul Mordecai wants to bequeath to Daniel. Daniel is moved by his tale but reminds him again that he is not Jewish. He had never known his parents and lives with his guardian, Sir Hugo, whom he believes to be his father. Undeterred by this report, Mordecai takes Daniel under his wing, introducing him to a discussion club of his friends, Jews and non-Jews, who are debating the momentous subject of “the law of progress.” Against a self-described “rational Jew” who sees the assimilation of Jews as the natural course of progress, Mordecai propounds the opposite view, that the future of Judaism lies in the “separateness” and “unity of Israel,” in Judaism as a “nationality” with “a land and a polity.”
Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West.... I say that the effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality.... There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality of protection.... Then our race shall have an organic center, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom.45
The meeting with Mordecai, although central to its theme, comes relatively late in the novel. Before that Daniel had a more dramatic encounter under very different circumstances. He was rowing in the Thames when he observed a young woman who is about to throw herself into the river. He rescues her and hears her sad tale. Mirah is a Jewess born in England, brought up by her father, a wandering actor in Europe. She has come to England to find her mother and brother, about whom she knows nothing except that their name is Cohen, and she is in despair because her search has been in vain. Daniel befriends her and installs her in the home of a friend. As he learns more about her, he discovers that Mordecai is her long-lost brother.
The mystery of that relationship solved, so is the mystery of his own parentage, when his guardian, Sir Hugo, tells him that his mother, who has so far insisted upon anonymity, is dying and wants to meet her son. The meeting of mother and son in Genoa is as dramatic as the discipleship scene with Mordecai. Daniel now discovers that Mordecai is right; he is Jewish. But while Mordecai wants to instill in Daniel the soul of the Jewish sages, his mother has sought exactly the opposite, to free him from the burden, as she sees it, of that legacy. She herself, she tells him, wanted to be liberated from the double bondage of being a woman and a Jew. After her husband’s death, to free herself in order to pursue her career as a singer and actress, and also to free her child from the onerous life of a Jew, she gave up her two-year-old son to her old friend and admirer, Sir Hugo, who promised to raise him as “an English gentleman.”
Pleased to know that he is Jewish, Daniel rebukes her for having concealed his birthright. She justifies herself: “The bondage I hated for myself I wanted to keep you from. What better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the bondage of having been born a Jew.” The Judaism her father, an observant Jew, wanted to impose upon her was onerous because it was irrational as well as restrictive.
I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuza over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind the tephil-lin on them, and women not,—to adore the wisdom of such laws, however silly they might seem to me. . . . I was to care for ever about what Israel had been; and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it.... You are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have not been brought up as a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you because I saved you from it.46
A second meeting finds his mother in a more tender but still unrepentant mood. Would Deronda become the kind of Jew her father was, she wants to know? No, he assures her, his education and “Christian sympathies” will prevent that, but he will identify himself with his people and do what he can for them. She sees the irony of this turn of events. In spite of herself, she has been the instrument of her father’s will; she has given him a grandson with “a true Jewish heart.” “Every Jew,” she quotes her father, “should rear his family as if he hoped that a Deliverer might spring from it.” Hearing the echo of Mordecai in that sentiment, Daniel asks whether these were his exact words. Yes, he had actually written them. As for her, she hopes her son can forgive her, and if he wants to say kaddish for her, he should do so: “You will come between me and the dead.” Almost as an afterthought, she asks whether Deronda is in love with a Jewess and whether that is why he is glad to be a Jew (not for that reason alone, he tells her), whether she is beautiful (yes), and whether she is ambitious to have “a path of her own” (no, that is not her nature).47 Disappointed with the last answer, she nevertheless gives Deronda a jeweled miniature of her picture to be given to this woman who is so unlike herself.
Daniel is indeed in love with Mirah—and not with another woman who plays a large part in the book and whom his mother (as well as many of his readers and critics) would have preferred as his mate. Gwendolen, like his mother, aspires to be a liberated woman and is entirely focused on her own interests and desires. Her life takes a tragic turn when her husband, whom she married to escape from a life of poverty, turns out to be malevolent and despotic. Released from his tyranny when he is accidentally drowned, she is painfully conscious that she married him knowing that he had a long-time mistress and two illegitimate children, and, worse, that she could have saved him from drowning and made no effort to do so.
During much of this time, before and during her marriage, Gwendolen has sought Daniel’s advice and comfort, looking upon him as a father-confessor and, as she sees it, an unrequited lover. Daniel, however, has other plans: to marry Mirah and with her carry out the mission bequeathed him by Mordecai.
I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there.... The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty: I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my own.48
Gwendolen versus Mirah, Rebecca versus Rowena—critics would like to rewrite the novels and re-pair the couples. Just as Rebecca seems a more fitting and interesting mate for Ivanhoe, so Gwendolen is for Daniel. Indeed, both novels have
been rewritten for just that purpose. In Rebecca and Rowena, Thackeray has Ivanhoe marrying Rebecca; in Gwendolen Harleth, F. R. Leavis, the literary critic, has Daniel marrying Gwendolen. These alternative novels are travesties, because neither takes the Jewish theme seriously. Rebecca will not marry out of her faith or be converted to Christianity; nor will Ivanhoe, the noted Saxon and champion of King Richard, be converted to Judaism. So too, Daniel, having assumed the mantle of Mordecai, can hardly leave the “true Jewess” Mirah in favor of Gwendolen, who is not Jewish, has no interest in Judaism, and can hardly help him in his mission to Palestine.
Leavis’s rewriting of the novel went beyond the marital rearrangement. He also eliminated most of the Jewish theme—the “bad half” of the novel, as he put it—leaving only the Gwendolen story.ai Other critics, Henry James, most notably, shared his distaste for that part of the novel, not because they were antisemitic (neither James nor Leavis was), but because they could not take seriously Daniel’s (or Eliot’s) view of Judaism and the Jewish people. Eliot had anticipated that the “Jewish element” in the novel would “satisfy nobody.”50 What she could not have anticipated was the different form that criticism would take today by “Orientalists” like Edward Said, who object not only to the Zionist agenda proposed by Daniel, but to the “ethnocentric,” “colonialist,” and “imperialist hegemony” they see in it.51
Yet the book had admirers in Eliot’s day and sold almost as well as her previous novel, Middlemarch. It was soon translated into German, French, and Russian, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish. And it still occupies a place in the “Great Tradition” of the novel—even in Leavis’s classic account of that tradition, where George Eliot has the place of honor and Daniel Deronda is treated respectfully, although with serious reservations about the “bad half.”52 In retrospect, there is much to marvel at in the novel, in the “bad half” as well as the good. It is remarkable that Eliot, a Christian woman, should have written so movingly about Jews and Judaism, and so presciently about Palestine, not merely as a “homeland” but also as a “Jewish polity.” (And so presciently about feminism as well, in the person of Daniel’s mother.) Even more remarkable was her rationale for what was to be known as Zionism. Unlike Evangelicals who looked forward to the “restoration” of the Jews in the holy land as the precondition for the Second Coming of Christ, or later Zionists who sought in Palestine a refuge from antisemitism and persecution, Eliot rested her case on Judaism itself—the “soul” that had traveled throughout the ages and throughout the world and would finally come to rest in the land of its forefathers.
It is this vision of Judaism, as a people and a nation, that later appealed to many Jews, and not only Zionists, who said that Daniel Deronda had inspired them to rethink and reexperi-ence their own lives and views. The English writer Israel Zangwill reported meeting a colonel commanding a Welsh regiment who said, “I am Daniel Deronda”; born a Christian of baptized Jewish parents, he explained, the book had brought him back to his faith and his people.53 Perhaps more surprising is the testimonial of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the leader of the religious Zionist sect, who praised Eliot as one of the few Christians who understood the religious roots of Zionism.54
Another odd tribute comes from Lionel Trilling, whose essay “The Changing Myth of the Jew” concludes with Daniel Deronda, the most satisfactory of the “counter-myths,” not only for Jews but for Gentiles as well who respond to “a genuine, inner, intimate quality” in the Jewish characters, a sense of “reality” and “credibility.” “It does not too much strain the imagination, Trilling observes, to say ‘Jews are like that’”; at least some Jews are like that, and to some degree. The final sentences of the essay remind the reader that in this novel, as in all novels, one must disentangle “the mythical from the actual”—a difficult task, “for in the mythical there is usually, of course, a little of what is true.”55
Eliot herself took on that task of disentangling the mythical and the actual, finding in the mythical (in her novel) more than a little of the truth. Just as Disraeli reaffirmed the moral of Tancred in his speech in Parliament, so Eliot did the same for Daniel Deronda in an essay written two years later. Daniel Deronda was her last novel; Impressions of Theophrastus Such her last book; and “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” the last and longest essay in that book.aj She started writing it in June 1878, completed it in November, and had the satisfaction of reading it to her husband (as she thought of him), George Lewes, on his death-bed. It was published in May the following year, a few months after his death.
The essay puts the case for Jewish “separateness,” or nationality, in spiritual as well as political terms: “The eminence, the nobleness of a people depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of striving for what we call spiritual ends—ends which consist not in immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul.” It is not only the collective soul that is ennobled; it is also the soul of each citizen who is related to something larger than himself, “something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice.” For Jews that sense of “separateness” is unique in its intensity because it is rooted in both revelation and history, and the dispersion of the people makes that history even more “exceptional.” Tortured and exiled, a people of weaker nature might have given way to pressure and merged with the population around them. Instead, tenaciously holding on to their inheritance of blood and faith, they cherish all the more the differences that mark them off from their oppressors: “The separateness which was made their badge of ignominy would be their inward pride, their source of fortifying defiance.” That separateness, to be sure, could also give rise to “answering vices” resulting from the abuses to which they are subject. But even the vices might be virtues, the condition of their survival. The virtues for which Jews are notable—the care for orphans and widows, women and children, family and community—withstood centuries of persecution and oppression because they are deeply ingrained in the Jewish religion and race.57
Nationality, then, is of the essence of Judaism. The question is whether there are enough worthy Jews, “some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees,” who by their heroic example would set about making their people “once more one among the nations.”
Every Jew should be conscious that he is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their Fathers.58
This might have been Deronda or Mordecai speaking. It was Eliot in her last testament. She died a year and a half later.
Literary philosemitism had come a long way in the course of the century. And so had literary antisemitism—in reverse. By 1876, when Daniel Deronda was published, blatantly antisemitic novels were no longer respectable. Dickens’s Fagin had appeared in 1838. Dickens, it was said at the time, was a “low writer”; he wrote about low subjects for a low audience.59ak Fagin was perhaps the lowest of his characters, a criminal and corrupter of children as well as an exploiter of the poor. A quarter of a century later, Eliza Davis, a Jewish woman (the wife of the solicitor who had bought his home), accused Dickens of encouraging, in the figure of Fagin, “a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew” and appealed to him to “atone for a great wrong on a whole though scattered nation.” Dickens protested that that was not at all his intention. In the period portrayed in the novel, it was unfortunately true that “that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew”; moreover, the other wicked characters in the novel were Christian.61 In the next edition of Oliver Twist, Dickens softened, ever so slightly, the image of Fagin by referring to him by name instead of as “the Jew,” thus making “the Jew” less of an epithet and making Fagin less conspicuously, or at
least specifically, Jewish. He performed a more serious act of atonement in 1864 in Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, which features Riah, an “old Jewish man,” a “gentle Jew,” an altogether admirable character, in contrast to Fledgeby, his “Christian master,” “the meanest cur existing.”62 Mrs. Davis thanked him for “a great compliment paid to myself and to my people,” and was particularly taken with the “very picturesque” character of Riah. 63al
Dickens’s Jews, for good or bad, were of the lower classes. Anthony Trollope’s were unmistakeably upper-class. A staunch Liberal, Trollope had a special animus against Jews because of his intense dislike for Disraeli, who was not only a Jew (by birth at least) but a Tory, and, worse yet, a novelist who received larger advances for his novels than Trollope did for his. A money-lender in Barchester Towers (1857) was called Sidonia after Disraeli’s character, and an especially unprincipled Tory politician in Phineas Finn (1869) was clearly patterned on Disraeli himself. Yet that later novel also featured Madame Goesler, the daughter of a German Jewish attorney and widow of a Jewish banker, who is one of the most intelligent and high-minded of Trollope’s characters. One critic described her as “the most perfect gentleman” in his novels—than which, for Trollope, there could be no higher praise (although he would surely have demurred at calling a lady a “gentleman”).65
Like Dickens, Trollope was more repentant in his later years. The Way We Live Now, in 1875, the most bitter of his novels, exposed the mercenary values of the new commercial society, which afflicted most of the characters and all aspects of life including love and marriage. Among its many villains, the worst was the dishonest speculator Augustus Melmotte, who was ambiguously Jewish, assumed to be so because his wife was vaguely East European. Melmotte’s disreputable associate, Cohenlupe, was unmistakeably Jewish. On the other hand, Ezekiel Brehgert, who “went to a synagogue on a Saturday” and was “absolutely a Jew,” was an honest banker, decent, intelligent, and thoroughly honorable. He proposed marriage to a “Christian lady” who accepted him for the most materialistic reasons, and then withdrew his proposal because he could not provide the magnificent house she had made a condition of marriage. “I behaved like a gentleman,” he explained—a view evidently shared by the author.66
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