g Although generically the word “commonwealth” simply meant government, in this context it was equated with “republic,” partly because of its association with the Cromwellian Commonwealth. It is interesting how often, in the Anglo-Hebraist literature, ancient Israel is referred to as a “republic”—respublica Hebraeorum. What was technically a monarchy was deemed to be a republic in spirit, based upon the books of Judges and Samuel which were anti-monarchic, and a kingship that was not hereditary and was subject both to the will of God and, as God told Samuel, the “voice of the people.”
h One of the sins responsible for their dispersion, Milton noted, was usury: “Their hearts were set upon usury, and are to this day, no nation more [so].” Quoting this, and observing that money-lending had been his father’s occupation and a major source of Milton’s own income, one scholar wonders Milton’s reluctance to admit Jews to England was because they might be competitors for his trade.38
i John Dryden, the first official Poet Laureate (a title he acquired in 1668), pronounced Paradise Lost, which had been published the previous year, “one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.”40 If Milton was deprived of the title of laureate, it was because, with the restoration of the monarchy, he was politically as well as theologically heretical.
j Pepys’s diary (October 14, 1663) describes an Orthodox service: the women behind a “lattice out of sight,” the service “all in a singing way, and in Hebrew,” the “carrying of the Torahs around the room,” concluding with a prayer for the King, in Hebrew (with his name pronounced in Portuguese). In this account, it would seem to have been anything but decorous: “But, Lord, to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more; and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world, so absurdly performed as this.”3
k Even in respect to the Treatises, there is much dispute about the significance of those Biblical references, some commentators questioning whether Locke’s natural law was at all dependent upon divine law.10
l Toland was not so favorably disposed to all religions. To Catholics he was merciless. “We Britons,” he wrote in another book, “further perceive that the governing principle of Rome is worldly, earthly, tyrannical; and that the papal hierarchy is a mere political faction, erecting a splendid, pompous, and universal empire over mankind.”21
m The term “Jew Bill” was not meant invidiously. It was used by supporters and opponents of this bill as well as of the later ones.
n It was also then that the phrase, “the Jewish question” was first used—not pejoratively, as it later was on the continent. In Europe in the nineteenth century, and more particularly in Germany (among the Young Hegelians, and Marx most notably), that expression had distinctly antisemitic overtones.25
o There is no mention of Jews in The Wealth of Nations. But the memorable phrase, “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,” was anticipated in Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence in the context of the unfortunate prejudice against Jews. Commenting on merchants and Jews, he spoke of “that principle in the mind which prompts to truck, barter, and exchange, though it is the great foundation of arts, commerce, and the division of labor, yet is not marked with any thing amiable.”34
p Of the three required oaths for public office (and for other purposes, such as attendance in a university)—the oaths of Allegiance, Supremacy, and Abjuration—it was the last that was the hindrance for Jews. Allegiance to the monarch was no problem; nor was the recognition of the monarch as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The oath of Abjuration, however, originally intended to exclude pretenders to the throne, was a problem because it concluded with the words, “on the true faith of a Christian.”2
q Five months after receiving his knighthood, Montefiore asked Russell to give him a baronetcy on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s coronation. Among the attributes that qualified him, he said, were his fortune, a landed estate, and a “supreme attachment to the constitution.” As if this would also be in his favor, he pointed out that since he had no children, the baronetcy would expire with him. In the event, that honor went not to him but to Goldsmid.15
r More widely discussed than the book itself was the seventy-odd-page ruthless critique of it by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review the following year.
s Mill was generally equivocal on the subject of religion. In his Considerations on Representative Government, he seemed to favor the people of the book over Christians because their book recognized the sacred character of the prophets. And because the prophets were often in opposition to their kings and priests, they provided that “antagonism of influences” that was the only security for progress and liberty—“the equivalent,” he quoted one Hebrew commentator approvingly, “of the modern liberty of the press.” Thus “the Jews, instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with them, have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern civilization.”25
t Eliot herself had written a long adulatory essay on Heine some years earlier, but, oddly enough, had made little of his Jewishness.
u This fictional Harrington has no relation to James Harrington, the author of Oceana.
v These agreeable Jewish characters were deliberate on the author’s part. She was moved to write Harrington, her father explained in the preface to the novel, by an American Jewish lady who complained of the stereotypical Jews in her earlier stories and asked her to write a romance with a good Jew in it.
w Scott defended his blend of history and romance in the preface to the first edition of the book, a “Dedicatory Epistle to the Rev. Dr. Dryasdust, F.A.S.” (In later editions it sometimes appears as an appendix.) Anticipating the objections of the antiquarian Dryasdust, Scott insisted that his was “a true picture of old English manners” based on true historic sources, although couched in modern language and perhaps taking some liberties with dates and facts.6
x Scott points out (again, with an unintentionally ambiguous effect), that in the course of amassing this wealth, the Jews invented a device for which commerce is “indebted to them”: the bill of exchange, which permitted them to transfer their wealth from one country to another, so that “when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another.”9
y In his last weeks, in a moment of consciousness, Scott requested his friend (and biographer) John Lockhart to read to him. “What book?,” Lockhart asked. “Need you ask?” Scott replied. “There is but one.” One historian cites this as evidence of Scott’s interest in the Hebrew Bible. But it was a chapter of St. John’s Gospel that Lockhart read to him, and it was this, Scott said, that was “a great comfort” to him.21
z Just as Thackeray had written a spoof of Ivanhoe, so he wrote one of Coningsby under the title Codlingsby, mocking one of the characters who finds Jews in control everywhere: “Even the Pope in Rome is one of us.”22
aa Sidonia is generally said to have been modeled on Lionel Rothschild. The Rothschilds, however, were not Sephardim descended from the “Nuevos Christianos of Arragon.” It was Disraeli himself who claimed to be of that lineage.
ab The origin of the name Tancred is not explained in the novel. A hint of it appears in the description of an ancestor of the family, “one of the most distinguished knights in the third crusade, having saved the life of Coeur de Lion at the siege of Ascalon.”26 The historic Tancred, however, was a knight not in the third crusade but in the first. It was under the name of Tancred that the young Theodor Herzl (the founder of Zionism) had been inducted, as a student in Vienna, into a German nationalist fraternity after the ritual of a saber duel. Herzl later proposed that dueling be officially accredited in the state of Israel as a token of the aristocratic and nationalist spirit of the new country.
<
br /> ac Disraeli himself had made that voyage from London to Jerusalem in 1831, where he felt himself among “that sacred and romantic people from whom I derive by blood and name.” Two years later the Jewish hero of another of his novels, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, discovers, in the “Land of Promise,” “all we have yearned after, all we have fought for, our beauteous country, our holy creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs.”29
ad “Arabia” meant Palestine, and “Arab” was equivalent to “Semite,” meaning Jews as well as Arabs.
ae Bentinck voted for those bills simply out of personal loyalty to Disraeli. “This Jewish question,” he wrote to a friend in 1847, “is a terrible annoyance.... For my part, I don’t think it matters two straws whether they are in or out of Parliament.”39
af Disraeli did not, however, read Daniel Deronda (or perhaps any other of Eliot’s novels). Asked whether he had done so, he delivered the famous quip, “When I want to read a novel, I write one.”40
ag Eliot had also become better disposed to Disraeli as a politician. She was pleased when he triumphed over Gladstone in the election of 1874 and praised him both for his speeches in Parliament and for his handling of the “Russian question” at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Defending his politics to a friend who thought him “unprincipled,” she also recommended his novels as “wonderfully clever.”42
ah Evidence of that education appears in the novel itself. The epigraph of one of the chapters is a passage from the German historian Leopold Zunz, the founder of Die Wis-senschaft des Judentums (“the science of Judaism”).If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations—if the duration of sorrows and patience with which they are born ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land—if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?
This excerpt appears in German in the epigraph and is translated into English in the opening paragraph of the chapter, where Eliot explains that Deronda “had lately been reading that passage.”43 Deronda could have read it (although Eliot does not say so) in an English translation recently published. But Eliot herself had read it in the original, in Zunz’s Die Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters, and it is her translation that appears in the novel.
ai Leavis’s novel was never published, not because he had second thoughts about it, but because his publisher did. His proposed title page was:GWENDOLEN HARLETH
George Eliot’s superb last novel
liberated from
DANIEL DERONDA49
aj Eliot explained neither the title of the book nor that of the essay. She may have thought it insulting to her readers to identity Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor in the Peripatetic School. The expression “Hep! Hep! Hep!” appears in Daniel Deronda where Daniel, wandering in the Jewish neighborhood of London, is imagined transported back to the Rhineland at the end of the eleventh century, when “the Hep! Hep! Hep! of the Crusaders came like the bay of bloodhounds” and the missionaries fell upon the Jews with “sword and firebrand.”56 More recently (Eliot did not mention this but she must have had it in mind), “Hep! Hep!” had been the rallying cry of anti-Semitic rioters in Germany in 1819.
ak Queen Victoria, reading the book over the objections of her mother (who disapproved of “light” as well as “low” books), found Oliver Twist “excessively interesting” and recommended it to her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. He confessed he could not get beyond the first chapters. “It’s all among Workhouses, and Coffin Makers, and Pickpockets. I shouldn’t think it would tend to raise morals; I don’t like that low debasing view of mankind.... I don’t like them in reality, and therefore I don’t wish them represented.” 60
al A more caustic comment was Lionel Trilling’s, who found Riah “as impossibly good as Fagin was impossibly bad.”64
am In one of Buchan’s earliest tales, A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), an American woman describes a Jewish financier: “I like his face; there is a fire somewhere behind his eyes. But then I differ from most of my countrymen in liking Jews.... They are never vulgar at heart. If we must have magnates, I would rather Jews had the money. It doesn’t degrade them and they have the infallible good taste of the East at the back of their heads.”71
an It is also intriguing to learn that the last books Buchan was reading shortly before his death in February 1940 (he was then Lord Tweedsmuir, the Governor General of Canada) were Lionel Trilling’s Matthew Arnold and Werner Jaeger’s Paideia, The Ideals of Greek Culture.75
ao To the cynical ear today, the expression “Restoration of Jews” may have an antisemitic ring, suggesting a desire to rid England of undesirable Jews. There is no hint of that in the contemporary usage of the term.
ap It was, indeed, a remarkable choice. Born to an English Jewish family living in Germany, Alexander emigrated to England in 1820, where he became the rabbi in Norwich and then a Hebrew teacher and shochet in Plymouth. In 1825 he converted to Christianity, moved to Dublin where he taught Hebrew, and was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church. He worked for the London Society, first in Danzig and then in London. He was a professor of Hebrew at King’s College when he received the appointment as bishop in Jerusalem.
aq There is no evidence of any relationship or even communication between Eliot and Shaftesbury. (Eliot died in 1892, Shaftesbury in 1895.) But they agreed in paying tribute to Disraeli. “D’Israeli,” Shaftesbury wrote shortly after his death, “is a Hebrew, and that to my mind always imparts a certain sense of reverence. I can never forget that of this race our blessed Lord came according to his flesh.”18
ar “Zionism” (derived from the Hebrew word “tsiyon,” hill—that is, Jerusalem) first appeared in a journal edited by Nathan Birnbaum, Selbstemanzipation. Birnbaum attended the first Zionist Congress in 1897, but later turned against the idea of political Zionism and became the first Secretary General of Agudath Israel, the religious anti-Zionist organization.
as As late as December, 1914, Weizmann entertained the idea, facetiously, one assumes, of a colony in “something like Monaco, with a university instead of a gambling-hall.”22
at The religious make-up of the cabinet is interesting. Seven of the nine Christians were raised as Evangelicals or embraced Evangelicalism later in life; three were sons of the manse; one was a Scottish Methodist. There were no Catholics, two Jews, and only one Anglican. The ethnic composition is equally curious. Lloyd George was Welsh, Balfour and three others were Scottish or had lived in Scotland for long periods, one was an Irish Protestant, one was born in South Africa, and one in Germany.25
au This remark about acetone recalls Weizmann’s first meeting with Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, early in the war. Churchill’s almost opening words were, “Well, Dr. Weizmann, we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it?”37
av In 1915, Asquith had greeted with derision a proposal by Herbert Samuel (the first Jewish cabinet minister) for a Jewish Palestine: “It reads almost like a new edition of Tancred brought up to date.... It is a curious illustration of Dizzie’s favorite dictum that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H.S.”39
aw In the same passage, praising the Greeks and Jews for the vigor of their political life and strife, Churchill tossed off another of his quips: “It has been well said that wherever there are three Jews it will be found that there are two Prime Ministers and one leader of the Opposition.”
ax The “sensible men” quip comes from Disraeli’s novel Endymion, but it did not originate with him. It was used almost a century earlier by the First Earl of Shaftesbury, who called for a “good humored religion” that would depend not on the “higher regions of divinity” but on “plain honest morals.”61
ay One display of irreverence was prompted by the Biblical account of the crossing of the Red Sea—600,000,
plus women and children. “We may,” Churchill commented, “without impiety doubt the statistics. A clerical error may so easily have arisen. Even today a nought or two is sometimes misplaced.”
Copyright © 2011 by Gertrude Himmelfarb
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The People of the Book Page 17