Daniel Deronda: George Eliot and the Jews.
In 1290, Jews were expelled from England. In 1656, Cromwell failed to persuade Parliament to welcome Jews back officially.
Jeremy Rosen
In 1753, the Jew Bill giving Jews citizenship was defeated by the antagonism of the Church and the merchant classes. And it would not be for a hundred years that all disadvantages were removed. So, it is surprising that in such an atmosphere of hatred, positive voices could be heard. And none more so than that of George Eliot (1819-1880) whose real name was Mary Ann Evans. Always one of my favourite English novelists.
She combined command of the language with a gift for a great story and an acute observation of the inequalities, and social hypocrisies of her age. She ought to be in every university’s literature courses. But she won‘t, of course, for two reasons. She lived and wrote during Imperial Britain. And she was pro-Jewish.
Eliot is remarkable not just as the outstanding female novelist, but uniquely as the most important non-Jewish literary voice in support of Judaism and Jewish identity in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Benjamin Disraeli had earlier written the novels Coningsby and Tancred, which feature major Jewish characters and their rejection of their Jewish origins. But both novels are mediocre works of literature. The Jewish element is quite incidental and reflects Disraeli’s ambiguity about his Jewish origins.
In contrast, George Eliot wrote Daniel Deronda. Admittedly, it is not one of her best novels, but it is still a major work of nineteenth-century literature. In it, through the character of Mordecai, she persuasively argues for the contribution that Judaism has made to the world and for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel, long before Theodore Herzl wrote his Altneuland or the Balfour Declaration and the Holocaust.
Daniel Deronda was published in 1876. It concerns the relationship Deronda had with two women with whom he crossed paths. One is an English rose called Gwendolin. The other is a Jewish girl called Mirah. The plot, in brief, is that Daniel Deronda was raised by a wealthy gentleman, Sir Hugo Mallinger. Deronda thought that he was Sir Hugo’s illegitimate son. One day, boating on the Thames, Deronda rescued a young, desperate Jewish girl, Mirah Lapidoth, from attempting to drown herself. She had come to London in search of her mother and brother after running away from her unsavoury and exploitative father. Deronda undertook to help her look for her mother (who, it turned out, had died) and brother. Through them, he is introduced to London’s Jewish community and Judaism.
Daniel met Mordecai, who, despite his ill health, was passionately committed to the Jewish people and worked and preached for them to be restored to their Promised Land. Through their conversations, Mordecai succeeded in influencing Deronda and pressed him to become an advocate for the Jewish people. Deronda was attracted to Mirah, and his desire to embrace Mordecai’s vision became stronger. But he was still confused about his own identity.
Deronda was finally reunited with his mother and learned that she was a Jewish opera singer with whom Sir Hugo was once in love. She had married and had a child, but because she resented the rigid religious upbringing of her childhood, she wanted to hide her identity from Deronda. On her husband’s death, she asked Sir Hugo to raise her son as an English gentleman, never to know that he was Jewish.
Daniel having discovered his Jewish identity, committed himself to carrying out Mordecai’s vision for the Jewish people. Daniel married Mirah, and the newlyweds prepared to set off for “the East” with Mordecai. But then Mordecai dies in their arms, and that is where the novel ends. A fascinating quote from the book are the words “Every Jew should rear his family as if he hoped a Deliverer might spring from it.”
Eliot showed real familiarity with Judaism and Jewish identity beyond that of any earlier non-Jewish novelist. She had met a Talmudic scholar called Emanuel Deutsch, who was working at the British Museum. He started to teach her Hebrew and a great deal more about Jewish life. Ironically, he set out to visit the Holy Land but died on the way there.
When Daniel Deronda was published, Chief Rabbi Adler of England wrote to thank her for her accurate and sympathetic portrait of Deronda and Judaism. A stark contrast to Dickens’s portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist or Melmotte in Trollop’s The Way We Live Now. However, many non-Jews resented and criticized her positive description of a Jew.
Henry James wrote a piece called A Conversation, which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. In it, he satirized Eliot’s Deronda and initiated a discussion in which all the negative stereotypes of Jews were presented as being a truer portrait.
Things have not changed much since. Daniel Deronda would never be read nowadays in an American or European University‘s English department for fear of giving offence. Chaucer wrote that “Love Conquers All.” Nowadays, in our intellectual world, it is “Hatred that conquers all.” Or as our Rabbis put it, “ Both love and hatred distort the mind.”
All this reminds me that there was and still is much goodwill towards Jews in our world. If only we humans could focus on what we share rather than what divides us!
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.
