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PARTISAN REVIEW
"godlessness," forlorn and serious, kept prompting her to search for
equivalents to belief that would give moral "weight" to human
existence. How can we lead a life of meaning in a universe stripped of
the faith that had long provided meaning?-this question grips almost
every serious writer of the nineteenth century, and George Eliot most of
all.
In the time between
Middlemarch
and
Daniel Deronda
George
Eliot plunged into the study of Jewish history, custom, lore. More, one
suspects, than her usual conscientiousness led her to so thorough an
investigation. Some years earlier she had gotten to know a Jewish
scholar, Emanuel Deutsch, who became head of a "Back to Palestine"
group foreshadowing Zionism. Deutsch, from whom George Eliot took
lessons in Hebrew, would serve as a model for Mordecai, the prophetic
figure in
Daniel Deronda
who speaks at times in the accents of
religious mysticism, at times as a modern rationalist, but always in
behalf of a Jewish national revival. In 1873, during a continental
journey, George Eliot visited synagogues in Frankfurt and Mainz.
(Deronda visits one in Frankfurt too.) All the while she was reading
avidly in Jewish history: the works of Graetz, Zunz, Geiger, and
Steinschneider among Jewish historians, and such gentile students of
Jewish life and language as Milman and Renan. From the historians
she learned about a long-standing dispute regarding the condition of
Jews in Europe: had they sunk irrevocably into "cultural degeneracy,"
becoming, as the twentieth-century historian Toynbee would say, a
mere "historical fossil," or were they at the brink of a national
renaissance? These disputes, in simplified but affecting form, are
echoed in the discussions at the "Hand and Banner" workingmen's
club which Daniel Deronda visits with Mordecai (in turn a possible
model for Hyacinth Robinson's visit to the "Sun and Moon" cafe in
James's
The Princess Cassamassima).
From this range of sources,
then,-from books, conversations, and visits-George Eliot came to
know something about Jewish life in Europe and to respond to it with
that warmth which is her unmistakable signature.
She knew perfectly well, as she noted in her journal, that the
Jewish part of the novel seemed "likely to satisfy nobody," but she
stubbornly insisted on the unity of her book-at least, unity .of
intention and design. Shortly after its publication she wrote to a friend,
objecting to "readers who cut the book into scraps and talk of nothing
in it but Gwendolen. I meant everything in the book to be related to
everything else there." With so self-conscious a writer as George Eliot,
this last sentence merits serious attention. Whether, nonetheless,
