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young Evangelical, Marian Evans (her family name), who almost forty
years earlier had thrilled to the word of Christianity, would now
reappear, far more complex and problematic, in the speeches of
Mordecai and the quest of Deronda. "Toward the Hebrews," she wrote
to Harriet Beecher Stowe, "we western people who have been reared in
Christianity, have a peculiar debt and, whether we acknowledge it or
not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral
sentiment." The phrase "a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship" seems
especially pointed: it refers to the linkage that Daniel Deronda is meant
to embody between the two great religions of "East" and "West,"
Judaism and Christianity, neither gjven literal credence by Eliot in her
mature years but both seen as historical repositories of moral wisdom.
None of this, to be sure, is made very explicit in a novel that probably
makes too many other things explicit; but it is suggested irresistably by
the scheme, the organizing fable, of the book-which in one part is the
transfiguration of a fine young Protestant apparently of upper-class
English birth into an eager young Jew of dubious yet blessed birth,
with the first Deronda in search of some ennobling purpose, whether
transcendent or not, and the second presumably having found it.
3) She saw in the barely-dawning movement of the Jews toward
national regroupment something that might arouse the imagination of
cultivated modern people-was not that movement somewhat like the
other resurgences of oppressed Europeans in the nineteenth century,
which had brought new vision to the continent? She saw in the Jews a
usable symbol for the search, recurrent in her work, for modes of action
through which to realize moral ideals. I shall come back to this point.
Now among sophisticated critics-there is of course no other
kind-it has become customary to patronize George Eliot a little for
this sudden turn of interest toward the Jews. That there are major flaws
in her treatment of Jewish experience, almost everyone agrees. But to
see that is by no means the same as simply to dismiss "the Jewish part"
as lacking in interest. Such a response is insensitive: it blurs a notable
moment in the growth of human consciousness.
For we should remember that the most vivid Jewish character in
nineteenth-century English fiction is alas, Fagin, the thief and mentor
of thieves, drawn in brilliant accord with the dominant myth of the
Jewish villain, a corrupting agent of Satan let loose to defile the
cleanliness of Christian society. To deny the power or persistence of
this myth would be foolish; to deny the fearful strength with which
Dickens embodied it, still more foolish.
Daniel Deronda,
as Lionel
Trilling has remarked in a youthful essay, "enshrined the Jew" in a
