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Eliot chose this representation, in part, because her knowledge of Jewish
lifestyles and teachings suggested powerful, yet practical revisions to the
majority culture. Ideas about prejudice, difference, and cultural perspec–
tive deconstruct as Daniel's conventional Christianity gradually trans–
forms into an unconventional Jewish perspective.
Historically, Victorian society could not assimilate an entrenched,
albeit minor, Jewish population. According to Cecil Roth, in
A History
of the Jews in England
(1964),
there were about sixty-five thousand
British Jews in
1880.
This number tripled over the next twenty-five years.
Jews for Eliot represented a partial solution to the country's spiritual cri–
sis rather than a problem.
In
Daniel Deronda,
she contemplates the ques–
tion of Jewish nationalism from a Jewish perspective. That is, for British
Jews, their proto-Zionist goals conflicted with their desire to assimilate.
Eliot analyzes these desires in reference to the Jewish presence in the
majority culture. So rather than Jews representing a force that threatened
the larger community, as Katherine Linehan and Susan Meyer suggest,
they represented an important element that would weaken English soci–
ety
if they left.
Although Jews illustrated that part of culture often seen
as different, foreign, and threatening to the main body of British society,
British society required their presence. Along these lines, Mark Wohl–
farth offers a compelling nationalist and political hypothesis:
The Jewish-nationalist plot of Daniel, a revision of the classical
Bil–
dungsroman
along nationalist lines, functions in many ways as a
narrative and symbolic solution to Eliot's emphasis on continuity
as well as rupture. That solution, however, given that Daniel is Jew–
ish, remains irrecuperable for English nationalist purposes and thus
necessitates the modulation of
Jewishness
into an idea of
Judaism
that could speak
to
the moral and nationalist concerns of England.
I agree with Wohlfarth's assessment of the novel as it relates to the
political conditions of England. I contend, though, that Daniel's move–
ment out of England reflects the precarious spiritual condition of the
country. England, finally, cannot be a place for Daniel or, for that mat–
ter, Judaism. The English needed this minority population to help exam–
ine their own majority spiritual convictions during a time where science,
industrialism, progress, and colonialism threatened the spiritual fabric
of the nation. But Daniel sees his quest, like Arthur's perhaps, to found
a nation where spirituality and community can simultaneously take
root. Eliot was not being ironic when she titled her final chapter "Fruit
and Seed."
In
Daniel Deronda,
Eliot in no way actively depicts the
