The People of the Book

“The preeminent authors of the English literary canon, are Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens.... They are also the preeminent authors of the English literary antisemitic canon.” This dictum, by the historian Anthony Julius, is a sobering thought. We may be comforted by his reminder that the literary canon does not necessarily coincide with the social reality, that a nation may have “a rich literary antisemitism and a meager political antisemitism.”¹ Yet the literary canon has a reality of its own, as is evident from the fact that two of these preeminent literary antisemites were living in England at a time when there were no Jews there. (In Shakespeare’s day, there were a few Portuguese Marranos who were not publicly identified as Jews, the most notorious being the Queen’s physician Rodrigo Lopez, who was accused of treason and publicly executed.) This is all the more reason to take seriously the fictional stereotypes that may be more dramatic and, in a sense, more real than the actual persons being caricaturized.

It is all the more reason, too, to be impressed by the emergence in the nineteenth century of a counter-canon, a philosemitic literary canon, so to speak, featuring admirable, even heroic Jews. These “counter-myths,” as Lionel Trilling called them²—a new set of stereotypes, a cynic might say—did not dislodge the old, but they did create plausible alternative images which reinforced the philosemitism playing itself out in the political arena. The most striking exemplars of the new genre are novels by three of the best-known novelists of the period, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda—with Disraeli as a prime player in both the literary and political worlds.

Miss Montenero, the daughter of a rich Jew of Spanish descent, is the fiancée of Harrington, the hero of the novel. Har-rington had been raised by a nursemaid who terrified him with stories of Jews who steal and slaughter children and use their blood for their rituals. As an adult he met and befriended real Jews, so that he is quite prepared to fall in love with the beautiful Miss Montenero. That love was fated to be unconsummated (his parents would never approve his marriage with a Jew) until her father tells him that she has been brought up as a Protestant in accord with the wishes of her mother, the daughter of an English (and Christian) gentleman. Thus Miss Montenero, “not an actual Jewess,” is happily wedded to Harrington. Edgeworth, like Scott, presumably “breathed more freely” by relieving her heroine from the taint of Judaism. Yet the novel has an unmistakeably philosemitic tone, Mr. Montenero, an actual Jew, being entirely likeable, even admirable, as are other Jewish characters in the novel.^v

Ivanhoe, set against a more dramatic historical background—late-twelfth-century England at the time of the Crusades—gives rise to the same potential misalliance. Unlike Edgeworth, however, Scott retained his heroine, Rebecca, as very much an “actual Jewess,” by choice as well as birth. Indeed, she is all the more a heroine for resisting the temptation to convert or even to become the Templar’s “paramour,” which would have saved her from imminent death. This meant, however, that Scott, uneasy with that intermarriage, had to marry off his hero, the Saxon Ivanhoe, to Rowena, a good, if boring, Saxon lady. Scott may have “breathed more freely” with this denouement, but his readers did not, for it clearly violated their expectations as well as the romantic spirit of the novel.

“Jews will always be to me Jews,” Scott had said—and so they were in Ivanhoe. Rebecca’s father, Isaac, is one of those “money-makers and money-brokers” whose profession “narrows the mind.” He is also, however, capable of a “liberality of principle” that makes him a worthy father of Rebecca, willing to sacrifice himself, and his fortune, for her. He is not, to be sure, the hero of the novel—Ivanhoe is that—but he is far more commendable than most of the Saxons and Normans who behave ignobly toward each other and inhumanly toward Jews. It is a Knight Templar, Rebecca’s unsuccessful suitor, who protests: “Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!”⁴ Isaac makes his first appearance in a chapter introduced by an epigraph that is the classic expression of bigotry and an intimation of its injustice. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, affections, passions?”⁵

Where Edgeworth associated that bigotry with the blood-libel myth, Scott focused on the unrelieved history of oppression and persecution suffered by Jews. The facts are so horrendous that the author interrupts his narrative to insist that what he is describing is not fiction but historical fact:^w “It is grievous to think that those valiant barons, to whose stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity.” A long quotation from the Saxon Chronicle depicts the torture inflicted by the Saxons upon the poor and the innocent. “They suffocated some in mud, and suspended others by the feet or the head, or the thumbs, kindling the fire below them. They squeezed the heads of some with knotted cords till they pierced their brains, while they threw others into dungeons swarming with serpents, snakes, and toads” . . . and so on, in excrutiating detail.⁷ Earlier in the novel, Isaac, escorted through the woods by an obliging pilgrim, suspects that he is being ambushed.

His doubts might have been indeed pardoned; for, except perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an unintermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury; for Norman, Saxon, Dane, and Briton, however adverse these races were to each other, contended which should look with greatest detestation upon a people, whom it was accounted a part of religion to hate, to revile, to despise, to plunder, and to persecute. The kings of the Norman race, and the independent nobles, who followed their example in all acts of tyranny, maintained against this devoted people a persecution of a more regular, calculated, and self-interested kind.⁸

It was in response to this unremitting persecution that the Jews developed the character traits they did. Their “obstinacy and avarice” increased in proportion to the “fanaticism and tyranny” to which they were subject. “On these terms they lived; and their character, influenced accordingly, was watchful, suspicious, and timid—yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in evading the dangers to which they were exposed.” It was thus that they not only survived but “increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums.”^x The Jews are aware of this double-edged nature of their existence. While they are being wronged, plundered, and derided, Isaac complains to his daughter, they have to “smile tamely” rather than “revenge bravely.” Rebecca reassures him: “These Gentiles, cruel and oppressive as they are, are in some sort dependent on the dispersed children of Zion, whom they despise and persecute. Without the aid of our wealth, they could neither furnish forth their hosts in war nor their triumphs in peace; and the gold which we lend them returns with increase to our coffers.”¹⁰

That struggle for survival had other fortunate effects. All the trials and tribulations to which Isaac and Rebecca are subject—extortions of wealth, accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, imprisonment, physical torment, and, finally, Rebecca’s decree of death—give evidence of their fortitude and dignity. When Isaac is thrown into the dungeon, he is more composed than another might be: “Above all, he had upon his side the unyielding obstinacy of his nation, and that unbending resolution with which Israelites have been frequently known to submit to the uttermost evils which power and violence can inflict upon them, rather than gratify their oppressors by granting their demands.”¹¹ So, too, when Rebecca and Rowena are imprisoned, with Rebecca in far greater peril than the Saxon lady, she has the advantage of being better prepared, “by habits of thought and by natural strength of mind,” to confront the danger. “Like Damocles at his celebrated banquet,” Rebecca beheld “the sword which was suspended over the heads of her people by a single hair.”¹²

While persecution is a dominant theme in the book, religion is a relatively minor one. It is not God but the “obstinacy of his nation” that fortifies Isaac in the dungeon. And the “habits of thought” and “strength of mind” that prepare Rebecca for adversity come not from God but from the peril to which “her people” have always been subject. On the few occasions when God is invoked, it is almost as an afterthought. Seeking Rowena’s help, she appeals to a Judaic-Christian God, “the God whom they both worshipped, and . . . that revelation of the Law upon Mount Sinai in which they both believed.”¹³ Later, finding herself without a defender before the “trial by combat” that will determine her fate, Rebecca is confident that “God will raise me up a champion.” The Templar who has pity on her puts the question she might have asked of herself: “What has the law of Moses done for thee that thou shouldest die for it?” To which she replies: “It was the law of my fathers; it was delivered in thunders and in storms upon the mountain of Sinai, in cloud and in fire.”¹⁴ The only memorable act of piety occurs while she is awaiting the duel, when she recites the traditional evening prayer and sings a devotional hymn.¹⁵ In the final scene, announcing her departure from England, she explains to Rowena (then married to Ivanhoe) that England is “no safe abode for the children of my people,” no place where “Israel [can] hope to rest during her wanderings.” Rowena begs her to remain in England where she can be weaned from her “erring law.” No, Rebecca replies, “I may not change the faith of my fathers like a garment unsuited to the climate in which I seek to dwell.... He to whom I dedicate my future life will be my comforter, if I do His will.” Is she going to retire to a convent? Rowena asks. No, Israel has no convents. She will do, as Jewesses always have done, devote “their thoughts to Heaven, and their actions to works of kindness to men.” In parting, she commends Rowena to the God “who made both Jew and Christian.”¹⁶

In his 1830 introduction to a new edition of Ivanhoe, Scott acknowledged the great success of the book and confronted some of the questions that had been raised about it. Like his other novels, this had been published anonymously; he now confessed that the author of the much-acclaimed Scottish-centered Waverley novels was also the author of this Anglo-Saxon novel. Addressing the complaints of those “fair readers” who objected to Ivanhoe’s marriage to the “less interesting Rowena” rather than the “fair Jewess,” he explained that “the prejudices of the age rendered such an union almost impossible”—echoing the scene in the novel when Ivanhoe, although attracted to Rebecca, resists her charm because he shares “the universal prejudices of his age and religion.”¹⁷ That they do not marry now appears as a point in Rebecca’s favor, confirming her moral superiority not only over the prejudices of the age but also over the debasing instincts of self-gratification.

A character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity. Such is not the recompense which Providence has deemed worthy of suffering merit. . . . A glance on the great picture of life will show that the duties of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated; and that the internal consciousness of their high-minded discharge of duty produces on their own reflections a more adequate recompense, in the form of that peace which the world cannot give or take away.¹⁸

On that lofty note, “the sacrifice of passion to principle,” Scott concluded his belated introduction, and Rebecca emerges as even more of a moral heroine than one might have thought, precisely because she is not married to the hero. What Scott did not say was what he had said in the novel, that the marriage had a larger significance than the union of man and wife. Attended by noble Saxons and Normans, the elaborate nuptials are “a pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt the two races.”¹⁹ This marriage between the “two races,” Saxon and Norman, was so successful that the distinction between them is now invisible. Left out of the marriage, of course, is that other “race,” the Jews. For them there is no “peace and harmony.” On the contrary, Rebecca and Isaac feel obliged to leave England to seek refuge abroad—an ominous anticipation of the expulsion of the Jews a century later.

Ivanhoe was even more successful than the Waverley novels. It sold ten thousand copies in the three-volume edition in a fortnight and remained a bestseller throughout the century. Six plays based on it appeared within a year of its publication and many more in later years, as well as several operas, including one by Rossini (which Scott saw in Paris in 1826 and complained that the story was mangled and the dialogue nonsense). In 1849, Thackeray published a spoof, Rebecca and Rowena, with Rowena a shrew jealous of her husband’s feelings for Rebecca, and Ivanhoe, something of a drunkard, going off to fight for Richard. Eventually, after Rowena’s death, he is free to marry Rebecca. But even that marriage is melancholic. “I think,” the final sentence reads, “these were a solemn pair and died rather early.”²⁰ “Solemn” or not, Rebecca the Jewess is unquestionably the heroine of the parody. Scott may have thought it inappropriate to have her marry Ivanhoe, but Thackeray did not. Nor did their readers. A Jewess, proud and resolute in her Jewishness, was thought to be a fit spouse for the hero, a Christian and a veteran of the Crusades.

If Ivanhoe belongs to the genre of the philosemitic novel, it is not the familiar mode of philosemitism. Judaism itself—its sacred texts, revered ancestors, rites and rituals—hardly figures in it. Nor is there any suspicion in the novel (or, for that matter, in Scott’s life) of anything like the Hebraism, millenarianism, or veneration for the Old Testament that motivated other philosemites.^y It is Rebecca’s character, her determination to remain Jewish rather than the specific substance of that Jewishness, that qualifies her as the heroine of the novel, even as it disqualifies her as Ivanhoe’s wife. So, too, it is the character of the Jewish people, nobly rising above oppression and persecution, that gives the novel its distinctively philosemitic tone.

The last of the trilogy, Tancred: The New Crusade, was the spiritual part of the trilogy. It appeared in March 1847, nine months before Disraeli’s memorable speech on the admission of Jews to Parliament. Two years later, he wrote a preface to the fifth edition of Coningsby that would have been more appropriate in Tancred. Reflecting upon the proper nature of Toryism, he saw the Church as the instrument for the “renovation of the national spirit.” He was then moved to “ascend to the origin of the Christian Church”—Judaism.

The modern Jews had long labored under the odium and stigma of medieval malevolence.... The Jews were looked upon in the middle ages as an accursed race, the enemies of God and man, the especial foes of Christianity. No one in those days paused to reflect that Christianity was founded by the Jews; that its Divine Author, in his human capacity, was a descendant of King David; that his doctrines avowedly were the completion, not the change, of Judaism.... The time had arrived when some attempt should be made to do justice to the race which had founded Christianity.”²³

That “race” first appears in Coningsby in the person of Sidonia. The aristocrat Coningsby is inspired by a stranger to defy the wishes of his grandfather and undertake the difficult task of national renovation. The stranger, Sidonia, is also an aristocrat, but of a different order, a scion of that “unmixed race,” the “aristocracy of Nature.”²⁴ Descended from a “very ancient and noble family of Arragon,” the Nuevos Christianos (Marranos) who had secretly practiced their Jewish faith before being exiled, Sidonia made his fortune during the Napoleonic wars and emigrated to England where he could openly profess his faith.^aa It is there that he meets Coningsby, infecting him with the ideals that would transform English politics.

Sidonia reappears in Tancred, bearing the message “All is race; there is no other truth.”²⁵ Like Coningsby, Tancred (Lord Montacute), the only son of the Duke of Bellamont, finds himself at odds with the political establishment, including his own father.^ab Repelled by the materialistic, soulless culture in England, he refuses to enter Parliament, telling his bewildered father that he wants instead to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the “sepulchre of my Saviour,” to find out “what is Duty, and what is Faith? What ought I to Do and what ought I to Believe?”²⁷ A family friend suggests that he call upon Sidonia, the famous Jewish banker, who might show him the inadvisability of that plan. “I am born in an age and in a country,” Tancred informs Sidonia, “divided between infidelity on one side and an anarchy of creeds on the other; with none competent to guide me, yet feeling that I must believe, for I hold that duty cannot exist without faith.” Was it so unreasonable, he asks, to do what his ancestors would have done six centuries earlier? Sidonia listens to him sympathetically and replies, “It appears to me, Lord Montacute, that what you want is to penetrate the great Asian mystery.”²⁸

Before him is a living, a yet breathing and existing city, which Assyrian monarchs came down to besiege, which the chariots of Pharaohs encompassed, which Roman Emperors have personally assailed, for which Saladin and Coeur de Lion, the Desert and Christendom, Asia and Europe, struggled in rival chivalry; a city which Mahomet sighed to rule, and over which the Creator alike of Assyrian kings and Egyptian Pharaohs and Roman Caesars, the Framer alike of the Desert and of Christendom, poured forth the full effusion of his divinely human sorrow.³⁰

Fatigued by his walk and lulled by the sound of the fountain, Tancred falls asleep and awakens to find a young woman standing before him, richly garbed and bejeweled, her face “the perfection of oriental beauty.” Their conversation quickly establishes the fact that he is Christian and she Jewish, which prompts them to reflect upon the similarities and differences of their religions. The woman concludes that they have one thing in common: “We agree that half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew. . . . Which do you think should be the superior race, the worshipped or the worshipper?”³¹ Tancred is about to answer, but she has vanished. She is later identified as Eva Besso, the “Rose of Sharon,” the daughter of the Jewish banker to whom Sidonia had written a letter of introduction on behalf of Tancred.

Much of the novel is an adventure tale in an exotic setting, differing from that genre only because the characters are so intellectual and articulate. The adventures are brought about by Eva’s foster-brother, Fakredeen, an unscrupulous and clever Syrian who is plotting to bring all of Palestine under his control. In the course of the Syrian’s intrigues, Tancred is taken prisoner, wounded, and finally released, all the while engaging with his captor in animated discourses about their respective faiths. At one point, Tancred confesses his disappointment not with the physical constraints in which he finds himself but with his own spiritual condition. His presence in the Holy Land, he had thought, would bring him a sense of communion with the Holy Spirit. “But since I have been a dweller within its borders, and poured forth my passionate prayers at all its holy places, and received no sign, the desolating thought has sometimes come over my spirit, that there is a qualification of blood as well as of locality necessary for this communion, and that the favored votary must not only kneel in the Hold Land but be of the holy race.”³² Was he, he worries, not of that blood, an unwelcome visitor to this land? Was it only a morbid curiosity or aristocratic restlessness that had brought him here? He reassures himself. He has every right to be there, because it is the Creator, his Creator, that sanctified that land. He is not like the Indian Brahmin visiting Europe out of curiosity, a Europe that has no relation to him. The Holy Land has the most intimate relation to him, as a Briton.

Vast as the obligations of the whole human family are to the Hebrew race, there is no portion of the modern populations so much indebted to them as the British people.... We are indebted to the Hebrew people for our knowledge of the true God and for the redemption from our sins.... I am not a traveling dilettante, mourning over a ruin, or in ecstasies at a deciphered inscription. I come to the land whose laws I obey, whose religion I profess, and I seek, upon its sacred soil, those sanctions which for ages were abundantly accorded.³³

In the final scene of the book, in the garden of Bethany where they had first met, Eva expresses some of the doubts Tancred had earlier voiced. Had their heroic aspirations been dissipated, had they been dreaming about an unattainable end? “Your feelings,” she tells him, “cannot be what they were before all this happened; when you thought only of a divine cause, of stars, of angels, and of our peculiar and gifted land. No, no; now it is all mixed up with intrigue, and politics, and management, and baffled schemes, and cunning arts of men. You may be, you are, free from all this, but your faith is not the same. You no longer believe in Arabia.”^ad “Why, thou to me art Arabia,” he insists. “Talk not to me of leaving a divine cause; why, thou art my cause, and thou art most divine.” She persists. “There are those to whom I belong, and to whom you belong.... Fly, fly from me, son of Europe and of Christ!” Why should he fly, he protests? He is a Christian in the land of Christ. He will not leave until she agrees that “our united destinies shall advance the sovereign purpose of our lives.” If only she declares her love for him, he will sever the “world-worn bonds” that constrain them. That she cannot do. Her head falls upon his shoulder, he embraces her, but her cheek is cold, her hand lifeless. He sprinkles her with water from the fountain, she opens her eyes, sighs, and looks about her in bewilderment. At that moment noises are heard, people come trampling toward them, there are shouts calling for Lord Montacute, and the party appears. “The Duke and Duchess of Bellamont had arrived at Jerusalem.”³⁴

That memorable last sentence of the book comes as a shock to the reader. What are the Duke and Duchess doing in Jerusalem, and what does their arrival signify for Tancred and his “divine cause”? For that matter, what exactly is his cause? Does the arrival of the Duke and Duchess mean that that the established order is reasserting itself, fettering Tancred yet again with those “world-worn bonds”? Or does their presence in Jerusalem mean that they finally understand and sympathize with their son’s aspirations? Most critics find fault not only with the denouement but with much of the latter part of the book, for Tancred never makes it clear what that “divine cause,” the “new crusade,” is. Disraeli, one might suspect, had simply given up toward the end, unable to resolve the problem he himself had raised.

Disraeli himself had no such doubts, no second thoughts about the spirit or intent of the novel. Some of the more audacious sentiments in it, uttered by Sidonia and Eva, were voiced by Disraeli himself in Parliament later that year, when he insisted that Jews, professing a “true religion,” were the “authors” of Christianity.³⁵ He stopped short of saying then, what he did in Tancred, that “Christianity is Judaism for the multitude, but still it is Judaism.”³⁶ Thirty years later, as Prime Minister much involved with the “Eastern question,” he told his friend Benjamin Jowett, the Greek scholar and Master of Balliol, that Tancred was the favorite of his novels.³⁷

If there is a problem about the meaning of Tancred, the solution may be found in another book by Disraeli, not a novel, written four years later. In the midst of his biography of George Bentinck (his friend and ally in the protectionist faction of the Tory Party), Disraeli inserted a quite gratuitous chapter, which does not even mention Bentinck, entitled “The Jewish Question.” That chapter, an essay really, is nothing less than a paean to the Jewish “race” which, “sustained by a sublime religion,” survived the hatred and persecution of centuries and produced gifted Jews in every sphere of life: “No existing race is so much entitled to the esteem and gratitude of society as the Hebrews.” So far from being guilty of the crucifixion, they could proudly claim Jesus, “born from the chosen house of the chosen people,” as one of them. Indeed, Jesus, the chapter concludes, is “the eternal glory of the Jewish race.”³⁸ It is only in the next chapter that Disraeli explains that the views espoused in the earlier one were not, in fact, those of Bentinck, who had supported the bills admitting Jews to Parliament solely on the principle of religious liberty.^ae ³⁹

They were, however, very much the views of Disraeli—and of Tancred. This was the “great Asian mystery” revealed to Tancred in the “holy land” of that “holy race”—the eternal, transcendent quality of Judaism even in the age of Christianity. And this was the “new crusade” to which Tancred had dedicated himself, a crusade not by Christians against Muslims but by a Christian and a Jew united in a “sovereign purpose.” Eva, the Jewess, may have faltered in the end, but Tancred, the Christian, did not. Nor did Disraeli, who embodied in himself the Jew and the Christian and who was steadfast to the end—a politician/novelist who was also the quintessential philosemite.

The fellowship of race, to which D’Israeli [sic] so exultingly refers the munificence of Sidonia, is so evidently an inferior impulse which must ultimately be superseded that I wonder even he, Jew as he is, dares to boast of it. My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews, and is almost ready to echo Voltaire’s vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus, but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein He transcended or resisted Judaism. The very exaltation of their idea of a national deity into a spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other oriental tribes. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.⁴¹

That was in 1848. In 1876, Eliot was to produce a novel that was almost as “exultingly” in favor of that “fellowship of race” as Sidonia himself.^ag Her novel differs from Disraeli’s in one crucial respect. Tancred’s crusade is cast in a universalist mode, a united Christianity and Judaism sharing a common purpose. Eliot and her hero Daniel Deronda have no such illusions. It is a national, not universal, sovereignty they seek for the Jews in Palestine, a “separate” nation that would incorporate universal ideals, to be sure, but that would be embodied in a distinctively Jewish state.

Like Deronda, Eliot had to undergo an initiation into Judaism. Born into a low-church Anglican family, inspired in her youth by an Evangelical teacher, and then converted to an agnosticism bordering on atheism by English Positivists and German Young Hegelians, she came to an appreciation of Judaism relatively late in life. She had already produced translations of such notable iconoclasts as David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Baruch Spinoza, when she met, in 1866, a young Jewish emigré, Emanuel Deutsch, who inspired her to rethink all of her old views. Encouraged to learn Hebrew, she read some of the ancient and medieval classics of Judaism, as well as modern commentaries. That extraordinary process of self-education and reevaluation was reflected, ten years later, in Daniel Deronda.^ah

As Eliot was initiated into Judaism by Deutsch, so her hero is by Mordecai, a clerk in a Jewish bookstore where Daniel happens to be browsing. Asked whether he is Jewish, Daniel tells him he is not. Yet Mordecai senses him to be one “of our race.” Sickly and contemplating his death, Mordecai comes to see in Daniel a disciple who will carry on his vision of Judaism and his aspirations for the Jewish people. He himself, he explains, came to that vision not in England, where he was born, but while studying abroad where he was exposed to both Jewish and Christian culture.

Then ideas, beloved ideas, came to me because I was a Jew. They were a trust to fulfil, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration, because I was a Jew, and felt the heart of my race beating within me. They were my life; I was not fully born till then.... They [the medieval sages] had absorbed the philosophy of the Gentile into the faith of the Jew, and they still yearned toward a centre for our race. One of their souls was born again within me, and awaked amid the memories of their world. It travelled into Spain and Provence; it debated with Aben-Ezra; it took ship with Jehuda ha-Levi; it heard the roar of the Crusaders and the shrieks of tortured Israel.⁴⁴

It is that soul Mordecai wants to bequeath to Daniel. Daniel is moved by his tale but reminds him again that he is not Jewish. He had never known his parents and lives with his guardian, Sir Hugo, whom he believes to be his father. Undeterred by this report, Mordecai takes Daniel under his wing, introducing him to a discussion club of his friends, Jews and non-Jews, who are debating the momentous subject of “the law of progress.” Against a self-described “rational Jew” who sees the assimilation of Jews as the natural course of progress, Mordecai propounds the opposite view, that the future of Judaism lies in the “separateness” and “unity of Israel,” in Judaism as a “nationality” with “a land and a polity.”

Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West.... I say that the effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality.... There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality of protection.... Then our race shall have an organic center, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom.⁴⁵

The meeting with Mordecai, although central to its theme, comes relatively late in the novel. Before that Daniel had a more dramatic encounter under very different circumstances. He was rowing in the Thames when he observed a young woman who is about to throw herself into the river. He rescues her and hears her sad tale. Mirah is a Jewess born in England, brought up by her father, a wandering actor in Europe. She has come to England to find her mother and brother, about whom she knows nothing except that their name is Cohen, and she is in despair because her search has been in vain. Daniel befriends her and installs her in the home of a friend. As he learns more about her, he discovers that Mordecai is her long-lost brother.

The mystery of that relationship solved, so is the mystery of his own parentage, when his guardian, Sir Hugo, tells him that his mother, who has so far insisted upon anonymity, is dying and wants to meet her son. The meeting of mother and son in Genoa is as dramatic as the discipleship scene with Mordecai. Daniel now discovers that Mordecai is right; he is Jewish. But while Mordecai wants to instill in Daniel the soul of the Jewish sages, his mother has sought exactly the opposite, to free him from the burden, as she sees it, of that legacy. She herself, she tells him, wanted to be liberated from the double bondage of being a woman and a Jew. After her husband’s death, to free herself in order to pursue her career as a singer and actress, and also to free her child from the onerous life of a Jew, she gave up her two-year-old son to her old friend and admirer, Sir Hugo, who promised to raise him as “an English gentleman.”

I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuza over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind the tephil-lin on them, and women not,—to adore the wisdom of such laws, however silly they might seem to me. . . . I was to care for ever about what Israel had been; and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it.... You are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have not been brought up as a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you because I saved you from it.⁴⁶

A second meeting finds his mother in a more tender but still unrepentant mood. Would Deronda become the kind of Jew her father was, she wants to know? No, he assures her, his education and “Christian sympathies” will prevent that, but he will identify himself with his people and do what he can for them. She sees the irony of this turn of events. In spite of herself, she has been the instrument of her father’s will; she has given him a grandson with “a true Jewish heart.” “Every Jew,” she quotes her father, “should rear his family as if he hoped that a Deliverer might spring from it.” Hearing the echo of Mordecai in that sentiment, Daniel asks whether these were his exact words. Yes, he had actually written them. As for her, she hopes her son can forgive her, and if he wants to say kaddish for her, he should do so: “You will come between me and the dead.” Almost as an afterthought, she asks whether Deronda is in love with a Jewess and whether that is why he is glad to be a Jew (not for that reason alone, he tells her), whether she is beautiful (yes), and whether she is ambitious to have “a path of her own” (no, that is not her nature).⁴⁷ Disappointed with the last answer, she nevertheless gives Deronda a jeweled miniature of her picture to be given to this woman who is so unlike herself.

Daniel is indeed in love with Mirah—and not with another woman who plays a large part in the book and whom his mother (as well as many of his readers and critics) would have preferred as his mate. Gwendolen, like his mother, aspires to be a liberated woman and is entirely focused on her own interests and desires. Her life takes a tragic turn when her husband, whom she married to escape from a life of poverty, turns out to be malevolent and despotic. Released from his tyranny when he is accidentally drowned, she is painfully conscious that she married him knowing that he had a long-time mistress and two illegitimate children, and, worse, that she could have saved him from drowning and made no effort to do so.

I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there.... The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty: I am resolved to begin it, however feebly. I am resolved to devote my life to it. At the least, I may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my own.⁴⁸

Gwendolen versus Mirah, Rebecca versus Rowena—critics would like to rewrite the novels and re-pair the couples. Just as Rebecca seems a more fitting and interesting mate for Ivanhoe, so Gwendolen is for Daniel. Indeed, both novels have been rewritten for just that purpose. In Rebecca and Rowena, Thackeray has Ivanhoe marrying Rebecca; in Gwendolen Harleth, F. R. Leavis, the literary critic, has Daniel marrying Gwendolen. These alternative novels are travesties, because neither takes the Jewish theme seriously. Rebecca will not marry out of her faith or be converted to Christianity; nor will Ivanhoe, the noted Saxon and champion of King Richard, be converted to Judaism. So too, Daniel, having assumed the mantle of Mordecai, can hardly leave the “true Jewess” Mirah in favor of Gwendolen, who is not Jewish, has no interest in Judaism, and can hardly help him in his mission to Palestine.

Leavis’s rewriting of the novel went beyond the marital rearrangement. He also eliminated most of the Jewish theme—the “bad half” of the novel, as he put it—leaving only the Gwendolen story.^ai Other critics, Henry James, most notably, shared his distaste for that part of the novel, not because they were antisemitic (neither James nor Leavis was), but because they could not take seriously Daniel’s (or Eliot’s) view of Judaism and the Jewish people. Eliot had anticipated that the “Jewish element” in the novel would “satisfy nobody.”⁵⁰ What she could not have anticipated was the different form that criticism would take today by “Orientalists” like Edward Said, who object not only to the Zionist agenda proposed by Daniel, but to the “ethnocentric,” “colonialist,” and “imperialist hegemony” they see in it.⁵¹

Yet the book had admirers in Eliot’s day and sold almost as well as her previous novel, Middlemarch. It was soon translated into German, French, and Russian, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish. And it still occupies a place in the “Great Tradition” of the novel—even in Leavis’s classic account of that tradition, where George Eliot has the place of honor and Daniel Deronda is treated respectfully, although with serious reservations about the “bad half.”⁵² In retrospect, there is much to marvel at in the novel, in the “bad half” as well as the good. It is remarkable that Eliot, a Christian woman, should have written so movingly about Jews and Judaism, and so presciently about Palestine, not merely as a “homeland” but also as a “Jewish polity.” (And so presciently about feminism as well, in the person of Daniel’s mother.) Even more remarkable was her rationale for what was to be known as Zionism. Unlike Evangelicals who looked forward to the “restoration” of the Jews in the holy land as the precondition for the Second Coming of Christ, or later Zionists who sought in Palestine a refuge from antisemitism and persecution, Eliot rested her case on Judaism itself—the “soul” that had traveled throughout the ages and throughout the world and would finally come to rest in the land of its forefathers.

It is this vision of Judaism, as a people and a nation, that later appealed to many Jews, and not only Zionists, who said that Daniel Deronda had inspired them to rethink and reexperi-ence their own lives and views. The English writer Israel Zangwill reported meeting a colonel commanding a Welsh regiment who said, “I am Daniel Deronda”; born a Christian of baptized Jewish parents, he explained, the book had brought him back to his faith and his people.⁵³ Perhaps more surprising is the testimonial of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the leader of the religious Zionist sect, who praised Eliot as one of the few Christians who understood the religious roots of Zionism.⁵⁴

Another odd tribute comes from Lionel Trilling, whose essay “The Changing Myth of the Jew” concludes with Daniel Deronda, the most satisfactory of the “counter-myths,” not only for Jews but for Gentiles as well who respond to “a genuine, inner, intimate quality” in the Jewish characters, a sense of “reality” and “credibility.” “It does not too much strain the imagination, Trilling observes, to say ‘Jews are like that’”; at least some Jews are like that, and to some degree. The final sentences of the essay remind the reader that in this novel, as in all novels, one must disentangle “the mythical from the actual”—a difficult task, “for in the mythical there is usually, of course, a little of what is true.”⁵⁵

Eliot herself took on that task of disentangling the mythical and the actual, finding in the mythical (in her novel) more than a little of the truth. Just as Disraeli reaffirmed the moral of Tancred in his speech in Parliament, so Eliot did the same for Daniel Deronda in an essay written two years later. Daniel Deronda was her last novel; Impressions of Theophrastus Such her last book; and “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” the last and longest essay in that book.^aj She started writing it in June 1878, completed it in November, and had the satisfaction of reading it to her husband (as she thought of him), George Lewes, on his death-bed. It was published in May the following year, a few months after his death.

The essay puts the case for Jewish “separateness,” or nationality, in spiritual as well as political terms: “The eminence, the nobleness of a people depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of striving for what we call spiritual ends—ends which consist not in immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul.” It is not only the collective soul that is ennobled; it is also the soul of each citizen who is related to something larger than himself, “something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice.” For Jews that sense of “separateness” is unique in its intensity because it is rooted in both revelation and history, and the dispersion of the people makes that history even more “exceptional.” Tortured and exiled, a people of weaker nature might have given way to pressure and merged with the population around them. Instead, tenaciously holding on to their inheritance of blood and faith, they cherish all the more the differences that mark them off from their oppressors: “The separateness which was made their badge of ignominy would be their inward pride, their source of fortifying defiance.” That separateness, to be sure, could also give rise to “answering vices” resulting from the abuses to which they are subject. But even the vices might be virtues, the condition of their survival. The virtues for which Jews are notable—the care for orphans and widows, women and children, family and community—withstood centuries of persecution and oppression because they are deeply ingrained in the Jewish religion and race.⁵⁷

Every Jew should be conscious that he is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their Fathers.⁵⁸

Literary philosemitism had come a long way in the course of the century. And so had literary antisemitism—in reverse. By 1876, when Daniel Deronda was published, blatantly antisemitic novels were no longer respectable. Dickens’s Fagin had appeared in 1838. Dickens, it was said at the time, was a “low writer”; he wrote about low subjects for a low audience.⁵⁹ ^ak Fagin was perhaps the lowest of his characters, a criminal and corrupter of children as well as an exploiter of the poor. A quarter of a century later, Eliza Davis, a Jewish woman (the wife of the solicitor who had bought his home), accused Dickens of encouraging, in the figure of Fagin, “a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew” and appealed to him to “atone for a great wrong on a whole though scattered nation.” Dickens protested that that was not at all his intention. In the period portrayed in the novel, it was unfortunately true that “that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew”; moreover, the other wicked characters in the novel were Christian.⁶¹ In the next edition of Oliver Twist, Dickens softened, ever so slightly, the image of Fagin by referring to him by name instead of as “the Jew,” thus making “the Jew” less of an epithet and making Fagin less conspicuously, or at least specifically, Jewish. He performed a more serious act of atonement in 1864 in Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, which features Riah, an “old Jewish man,” a “gentle Jew,” an altogether admirable character, in contrast to Fledgeby, his “Christian master,” “the meanest cur existing.”⁶² Mrs. Davis thanked him for “a great compliment paid to myself and to my people,” and was particularly taken with the “very picturesque” character of Riah. ⁶³ ^al

Dickens’s Jews, for good or bad, were of the lower classes. Anthony Trollope’s were unmistakeably upper-class. A staunch Liberal, Trollope had a special animus against Jews because of his intense dislike for Disraeli, who was not only a Jew (by birth at least) but a Tory, and, worse yet, a novelist who received larger advances for his novels than Trollope did for his. A money-lender in Barchester Towers (1857) was called Sidonia after Disraeli’s character, and an especially unprincipled Tory politician in Phineas Finn (1869) was clearly patterned on Disraeli himself. Yet that later novel also featured Madame Goesler, the daughter of a German Jewish attorney and widow of a Jewish banker, who is one of the most intelligent and high-minded of Trollope’s characters. One critic described her as “the most perfect gentleman” in his novels—than which, for Trollope, there could be no higher praise (although he would surely have demurred at calling a lady a “gentleman”).⁶⁵

Like Dickens, Trollope was more repentant in his later years. The Way We Live Now, in 1875, the most bitter of his novels, exposed the mercenary values of the new commercial society, which afflicted most of the characters and all aspects of life including love and marriage. Among its many villains, the worst was the dishonest speculator Augustus Melmotte, who was ambiguously Jewish, assumed to be so because his wife was vaguely East European. Melmotte’s disreputable associate, Cohenlupe, was unmistakeably Jewish. On the other hand, Ezekiel Brehgert, who “went to a synagogue on a Saturday” and was “absolutely a Jew,” was an honest banker, decent, intelligent, and thoroughly honorable. He proposed marriage to a “Christian lady” who accepted him for the most materialistic reasons, and then withdrew his proposal because he could not provide the magnificent house she had made a condition of marriage. “I behaved like a gentleman,” he explained—a view evidently shared by the author.⁶⁶

By the third quarter of the century, the familiar kind of literary antisemitism was much abated. The stereotypes and prejudices remained, in society and in the culture, but they were less virulent and less intrusive. As the political aspect of the Jewish question was amicably resolved, so, too, the cultural and social aspects were, not resolved, to be sure, but much alleviated. When Daniel Deronda was published, the year after The Way We Live Now, the reader would not be surprised to encounter a Jewish hero who was also, as his mother said, an “English gentleman.” What was surprising, and what made the book so controversial, was not so much the philosemitism that accompanied this social acceptance as the philo-Zionism that seemed to flow from the philosemitism. It was not only individual Jews who were judged and accepted as individuals, in society as in the polity, but Jews as a “separate” people deemed worthy of their own homeland in the place of their historic origin—all this before either “philosemitism” or “Zionism” entered the vocabulary.

A footnote to this Victorian saga brings it into the following century with a notable example of literary antisemitism transmuted into philosemitism. The most quoted passage in John Buchan’s most popular novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps (written early in World War I), describes Jewish anarchists conspiring with Jewish capitalists to bring Russia and Germany to a war that would involve Britain and devastate all of Europe.

“For three hundred years they [the Jews] have been persecuted, and this is the return match for pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. . . . But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now . . .”⁶⁷

This portrait of the villain appears on the fifth page of the novel and haunts much of the rest of it. The hero and narrator, Richard Hannay, looking out for that rattlesnaked-eye Jew and his accomplices, tries to outwit them in a series of breathtaking adventures. But the passage is deceptive, for it is not Richard Hannay, who describes that Jew so vividly. It is a Mr. Scud-der, an American (from Kentucky), who warns Hannay of that nefarious character and his conspiracy. And it is Hannay who soon discovers that the whole story is “a pack of lies.”⁶⁸ There is a conspiracy, to be sure, but it is led by German spies, not by Jewish anarchists or capitalists. For the rest of the book, Germans are the villains while Jews disappear from the scene. Even the word is absent, except for the explanation that Scud-der “had a lot of odd biases.... Jews, for example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.”⁶⁹

This is not to acquit Buchan of the charge of antisemitism. There are Jewish capitalists and financiers, communists and anarchists, in his novels, along with the familiar antisemitic and pejorative gibes. But there are also non-Jewish capitalists and financiers who are villainous, and Jewish capitalists and financiers who are honorable, even heroic. Hannay himself (who features in other of Buchan’s novels) is something of a capitalist—a South African mining engineer who boasts of having “got my pile—not one of the big ones, but good enough for me.”⁷⁰ ^am Even the Jewish villains are not the nastiest of villains; in Mr. Standfast (1919), he is the most decent of the lot. The Three Hostages (1924), the last of the Hannay quintet, introduces Julius Victor, an American banker who had been financially helpful to Britain during the war, and who is “one of the richest men in the world” (a few pages later he is “the richest man in the world”). He is also, incidentally, a Jew. Hannay recalls being told by a friend “who didn’t like his race,” that he was “the whitest Jew since the apostle Paul.”⁷² In the novel he is a very white Jew, not the perpetrator but the victim of another conspiracy precisely because his mission is to secure peace in the world. Moreover, his beautiful daughter, a Jewess, is the fiancée of the Marquis de la Tour du Pin, one of Hannay’s oldest and noblest friends, and, of course, a Christian.

He “didn’t like his race”—this was the familiar, almost reflexive antisemitism of the time, in fiction as in reality. So long as the world itself was normal, this kind of antisemitism was disagreeable but not perilous. It was when the conspiracies of the adventure tales became the realities of German politics that Buchan, acutely sensitive to the precarious nature of civilization, realized that what was permissible under civilized conditions was not permissible with civilization in extremis. This atonement (if it can be called that) manifested itself in his personal life as well as his novels. As early as 1930, before most Englishmen had become conscious of the nature of Nazism, Buchan, as a Member of Parliament (and an acquaintance of Chaim Weizmann), took up the cause of Zionism. In an article, “Ourselves and the Jews,” he defended the Balfour Declaration as “a categorical promise” binding upon the government. Two years later he was elected chairman of the Parliamentary Pro-Palestine (that is, pro-Zionist) Committee, and two years after that he spoke at a mass demonstration organized by the Jewish National Fund: “When I think of Zionism I think of it in the first place as a great act of justice. It is reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong which have stained the record of nearly every Gentile people.”⁷³

It may seem ironic that the man associated with the fictional Jewish-capitalist-communist conspiracy should have had his name inscribed, in solemn ceremony, in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund. Buchan himself would have found nothing ironic about this. His speech acknowledging this honor took as its theme the racial similarities of Scotsmen (like himself) and Jews, with particular reference to their high regard for learning. A participant in the ceremony, sharing the platform with Buchan, recalled his behavior during the address following his, when Buchan leaned forward and watched, with unconcealed delight and fascination, the ample gestures and bodily movements of a Yiddish-speaking rabbi.⁷⁴ One wonders what Buchan the novelist, the sometime antisemite, would have done with that scene.^an

Buchan had come a long way from that memorable rattlesnaked-eye Jew in The Thirty-Nine Steps—as had the literary canon itself, the myths and counter-myths of fiction ranging from unabashed antisemitism to enthusiastic philosemitism. So too, philosemitism, in reality as well as in fiction, was to come a long way from the philo-Zionist sentiments of religious thinkers and preachers to the Zionist proclamations of politicians and statesmen.