Nineteenth-century literary culture has, in recent years, proved a rich resource for antisemitism studies. From the satanic
imagery with which Dickens surrounds his Jewish archcriminal Fagin to Trollope’s suspicion of assimilated arrivistes to the
racial terror invoked by Bram Stoker’s Dracula at the fin de siècle, research has uncovered the persistent threads of hostility
to Jews that found expression in novels.
1 And thanks to the work of Sander Gilman, we also know how widely discourses of the diseased and degenerate Jewish body were
disseminated through medical and sociological as well as literary texts in the period.
2 What is equally striking about this scholarship, however, is its almost universal assumption that “the Jew” in the text is
male. When Todd Endelman writes, for example, that the
intellectual arsenal of European antisemitism can be reduced to “a handful of accusations about Jewish character and behavior:
Jews are malevolent, aggressive, sinister, self-seeking, avaricious, destructive, socially clannish, spiritually retrograde,
physically disagreeable, and sexually overcharged,”
3 the Jew in such descriptions is implicitly masculine. Perceptions of Jews, indeed, are frequently seen as projections of
anxieties about masculinity. As Gilman writes in
The Jew’s Body, his focus is on “an image crucial to the very understanding of the Western image of the Jew at least since the advent of
Christianity”: “the male Jew, the body with the circumcised penis.”
4 Where the Jewish woman
has been the object of study, masculinity has still been the focus. Recent studies of Sarah Bernhardt, for example, have been
interested in the ways that her business acumen and her Jewishness were linked to cast her as a masculinised figure.
5 In a different context, Riv-Ellen Prell’s work on the image of the Jewish mother in modern American popular and literary
culture argues that male anxieties about affluence and consumption in postwar America were projected onto the demonized figure
of the domineering, emasculating Jewish mother.
6 In reiterating the link between antisemitism and various historical crises of masculinity in this way, Jewish cultural studies
has tended not only to occlude relationships between femininity and Jewishness but also to elide the various and specific
cultural contexts in which representations of Jews were produced.
Looking more closely at the case of England in the period, however, a different picture emerges. While it is certainly the
case that a number of literary texts include or even center on figures of male Jews who are racially repellent, socially intrusive,
or politically subversive, these figures
are repeatedly shadowed by images of Jewish women that are in every way the opposite. Sander Gilman’s analysis of the European
culture of antisemitism does not account for this more complex configuration. Closer, perhaps, are studies of the dangerously
alluring
belle juive, the stereotype of exotic sensuality and tragic self-sacrifice that haunted nineteenth-century French and German literature.
This figure has invariably been read through the lens of Saidian Orientalism as an allegory that naturalizes the political
subjugation or social exclusion of Jews.
7 But in English literary culture the Jewess was idealized rather than exoticized, a model for rather than a foil to bourgeois
femininity. Yet scholars have been so eager to uncover instances of antisemitism in English culture that they have all but
ignored this crucial aspect of semitic representation. What I want to explore here is the flourishing in nineteenth-century
middle-class culture of the figure of the virtuous Jewess and in particular to account for her presence in two of the most
critically acclaimed and influential novels of the mid-Victorian period.
8
The origins of the representation of the Jewish woman in English culture have recently been explored in Michelle Ephraim’s
work on early modern drama, which links the Jewess to the assertion of Protestant identity in Elizabethan England. The Jewess
on the Elizabethan stage, argues Ephraim, was a figure for the Hebrew Bible, newly being claimed as the authentic foundation
of Protestant meaning although also, at the same time, perceived as an ambiguous, unstable text.
9 The ambivalent philosemitism that is central to Protestantism was also the source for the emergence in the literary culture
of early Victorian evangelicalism of the image of the good Jewess. In evangelical theology, the Jews were accorded a uniquely
privileged status, and evangelical approaches to the Jews were marked with a peculiar intensity and ambivalence.
10 Reviving the ideology of
seventeenth-century millennialism, English evangelicals stressed not the rupture between Christianity and Judaism, but their
identification with God’s Chosen People and especially its Bible. Writers often invoked the familial relationship between
Christians and Jews, who, it was said, were “kindred, ‘as concerning the flesh’ of the Saviour himself” or “God’s peculiar
family.”
11 This affection, however, coincided with a severe critique of Judaism as archaic, law-bound, and materialist. Rapprochement
with Jews was sought, then, with a view to their conversion, which evangelicals pursued with indefatigable vigor. Increasingly
preoccupied with eschatological studies, evangelicals also saw the conversion of the Jews as a crucial step in hastening the
Second Coming of Christ; England, with its history of tolerance rather than persecution, had a special role to play in this
project. An often explicit anti-Catholic subtext to evangelical discussion of Jews sought to ascribe the advent of an expansive
Christianity to the Protestant Reformation, and a uniquely tolerant atmosphere to modern England.
Evangelical ambivalence with regard to the Jews had a rhetorical analog in their ideology of gender. While men were regarded
as inherently sinful and sullied by their contact with the world of work, the figure of the domestic woman was highly venerated.
The evangelical emphasis on the humanity of Christ, his sacrifice in the atonement, his meekness and humility brought women
into closer identification with his mission. Women, who must needs submit to duty, could thereby emulate Christ’s sacrifice
and wield his redemptive power.
12 Evangelicalism prescribed an exalted role for women through their influence on the public sphere; the emotionalism attributed
to women brought them closer to God and to a more powerful embodiment of the evangelical appeal, and their inherent moral
superiority conferred on them a key position in the crusade for national regeneration.
13 The evangelical notion of the “religion of the heart” – that is, easily accessible to the theologically unsophisticated –
was also implicitly a feminized religion.
In the 1830s and 1840s writing on the Jews, especially by evangelical women, proliferated, aimed at a female readership and
often focused on the figure of the Jewess. In countless narrative fantasies about the Jews’ desire for conversion, the Jewess
appeared as inherently spiritual and ardent, and also particularly oppressed by the archaic Jewish legal code – calling out
for aid to her Christian sisters. In these texts, therefore, the
theological problem posed by the Jews’ simultaneous proximity to and distinctiveness from Christianity is metonymically resolved
by the figure of the Jewess who longs for conversion. In this example from the conversion novel
The Orphans of Lissau (1830), the Jews’ double potential for obduracy and salvation is explicitly projected onto gender difference. The author
clearly differentiates the physical and psychological characteristics of two Jewish children:
Seldom had two lovelier infants been seen, though in person and disposition entirely dissimilar. The strongly marked, animated
features, and sparkling black eyes of Raphael, were indicative of that spirit and energy which afterwards characterised him,
and had already begun to develope [
sic] itself. Gertrude was unusually fair and delicate, with pale auburn hair, and soft blue eyes; contrasting strongly with the
dark and vivacious character usual to Jewish female beauty. In manner, she was gentle, retiring, and thoughtful, even to melancholy;
and her light and noiseless step, as she glided about the house, seemed to make the wild, riotous, bounding of Raphael more
conspicuous.
14
Here, the Jewish male is energetic and disruptive while the female is submissive and introspective. She blends in with her
environment rather than standing out from it. The blue eyes of the Jewess are contrasted with the impenetrable black eyes
of the Jewish boy; Gertrude’s body and temperament (and Teutonic rather than Hebrew name) anticipate her destiny as a Christian
proselyte. This gendered bifurcation of the figure of the Jew characteristically structures conversion literature. While the
texts point repeatedly to the Jews as a troublesome and resistant presence, at the same time they also invariably draw on
the virtues ascribed to women to insist on the redeemable nature of the Jews.
Conversion narratives also mapped the distinction between false and true piety onto gender. In a letter from a converted male
Jew published in the evangelical periodical the
Christian Lady’s Friend and Family Repository in 1832 the narrator describes how his religious doubt was inaugurated by contemplating the irrational pedantry of Jewish
law. When he began to read the New Testament, he “compared it with Moses and the prophets, and found that they corresponded
in every respect”; eventually he came to the logical decision “that the Christian religion must be the best, because it is
generally professed by all civilized nations.” The rest of the letter labors to disprove this motive for conversion: “I found
afterwards that it is not by philosophy and reasoning that a man is converted, or that water baptizes him; it is the grace
of God which converts a sinner, and the Holy Ghost which baptizes him.” The narrator describes how, in a moment of
destitution and despair, “involuntarily as it seemed, I called on the name of the Redeemer, to strengthen me by his example
of humility and patience, which he gave us while he walked in this world.” It was only through a spontaneous, nonrational,
and submissive need that the narrator realized his conversion had been confirmed.
15The unhealthy masculine reasoning that had impeded the ascent of this Jew’s soul is absent in evangelical accounts of the
proselytizing of Jewish women. Such accounts emphasize the spiritual and affective components of religion that persuade unencumbered
by argumentative proofs. A typical narrative tells of a Jewish banker’s daughter, who converts to Christianity after her mother
dies, when the words of the New Testament are the only “consolation” for her.
16 A letter to the
Jewish Herald in 1849 contained the narrative of “Mrs D.,” a woman who had been brought up in the Jewish religion. Later in life she “became
the subject of many great and sore troubles, and being ignorant of the only way to access to God, I was bowed down with continued
sorrow.” Her emotional yearning was only relieved on her meeting with “two young ladies” who “conversed with me on the all-important
concerns of my never-dying soul.”
17 Here, as in many other narratives, religion is shared between women and fulfills needs ascribed to them as women.
The trials of conversion, moreover, supplied an inherently novelistic narrative. Jewish conversion autobiographies supposedly
authored by Jewish women were a particularly popular subgenre. The texts follow a strict formula, relating the spiritual rebellion
of a Jewish daughter against her patriarchal family, her resistance to their attempts to force her into marriage, the persecutions
she suffers as she courageously clings to her new-found faith, and ultimately her martrydom. The story of “Leila Ada,” for
example, published posthumously in the 1850s in a series of books by her “editor,” the Reverend Osborn W. Trenery Heighway,
describe the heroine’s disillusion with her religious education, which had been based on the Talmud, “an impure, stupid fabrication,
composed by fallen and sinful man”; her increasingly “strong opinion that the advent of the Messiah is probably near”; and
her instinctively “simple, devout reading, and study of Thy Holy Word, the New Testament.”
18 In this narrative we see the typical evangelical emphasis on the authority of the individual in scripture reading and the
high value placed on female suffering as a religious virtue. In conversion texts, the Jewish woman is represented as not only
particularly susceptible
to conversion, but also particularly responsive to it. In Madame Brendlah’s
Tales of a Jewess (1838) the heroine reflects on her love for the Christian hero that “a time will come when William shall see that a despised
Jewess can love with all the fervour of a Christian! Ah, far more sincere and devoted is the love of a Jewess!”
19 The exceptional ardor – and exceptional suffering – of the Jewess make her, in these texts, the more enthusiastic, and more
authentic, Christian.
Conversion texts, like the voluntary societies from which they emanated, never achieved the goals of evangelization for which
they ostensibly aimed. What they undoubtedly did effect, however, through their extraordinarily wide dissemination, was a
deep and lasting influence on literary constructions of Jews, an influence that was to endure throughout the century in the
writing of non-Jews and Jews alike. Moreover, by the mid-Victorian period the figure of the beautiful, virtuous, and self-sacrificing
Jewess, and all that she symbolized, had entered the literary mainstream.
Although the evangelicals endowed them with enormous theological and rhetorical importance, Jews remained a tiny and materially
insignificant fraction of the British population in the early Victorian years. By the 1860s and 1870s, by contrast, newly
emancipated, they had become highly visible in public life. The dominant new figure in semitic discourse of the mid-Victorian
period was the Jewish man of commerce. In the rapidly expanding London finance market of the 1860s and 1870s, the startling
success of Jewish banking and stockbroking firms appeared to T. H. S. Escott, editor of the Fortnightly Review, as a barometer of social change: “English society once ruled by an aristocracy is now dominated by a plutocracy,” he wrote.
“And this plutocracy is to a large extent Hebraic in its composition. There is no phenomenon more noticeable in society than
the ascendancy of the Jews.”
Efforts to explain this ascendancy invoked the “essentially speculative” nature of the Jew and the “corporate cohesion that
distinguishes his race”; both could be seen as antipathetic to the moral conduct of business.
20 This view was underlined by the government investigation into foreign loan schemes in the early 1870s, which reserved particular
criticism for Bishoffsheim and Goldschmidt, the Jewish firm behind the notorious failed Honduras Inter-Oceanic Railway loan.
Jewish commerce provides
a narrative for several key mid-Victorian novels, including Anthony Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now (1875), which centers on a fraudulent probably-Jewish railway loan-monger; it also lurks in the background of George Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda (1876), the plot of which is precipitated by a bank collapse, more specifically a (presumably Jewish) “Mr Lassman’s wicked
recklessness, which they say was the cause of the failure.”
21 For the cultural critic Matthew Arnold, meanwhile, Judaism functioned in more metaphorical terms, albeit invested with similar
meanings. “Hebraism,” according to his
Culture and Anarchy (1868), the Puritan, individualistic, and pharisaical strain in British culture, had led, in the nineteenth century, to “the
growth of commercial immorality in our serious middle class.”
22 Rooted in Christian theology, the critique of Judaism as materialist and of the Jews as materialistic was reinvented for
the age of rampant capitalism.
Yet, insisted Arnold, there was hope. “The remedy is the same as that which St. Paul employed” with the Jews who had lost
sight of the spirit of the law: “an importation of what we have called Hellenism into his Hebraism, a making his consciousness
flow freely round his petrified rule of life and renew it.”
23 Culture, or “Hellenism,” could be a redemptive or transformative force. The
Economist employed similar terms in a leader published in June 1875, which suggested that “by far the best check on this intense vitality
and recklessness of the commercial intelligence would result from such wider culture as would give these men other keen intellectual
interests as well as those which are identified with their occupations.”
24 The same dualism is also strikingly visible in novels of the period, in which “these men” – figures of enterprising self-interest,
frequently Jews – are invariably shadowed by a Jewess. Texts cast the Hellenistic Jewess against the Jew as a force of redemption,
highlighting her persecution by her family, her affinity for culture rather than wealth, and her critique of Jewish social
and financial transgressions. This familiar story of the Jewess forms a crucial narrative strand both in Trollope’s tragedy
of speculation and (twice) in Eliot’s meditation on the rival claims of art and nation. These texts revitalize the philosemitic
element in narratives about Jews and retell in secular terms the conversion stories of the 1830s.
Suffused with nostalgia for the stability of feudal England,
The Way We Live Now is a sustained critique of the “newer and worse sort of world” in which the power and property of the traditional aristocracy
and gentry are
increasingly reliant on the commercial class.
25 Trollope’s irony lays bare the system that cynically benefits both: upper-class profligates have come to understand the marrying
of an heiress as “an institution, like primogeniture … almost as serviceable for maintaining the proper order of things. Rank
squanders money; trade makes it; – and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour” (2:59). As the ultimate source
of stability – inherited land – is increasingly undermined, “an atmosphere … burdened with falsehood” prevails (1:132–3).
Instead of inhabiting their appointed roles as the sons of the ruling class, Trollope’s young aristocratic males talk their
way into unlimited credit and then spend it philandering and gambling. The grotesque avatar of this way of living is Augustus
Melmotte, the “Great Financier,” a cosmopolitan parvenu whose rise and fall furnish the novel’s plot. Melmotte is a supreme
performer, whose ostentatious spending of wealth he does not possess is the sure route to further credit. Such speculation
is frequently linked in Victorian fiction not only with undesirable social mobility but also with the threat of economic disorder
that haunted the 1870s.
26 These concerns were particularly acute at the time of the novel’s composition during the financial crisis of 1873, two years
after the death of the “Railway Napoleon” and Conservative MP George Hudson and in the midst of the House of Commons Select
Committee investigation into fraudulent loan schemes.
Symptomatic of the social disorder of
The Way We Live Now is the perversion of feudal patriarchy in London society. The wife and daughters of the debt-ridden Mr. Longestaffe regard
him as “their natural adversary,” failing in his duty of protection (1:193). The novel is full of sisters and daughters rendered
vulnerable by the reckless spending of their menfolk. This theme is emphasized with even greater force in the story of Marie,
Melmotte’s daughter. Marie is first seen dancing at her mother’s ball with the reluctant Lord Buntingford, a potent symbol
of the “bargain” between the impoverished aristocracy and Melmotte that guarantees their debts and his social entrée. Referred
to throughout the novel by both her father and her suitors as “the girl” rather than by her name, Marie is relentlessly “trafficked
for” by the avaricious young lords (1:107). Marrying Marie with an uncertain knowledge of her fortune becomes the key gamble
of the novel; Sir Felix Carbury is considered “the favourite for the race,” but he regards his suit as even more risky than
a very dangerous game of cards, and when Melmotte demands his credentials feels himself “checkmated”
and concludes that “the game was over” (1:87, 223, 223). While the traffic in women is a theme in Trollope’s other novels,
27 here it also has a particular resonance and provenance from earlier nineteenth-century literary representations of the Jewess.
If Melmotte’s Jewish identity is uncertain, it is nonetheless strongly suggested by his relationship with his daughter, whose
“destiny had no doubt been explained to her” – Marie’s miserable subjection suggesting the by-now-commonplace narrative of
the Jewish woman’s helpless suffering (1:33).
As critics have noted, Marie Melmotte’s willingness to elope with the fortune that Melmotte has settled on her for safekeeping
places her in the role of Shakespeare’s Jessica ruthlessly robbing her father of his ducats.
28 Another intertext, however, is the evangelical novel. In her repeated insistence on her capacity for suffering, Marie is
conceived within the terms of early Victorian representations of the Jewess. Beginning her life poor and illegitimate, she
is long innured to “alternately capricious and indifferent” treatment by her father (1:107). Marie’s acceptance of the suit
of the impoverished Sir Felix, however, liberates her from Melmotte’s world of material “magnificence,” opening her mind to
fantasies “which were bright with art and love, rather than with gems and gold. The books she read, poor though they generally
were, left something bright on her imagination” (1:107, 164). As with the heroine of conversion narrative, Marie’s liberation
begins with texts. Similarly, if Marie’s romance reading has given her the means to oppose the prevailing ethos of acquisitiveness,
she expresses that “identity of her own” as an embattled devotion to her lover: “She would be true to him! They might chop
her in pieces! Yes; – she had said it before, and she would say it again” (1:233, 473). Frequently reiterating this signature
refrain, Marie imagines self-assertion as bodily martyrdom.
Yet Marie’s enthusiasm for self-sacrifice becomes the crucial motor of the novel’s plot. At the height of his ascendancy,
when “the world worshipped Mr. Melmotte,” Marie alone expresses her dissent, disrupting her father’s power by refusing his
arrangement to marry her to Lord Nidderdale (1:331). In determining that “nobody shall manage this matter for me … I know
what I’m about now, and I won’t marry anybody just because it will suit papa” she is the only character in the novel to resist
Melmotte’s control (1:382). In contrast to Longestaffe and Nidderdale, who, on the brink of Melmotte’s bankruptcy, are still
persuaded by the eloquence of his “false confessions” (2:239), Marie, clear-sightedly, is unmoved by his rhetoric. As Robert
Tracy argues, Melmotte’s fall occurs when he lays sacrilegious hands on the property that, throughout
Trollope’s writing, stabilizes society.
29 But the novel also orchestrates the downfall of Melmotte as spiraling from Marie’s climactic refusal to sign over her own
fortune to honor the purchase, and thus save him from prosecution for fraud. Despite a cruel beating that leaves her wishing
for death, she continues to defy the man her mother sees as “an awful being, powerful as Satan” (2:258). Not only does Marie
reveal that, far from being “an absolutely passive instrument” of her father’s will, “she had a will of her own,” but, by
disobeying Melmotte, she becomes the novel’s only agent of virtue (1:275).
In the role of the rebellious Jewish daughter, then, Marie not only resists Jewish ambition, but redeems it. In contrast to
her father’s self-interested obfuscation of language, Marie’s tenacious love for Felix is characterized by “a certain brightness
of truth” (1:166). Yet Marie ultimately comes to accept her place in a preordained hierarchy and in doing so plays an important
role in the novel’s final restoration of social and sexual order. At the end of the novel, she humbly renounces her claim
on the English aristocracy, thus both enacting the self-denying virtues associated with the traditional gentry and atoning
for the excesses of her father. If, as Jonathan Freedman insightfully argues, Melmotte’s “bulky Jewish body … metonymically
symbolizes speculation – the swelling of money by illegitimate means,”
30 Marie’s “little” body is its nemesis (1:32). Thus, Melmotte’s hypermasculine appetency is counterbalanced by his daughter’s
feminine continence. As his former clerk comments: “He vas passionate, and did lose his ’ead; and vas blow’d up vid bigness.
… ’E vas a great man; but the greater he grew he vas always less and less vise. ’E ate so much that he became too fat to see
to eat his vittels. … But Ma’me’selle, – ah, she is different. She vill never eat too moch, but vill see to eat alvays” (2:449).
In her future career as a “woman of business” with a perspicacious “strength in discovering truth and falsehood,” the Jewess
represents a redemptive, because restrained, Protestant kind of commerce (2:448).
Trollope’s literary reinforcement of the values of feudal England in The Way We Live Now, then, is dependent on the figure of the Jewess. Marie Melmotte’s willingness to be chopped into pieces by her father exposes
the full horror of his violence against the domestic and social order and at the same time undermines it. Marie’s romantic
imagination combats Melmotte’s amoral pragmatism; her ardor stands against his artifice. In the novel’s conclusion, moreover,
Marie directs her sacrificial inclinations toward England, recognizing her position as an “impostor” and voluntarily removing
herself. (2:341) Redeeming Melmotte’s cosmopolitan treachery, Marie, like her converting literary forebears, symbolically
resolves the problem of the Jews.
The imagination, resolution, and masochism of Trollope’s Jewess are revived in another, more complex meditation on the corruptions
of the 1870s, George Eliot’s last novel,
Daniel Deronda (1876). Here, Eliot brings into unexpected dialogue the parochial concerns of the privileged gentry with the nationalist
aspirations of a group of poor East End Jews inspired by the rise of Italian nationalism. Moving between these two worlds
in the course of the novel is the protagonist Deronda, a baronet’s adoptee, whose shame about his unknown parentage has led
to an inclination to sympathize with the suffering, and thence to an interest in the history of the Jews. Eliot’s novel, like
Trollope’s, diagnoses decadence, anomie, and moral hypocrisy at the heart of the mid-Victorian ruling class. Unlike Trollope,
however, Eliot posits Judaism as a corrective to these ills – “a noncombative, spiritually oriented nationhood,” as Katherine
Bailey Linehan describes it, “founded on racial separateness.”
31 In the novel, this proposition is most explicitly articulated in a series of discussions between working men at the “Philosophers’
Club” in a London tavern, and between Deronda and Mordecai Cohen, the consumptive mystic he encounters in Whitechapel. But
it is also advanced, I will argue, through the contrasting life narratives of two Jewesses, the assimilated cosmopolitan Alcharisi
and the religious nationalist Mirah Lapidoth. Eliot’s philosemitism in Daniel Deronda was well recognised and much derided
(from the 1876 Saturday Review to F. R. Leavis in 1948), but its theological and literary genealogy has been less well explored.
32 In her version of the story of the Jewess, Eliot, who famously scorned popular pious fiction as “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,”
demonstrates striking debts to, as well as radical departures from, the tropes of evangelical writing.
33One of the key turning points in Deronda’s Bildungsroman is his encounter with his previously unknown mother, who summons
him to Genoa to tell him the story of her life and, to his astonishment, his true identity as a Jew. Now in the grip of terminal
illness, Deronda’s mother reveals herself as the Princess Halm-Eberstein, formerly the opera singer Leonora
Alcharisi, who fled her restrictive family to devote her life to art. Alcharisi’s narrative has been thoroughly mined by critics
for the bitter protest that Eliot articulates against the suppression of female vocation.
34 Alcharisi recalls the intractable clash of wills between herself and her father: “He never comprehended me, or if he did,
he only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was to be what he called ‘the Jewish woman’ under pain of his curse. … you
can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl” (630–1).
But it was in this context that she first learned to dissemble so well: “when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who
wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment. I meant to have my will in the end, but I could only have it by
seeming to obey” (632). Fostered, paradoxically, by the constraint of patriarchal law, Alcharisi’s capacity for deliberate
self-representation became the basis of her dramatic brilliance – what the narrator calls her “double consciousness” (629).
In Alcharisi’s story, Arnold’s Hebraism and Hellenism are given narrative incarnation. Thus, it is not simply a universal
patriarchal tradition under which she suffered, but her father’s religion in particular. Judaism is experienced by her as
a system of narrow restraints, a reverence for law and the Jewish past, whereas she desired “a large life, with freedom to
do what every one else did, and be carried along in a great current” (630). Transcending the insular life of the Jewess, acting
gave Alcharisi the expansive existence of the cosmopolitan: “Men followed me from one country to another. I was living a myriad
lives in one” (626). This key tension between the Jewish separatism of Alcharisi’s father and the universal humanism of her
own artistic ambition structures Eliot’s novel as a whole. As Amanda Anderson has shown, this frame of reference also locates
Daniel Deronda within the wider current of nineteenth-century philosophical constructions of Judaism. In the Hegelian tradition, Jews were
understood as incapable of becoming modern – which required having a reflective relation to one’s cultural heritage rather
than adhering unthinkingly to a fixed legal code. The Jews, in this view, “are fundamentally unfree insofar as they fail to
develop the dimension of interiority that characterizes Protestant Christianity and the capacity for self-authorization of
beliefs that forms the core of the Enlightenment conception of autonomy.”
35 Alcharisi’s inner life, yearning toward both self-realization and self-dissolution, then, points to the incompatibility not
only of Judaism and art, but also of Judaism and modernity.
In the figure of Alcharisi, Eliot meshes this Enlightenment polemic against Judaism with the gendered terms of the evangelical
conversion
narrative to produce a feminist critique. Judaism, in Alcharisi’s account, is masculinized, and her rebellion against the
archaic patriarchal law is abetted by the instruction and encouragement of a woman, her aunt Leonora. For holding ambitions
outside her father’s destiny for her as a Jewish wife and mother, Alcharisi says, “I was to be put in a frame and tortured”
– identifying Judaism with the inquisitorial methods of forced conversion (662). Invoking the Christian image of the yoke
of Jewish law – “things that were thrust on my mind that I might feel them like a wall around my life” – she elides it with
the ghetto of Jewish persecution (637). With this figurative language, Alcharisi’s story recalls that of the Jewish daughter
in conversion literature, whose greater capacity for Christian faith was grounded in the elevating suffering to which she
was subjected within the Jewish family. In Eliot’s secularized conversion narrative, the Jewess finds her salvation not in
Christianity but in the alternative religion of culture. A life in theater, for her, is “a chance of escaping from [the] bondage”
of Judaism, and her Jewish “double consciousness,” formed under the strain of that bondage, is what transforms her life into
great art (631). The Jewess once again liberates herself from the narrow material world of Judaism into a life of the spirit.
Despite the emotional power of Alcharisi’s rhetoric, however, this argument – that a legalistic Judaism can be transcended
by the universalism of art – is not endorsed by the novel as a whole. For in striking contrast to Arnold, Eliot does not regard
“culture” as necessarily redemptive. The art of the stage, in particular, as a number of critics have argued, forms part of
a nexus of associations among gambling, usury, and prostitution that constitutes the moral framework encompassing the text’s
various narratives.
36 Rather than redeeming the ruthless individualism and cosmopolitanism associated with “Jewish” commerce, then, the figure
of the assimilated Jewish actress in
Daniel Deronda is its female avatar. In responding to Alcharisi, Deronda reads her devotion to art over racial inheritance in precisely
these terms, warning that it is ultimately futile since “the effects prepared by generations are likely to triumph over a
contrivance which would bend them all to the satisfaction of self” (663). Deronda, and the novel as a whole, cast the Jewess’s
claim to autonomy as a modern and misguided effort to replace collective obligations with individual will.
In contrast, the novel offers an alternative Jewess, the child actress Mirah Lapidoth. Mirah enters the narrative when she
is rescued by Deronda from
a suicide attempt, having journeyed across Europe in a fruitless search for her lost mother. Mirah, as Deronda reluctantly
informs his mother, “is not given to make great claims” for herself (664). Her body is repeatedly described in diminutives,
and her smallness and delicacy make her a kind of purified Jew.
37 Indeed, she resembles the idealized Jewess of evangelical fiction, whose “exquisite refinement” points to her elevation above
Jewish degradation (206). While Mirah’s story begins from the opposite premise to Alcharisi’s – “I did not want to be an artist;
but this was what my father expected of me” (213) – their narratives have a noticeably similar structure: both are stories
of female rebellion in which Judaism and art are counterposed against one another. Like Alcharisi, Mirah learns the means
of her opposition to paternal domination from another woman, a landlady in one of their many lodgings, and harbors a secret
life with her Bible and prayer books. Like Alcharisi, Mirah learns to counterfeit her feelings in resistance to her father:
“whatever I felt most I took the most care to hide from him” (216). Whereas Alcharisi abandons her father because of his narrow
orthodoxy, Mirah flees the cosmopolitan commercialism of hers. The representation of Mirah, like that of Alcharisi, draws
on these tropes of conversion writing but directs them toward different ends.
Mirah’s narrative of her life also offers an alternative account of Judaism, casting it not as a system of law but in the
feminized language of affect. She associates both Judaism and music with early childhood memories of hearing “chanting and
singing” at the synagogue and her mother murmuring Hebrew hymns; in the absence of her understanding the meaning of the words
“they seemed full of nothing but our love and happiness” (214, 210). In her later, sadder life, Jewish history figured similarly:
“it comforted me to believe that my suffering was part of the affliction of my people, my part in the long song of mourning
that has been going on through ages and ages” (215). Mirah’s Judaism is mystified and prerational; it is “of one fibre with
her affections, and had never presented itself to her as a set of propositions” (362). Her own uncontrived performance style,
moreover, is a version of this kind of unmediated emotion. She has nothing of Alcharisi’s “double consciousness”; she has
“no notion of being anybody but herself,” and to her the artifice of the theater, where she was forced to earn her living,
is anathema (213). While the narrative links transparency and affection with the figure of the mother, a different story is
told of the Jewish father. The prime cause of his daughter’s suffering, Lapidoth parades her before sneering antisemites,
panders her, and finally abducts her to subject her to his will. Physically as well as morally they are opposites: when she
is seen with him later in the novel Mirah appears in the “quiet, careful dress
of an English lady,” in contrast to “this shabby, foreign-looking, eager, and gesticulating man” (738). In this respect also,
her story, like Alcharisi’s, invokes the narrative of Jewish conversion, in which the suffering of Jews is invariably ascribed
to the Jewish father.
In contrast, Mirah’s progress toward martyrdom, suggested in her description of the final agony of abandonment that preceded
her suicide attempt, is a Calvary that renders her a type of Christ: “I wandered and wandered, inwardly crying to the Most
High, from whom I should not flee in death more than in life – though I had no strong faith that He cared for me. The strength
seemed departing from my soul: deep below all my cries was the feeling that I was alone and forsaken” (222). Redeemed, not
only by the messianic Deronda but also by the Christian Mrs. Meyrick and her daughters, Mirah has an appropriately submissive
attitude: “I want nothing; I can wait; because I hope and believe and am grateful – oh, so grateful!” (211). In this she cannot
but jar strikingly with Alcharisi, whose proud declaration “I cannot bear to be seen when I am in pain” is also a refusal
to be pitied (639). These elements of the conversion genre, which emphasize the suffering and submission of the Jewess – by
which she is ennobled and made worthy of redemption – are linked, I will now argue, to the novel’s conceptualizing of Jewish
history and crucial to its broader political vision.
This vision is elaborated in the scene in which Deronda and Mordecai attend a meeting of the workingmen’s Philosophers’ Club
at the Hand and Banner tavern, where Mordecai puts forward an argument for the revival of Jewish national consciousness. Against
the charge made by Lilly that the Jews “are a stand-still people” incapable of modernization, Mordecai contends that theirs
is a heroic tenacity: “They struggled to keep their place among the nations like heroes – yea, when the hand was hacked off,
they clung with the teeth” (531). In Mordecai’s vision, the restoration of Jewish nationality “shall be a worthy fruit of
the long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness, refusing the ease of falsehood” (535). The emotional power
of this argument, however, has already made itself felt to Deronda, when he witnesses Mirah affirm her devotion to her religion
in response to her fear of the conversionist inclinations of the Meyrick women:
As Mirah had gone on speaking she had become possessed with a sorrowful passion – fervent, not violent. Holding her little
hands tightly clasped and looking at Mrs Meyrick with beseeching, she seemed to Deronda a personification of that spirit which
impelled men after a long inheritance of professed Catholicism to leave wealth and high place, and risk their lives in flight,
that they might join their own people and say, “I am a Jew.” (376)
Just as his immediate thought on first meeting Mordecai is to imagine him in “some past prison of the Inquisition,” Deronda’s
identification of Mirah
with the figure of the Iberian
converso enduring deprivation in order to return to the faith underlines the version of Jewish identity to which he is attached: that
of the Jew elevated by suffering (386).
The meaning of Mirah becomes clearest to Deronda, however, when she performs Leopardi’s “Ode to Italy.” The first time she
sings it, we are given the opening lines of the song: “O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi / E le collonne e i simulacri
e l’erme / Torri degli avi nostri. … Ma la Gloria non vedo [O my fatherland, I see the walls and arches and columns and statues
and lonely towers of our ancestors; but their glory I cannot see]” (483–4). The second time, Mirah performs in public at a
musical party. The text is glossed by the narrator: “when Italy sat like a disconsolate mother in chains, hiding her face
on her knees and weeping,” words that link the lyric to the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Now, hearing Mirah sing, Deronda is
deeply moved at the thought of the “heroic passion” for nation that is also “the godlike end of … unselfish love” (559). In
Mirah’s performance, the self is subsumed rather than asserted. Her singing stirs emotional depths precisely because, rather
than being a contrived “representation” of the grief of exile, it is a direct expression of it. Mirah’s submission to persecution
and her self-identification with Jewish history now merge with and are given meaning by the political debate that Deronda
has just witnessed at the Philosophers’ Club. As his own comment in that debate had tentatively suggested, the image of Italy
mourned in Mirah’s song but reenvisioned by Mazzini provides a model for the national restoration of the Jews too: “As long
as there is a remnant of national consciousness … there may be a new stirring of memories and hopes which may inspire arduous
action” (536). Mirah is Leopardi’s weeping Italy in chains, Jeremiah’s exiled daughter of Jerusalem, and the Iberian crypto-Jew.
Her own redemption by Daniel Deronda, then, stands emblematically and prophetically for the future redemption of the Jewish
nation. By orchestrating images of Mirah in this way, Daniel Deronda provides an affective narrative of the development of “national consciousness.”
As Bernard Semmel has commented, George Eliot was, in the 1870s, turning away from her earlier commitment to a Comtian religion
of humanity and toward the “idea of Nationality” and the protection of “distinctive national characteristics.” Her thinking
resonated with Disraeli’s pronouncements in the 1860s and 1870s on the need “to preserve the British national inheritance
from both a divisive and alienating individualism and a cosmopolitanism that denied the bonds of a shared past.” Despite her
earlier disdain for Disraeli’s Jewish chauvinism, Eliot was increasingly aligning herself not with Gladstone’s liberal cosmopolitanism
but with Disraeli’s nationalism.
38 In the stories of the two Jewesses, then, Eliot illustrates the
alternative routes of “cosmopolitanism” and “nationality” for the Jews. Alcharisi is arrested in an attitude of strife, reenacting
the irreconcilable conflict between individual ambition and collective destiny, between assimilation and racial loyalty, between
universalism and particularism. The self-abnegating Mirah with her “unselfish love,” on the other hand, inspires the resolution
of this conflict. Alcharisi stands for the discontents of the Diaspora Jew, Mirah for submission to the higher ideal of nationhood.
As I have argued, these stories of the oppression, rebellion, and suffering of the Jewess read like striking echoes of the
tropes of evangelical fiction. In Eliot’s hands, however, they become a complex political allegory, suggesting the route to
national renewal for the English as well as the Jews.
In other ways,
Daniel Deronda draws together elements of the Jewish conversion narrative in a radically new configuration. The much-analyzed project of
the Jews’ restoration to Zion suggested at the conclusion of the novel can be read, for example, not only as a recasting of
Mazzinian romantic nationalism but also as specifically Protestant aspiration inherited from earlier philosemitic millennialist
discourse.
39 More audaciously, in the novel’s endorsement of Mirah’s version of Judaism as a religion of affect over Alcharisi’s legalistic
patriarchalism, Eliot casts Judaism itself as feminine rather than masculine. “Israel,” declares Mordecai, “is the heart of
mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love” (530). This metaphor
of humanity as an organism, in which the different races are organs, each with its “own work” to do but linked together in
sympathetic affection by the Jews, is taken from the theory of Jewish nationalism proposed by the Young Hegelian German Jewish
radical Moses Hess, whom Eliot had read.
40 In the context of Eliot’s oeuvre, however, it is being used as much for a gendered as a political vision. In the novel, Judaism
is associated with the female capacity for domestic tenderness that, as Katherine Bailey Linehan has argued, Eliot regards
as the linchpin of civilization.
41 Mirah’s ideally feminine “unselfish love” is thus also an expression of Judaism itself. In characterizing Judaism as the
supreme religion of the heart, Eliot boldly challenges the symbolic economy of evangelicalism.
In
Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews, 1840–1939, William D Rubinstein and Hilary L Rubinstein seek to overturn
the dominant historiography of Jewish–non-Jewish relations in the century leading up to World War II. Alongside the disabilities
and discriminations, the outbreaks of violence and ideological antisemitism that assailed Jews in eastern Europe and the Afro-Asian
world, the “English-speaking world,” they assert, was “different” because it “almost entirely lacked the tradition of venomous
popular antisemitism found in Central and Eastern Europe,” and there Christian advocates of Jewish rights “gave their support
unconditionally. They championed Jews as Jews.” Philosemitism “often more than balanced whatever religious antisemitism remained
in the English-speaking world after the early nineteenth century.”
42The Rubinsteins’ corrective to a lachrymose teleology that seeks precursors to genocide in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century; their wish to distinguish the particular religious culture that promoted an identification with rather than a denigration
of Judaism in England, its colonies, and its ex-colonies; and their insistence that instances of antisemitic persecution in
this period, as indeed in our own time, consistently generated swift and strong expressions of outrage from across the social
spectrum, is important. Nonetheless, they strikingly fail to account for the phenomenon of philosemitism beyond the surface
of the statements of the enthusiasts themselves. What they do, in effect, is to replicate rather than analyze the Anglocentric
triumphalism of Victorian philosemitism. In contrast, I have sought here, by considering the gendered rhetoric of nineteenth-century
philosemitism, to examine the relationship between antisemitism and philosemitism and the ideological uses to which this rhetoric was put.
The fundamentally contradictory place occupied by Judaism and Jews in both Christian and secular culture, I have argued, was
inscribed into nineteenth-century narratives in gendered terms. Repeatedly, the figure of the Jewess marked the bifurcation
between the discursive denigration and idealization of Judaism. The Jew was represented as archaic, legalistic, materialistic,
intolerant, superstitious, and primitive; Judaism itself was masculinized. The Jewess, by contrast, was spiritual, cultured,
patriotic, emotional, and modern. While the Jew was irredeemable, the Jewess represented the capacity of the Jews to transcend
their spiritual and social narrowness. Persisting across the nineteenth century, this rhetorical figure appeared at the crux
of discursive contestations over religious, national, and gendered identities.
Writing about Jews encompassed not only the projection of otherness on to male Jews, but also the figuring of the Jewess as
an ideal self. As the broader political and cultural questions represented by the Jews changed, however, so did the terms
in which the Jewess was idealized. In the first half of the century, ecclesiastical controversy defined the public debate
about Jews. For evangelicals, anti-Catholicism provided the conceptual model for understanding Jewish difference, but, at
the same time, they enthusiastically reclaimed the Old Testament and Jewish textuality. In this context, evangelical writers
regarded the Jewess as the most desirable kind of convert, because she was both a link to the roots of Christianity and an
emblem of its supersessionary power. By the 1860s, the economic and social success of middle-class Jewry had become a symbol
both for the ascendancy of liberalism and for the apparent determinism of “race.” The ubiquitous, racialized figure of the
Jewish man of commerce, however, was frequently shadowed by the artistic Jewess, whose position between Jewish and gentile
cultures was seen to produce a peculiarly alienated and eclectic intellect. Here, the exceptional spiritual potential ascribed
to the Jewess in evangelical culture was secularized. Deeply indebted to the literature of conversion, novelists dynamically
reshaped semitic discourse by accommodating the existing narrative of the redemptive Jewess to the changing circumstances
of the mid-Victorian period.
Ambivalent responses to the Jews were embedded in political, theological, scientific, and philosophical texts in the nineteenth
century. The medium of fiction, however, had unique rhetorical capabilities. In particular, writers used the image of the
passionate and tormented Jewess to elicit a sentimental emotive response from readers. The spectacle of suffering exhibited
in the “Jewish” autobiographers beloved of evangelical readers powerfully demanded sympathy from their audience. The sympathetic
imagination, a cornerstone of Romantic politics and creativity, was equally central to the feminized theology of evangelicalism.
It was, therefore, evangelical writers who developed the trope of the suffering Jewess most insistently of all, regarding
her as particularly afflicted and hence particularly susceptible to the “conversion of the heart” with which women readers
could especially identify. Later in the century, the Jewess continued to be linked with “feeling”: in the work of Trollope,
her refined sensitivity was pitted against the cold, calculating, and masculinized force of Jewish commerce. By the late nineteenth
century the Jewess was admired above all for her resistance to the instrumentalizing and excessive rationality of the Jews.
All these texts produced in the reader simultaneously and symbiotically an aversion to Jewish male figures and an identification
with the Jewess.
In Eliot’s intricately juxtaposed portrayal of the two Jewesses in
Daniel Deronda, we see the most nuanced articulation of the gendered structure of Victorian philosemitism. The Jewess was invariably seen
as exceptional: torn between the most fundamentally incompatible allegiances and therefore subjected to exceptional suffering.
However, it was precisely this suffering that generated her unique relationship to religion, nation, or art. The Jewess was
not simply redeemable where the Jew was beyond salvation; she was an
ideal version of the Christian, the patriot, or the artist.
The Jewess was valuable as a convert not in spite of but because of her Jewishness, which gave her conversion miraculous and
portentous meaning. Similarly, national loyalty in the face of intolerance gave the Jewess’s patriotism a particularly poignant
and durable quality. In struggling as an artist against a narrow world of religion or commerce, moreover, the Jewess’s imaginative
and performative propensities were heightened and honed. The Christian value of the virtue of suffering underpinned the story
of the Jewish woman both within and beyond Christian narratives. Equally, Judaism as an absent presence haunted the representation
of the religious or secular convert.