Trudy Gold
George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: Disraeli, Conningsby, Alroy

Trudy Gold - George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: Disraeli, Conningsby, Alroy

- Mary Ann Evans, the reason she took the pseudonym George Eliot is that it was very, very difficult for women novelists in those days. If you think about the Brontes, they all published under pseudonyms. And you’ve got to think also about the role of women in Victorian England. And I think when we examine a little of the life of George Eliot, you will see that she really was a woman outside her time. She is a pioneer in so many, many different areas, she was a great intellectual, and she broke a lot of taboos. And also, her novel “Daniel Deronda” was incredibly important in the history of Zionism. And not only that, she befriended quite a few Jewish scholars. So who was she? And of course, one of the most famous novelists in Britain, and let’s have a look at her major novels. I’m sure many of you will have read them, but if not, give yourselves an incredible treat. She really got inside her characters, she had the kind of life where she met all sorts of people, and I’ll talk about that later. And of course, I suppose her foremost famous books would be “Middlemarch”, “Adam Bede”, the “Mill on the Floss”, and “Silas Marner”. There’s a darkness in many of them as well. But really, really, if you really want a great read, read George Eliot. Now, can we go on please? This is “Daniel Deronda”, which he published in 1876. It’s not her best novel, but what makes it incredibly unusual, is it’s about Jews, and it’s an incredibly sympathetic portrait of Jews, and also of a young man who decides it’s his mission to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem.

Now, we have been looking at proto-Zionism, philosemitism, and very much George Eliot fits into that, but in a different direction. Now, who was she? She was the third child of a man called Robert Evans and Christine Evans. She had a full sister, and half brothers, from father’s previous marriage. The father had a very interesting job, he was the manager of Arbury Hall. Let’s have a look at Arbury Hall. Now, this was the home of a family called the Newdigate family, and Maryanne was actually born on South Farm on the estate. And when she was only four months old, the family moved to a house a little further away. And she’s very bright, from an early age, her father realises he’s got to invest in her education. And she boarded at a school, because in those days what was the sort of education for women, she boarded at a boarding school, and she went to another, and then another. And at her last school, she was actually taught by an evangelical Christian, a woman called Maria Lewis, and she has her earliest surviving letters. And it’s in the religious atmosphere at her last school, Ms. Franklin’s, she was exposed to a very disciplined Christianity, Christianity, evangelical Christianity, this time, in Victorian, because we’re just about into the Victorian age, she was born, remember, in 1819, and evangelical Christianity was a very kind of Bible reading Christianity, there was a lot of contact with the people of the book. So it was something, later it was said that many of these evangelical Christians, or people brought up that way, knew the Bible, they knew the geography of Palestine better than they knew the geography of their own homes.

Now, she left school at 16, but because of her father’s position at Arbury Hall, she was allowed access to the library. Now, there was a magnificent library, which, and she self-taught. So having had a standard education, she now begins to have the benefit of an extraordinary library, which really increased her breadth of education, she read Greek philosophy, she read tragedy. And also, because she’s a very bright woman, and she’s going to become quite close to the family there, she gets to know how the wealthy live, and also the middle classes, and also the poor. She sees every aspect of British society, from her family, which are middle class, the poor in the villages, and she sees how they run. And that’s going to be, as an acute observer, as an novelist, this was incredibly important for her. And her mother died, she becomes her father’s housekeeper, and it’s at this stage that her brother married and took over the family home, so she moves with her father to Coventry. Now in Coventry, she met up with a really interesting intellectual circle, ran by a couple called Charles and Cara Bray. And this is another side of England, remember, this is the Midlands, he had made his wealth as a ribbon manufacturer. The middle classes, they want trimmings for their clothes, this is it England at the height of industrialization, he becomes very, very rich. He’s a Christian, and he has a huge sense of social responsibility, so what he does is he builds schools, he is involved in hospitals and all sorts of philanthropic causes. Now, he’s at the centre of an intellectual crowd, because quite often, these wealthy individuals helped the nascent intellectuals.

And let’s have a look at some of the people she met through him, ‘cause she’s only a young woman, and she’s already on the way to becoming really part of intellectual English society. Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, another fascinating woman if you want to read a good biography, and of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson, visiting. They were radicals, and they introduced her to writers such as David Strauss. Now, let’s have a look at David Strauss. Next slide, please. Now David Strauss, he was a writer. Who is he? He’s German, and he is actually wondering about the veracity of the Bible, who actually wrote the Bible. And you are beginning to see quite a lot of free thinking in intellectual circles. Her first important work, because she had languages, she’d learned a lot of languages, was to translate Strauss’s “Life of Jesus” in 1846. And this is when George Eliot, and I’m going to call her George Eliot for ease, she began to question her religious faith. Now, her father though, is still a conventional evangelical Christian. And he threatens her, he says, “Look, if you do not conform and come with me to church, then you’re going to have to leave my home.” And at that stage, she doesn’t have her own income, she is dependent on the largess of her father, so she tows the line and she attends church until his death in 1849, when she was 30 years old. Now she still maintains a very close contact with the Brays, and five days after his death they take her with them to Switzerland. She’s an engaging companion, she has all these languages, she’s already beginning to be part of the milieu of intellectuality. She was so taken by Switzerland, she decided to stay behind, she had a small pension now, and she wanted to perfect her languages, and also to study more.

And it’s when she comes back to London in 1850, she decides to become a writer. Can we see the next slide, please? She was given lodgings in the home of John Chapman, he was a radical publisher, and she’d met him at the Brays’ country home Rose Hill. And England was trying to improve, improve the lot of the poor, and he bought a campaigning journal called the Westminster Review, and she becomes the assistant editor. And she virtually ran the journal, really up until the first half of 1854. And it’s around this time, through John Chapman, she meets the love of her life, let’s have a look, and she’s going to break all the taboos. This is The Westminster Review, she is the main editor of it, right up until 1854, but you can see, it continues, it was a very important radical magazine. It’s tragic, isn’t it, how we are no longer reading prints, and many of these wonderful things will disappear. So she meets the love of her life, let’s see him, George Henry Lewes. He’d first met her in 1851 through the Brays, and by 1854 they decide they want to live together. He was already married, he was married to a woman called Agnes Jervis, and they agreed to an open marriage. Now, on one level you think of Queen Victoria and the real constraints of Victorian England, you think of the appalling lot of poor women, something like one in 12 women had to be prostitutes, not because they wanted that profession, but if they didn’t have a man, a husband or a father to look after them, then they were destitute. But there was also a new strand of pioneering women who are demanding their place in the world. And this is a woman, she’s already found her intellectual freedom, she is editing a magazine, she is mixing in the kind of circles, and she meets a man who she wants to be with, he’s already married, and she agrees to an open marriage.

And apart from his children by Agnes, he had three children by her, and then Agnes had four children by another intellectual called Thornton Lee Hunt. And in 1854, Louis and Maryanne travelled to Weimar, in Berlin, and she translated Feuerbach’s essay on Christianity, and also worked on Spinoza’s “Ethics”. Can we see the next slide, please? This is Spinoza’s “Ethics” translated in 1856, but it wasn’t published in her lifetime. Now, this is very important, and this is her last essay for the review, and it was “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, and that’s when she adopted the name George Eliot, and this is when she begins to write. And unfortunately, her story leaks out, her identity leaks out, and people are shocked by her scandalous life. In a way though, she does become rehabilitated when she meets two of Queen Victoria’s daughters, and Victoria read all her books and really admired her. When we talk about Victorian England, on one level, Victoria and Albert were the epitome of respectability. After the appalling period of the Regency, and George IV and William IV, Victoria, prince Albert had a great sense of what he believed the public wanted, and they came over as an incredibly bourgeois couple. You remember, of course, Disraeli’s great quote, “Whenever I want to find out how the the middle classes think, I ask the Queen.” So she is going to write and write and write, and her first big success is “Adam Bede”, and for the next 15 years, up until “Mill on the Floss”.

And “Mill on the Floss”, the inscription is rather lovely, “To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewes, written in the sixth year of our lives together, at Holly Lodge, South Fields, Wandsworth, finished the 21st of March, 1860. And she and Lewes moved to Surrey, Lewes’ health unfortunately fails, he dies two years later, and she’s going to spend the next two years editing his work. I’m going to finish with her biography, and then we are going to look at the Jewishness. She then marries a man called John Walter Cross, who was 30 years younger than herself, and this legal marriage made, even though he was so much younger, it’s fascinating, if a man marries a woman much younger they think he’s lucky, if a woman marries a man much younger they think she’s odd. But anyway, her brother Isaac had cut off all relations with her during her life with Lewes, but because she’s now respectably married, he overlooked the age difference. and she was rehabilitated back into her family. They had a lovely honeymoon in the canals of Venice, they lived in Chelsea, but unfortunately Eliot died soon after of kidney disease. She’s buried in High Gates Cemetery next to George Henry Lewes, in an area which is reserved for, quote, unquote, dissenters and agnostics, and she lies adjacent to Karl Marx. It was in 1980 at the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was established in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. So let’s talk about "Daniel Deronda”.

Now, let’s have a look though, at Emanuel Oscar Deutsch, because he is a character that had a huge influence on her. Now, Emanuel Oscar Deutsch, he had been born in Neisse, in Prussian Silesia. He’d been educated by his uncle, he had a religious education, and then he went to the University of Berlin. Why? Because in 1812, the Jews in Old Prussia were emancipated. He’d already studied theology and Talmud with his uncle, he further studies in Berlin, but he also studies English language and literature at the university. He’s an incredibly bright young man, he has an incredible, this is a letter of interruption. he wants a post abroad, he wants to travel, he wants to see the world, and he wants this post at the British Museum. And a letter is written from Albert Conn, a Berlin bookseller, a young man of 23, and a Jew, endowed with natural cleverness. He understands, listen to this, Latin, Greek and Hebrew perfectly English and French, he understands both languages. His moral conduct has hereto been faultless, and his character thoughtfully respectable. And he begins to move in intellectual circles, and he meets George Eliot, and has a very big impact on her. Another man who has an impact on her is Leopold Zunz, can we see Leopold Zunz, please? Leopold’s a fascinating character. Also, he was the son of a Talmudic scholar, as most of them were, also studied at the University of Berlin, and he took his PhD in Halle. He early supported religious reform, and in 1819 he worked with a man you will know very well, Heinrich Heine, in setting up a society for the culture and science of the Jews.

Now, that was a society that was established by a group of young Jews in Berlin to hold back the tide of assimilation and conversion, what they wanted to do was to show that within Judaism and Jewish history, there is something worth having, because as I’m sure you all know, something like a third of German Jews, a third of Berlin Jews are going to convert between 1815 and 1830, they want to hold back the tide. In fact, Heinrich Heine, who was the secretary of the society, he himself converts in 1824, he says baptism is the passport to European civilization. Now, he becomes one of the most important Jewish scholars in the world, and he visits the Jewish museum in 1846, and he meets George Eliot, and he’s actually quoted by her in one of the chapters in “Daniel Deronda”. So she’s already met some very interesting Jews. And before we go on to “Daniel Deronda”, let’s have a look at Highgate Cemetery, where she was buried. Harriet Beecher Stowe I’m going to talk about soon, because she writes to her about “Daniel Deronda”, but I just want to take us onto the last slide. There you go, George Eliot and Karl Marx, fascinating that they lie adjacent to each other. You know, when he was buried, I think there were only 13 people at his funeral, the man that changed the world.

So let’s talk about “Daniel Deronda”. “Daniel Deronda”, I don’t know how many of you have seen it or read the book. There is a pretty good series on prime television, I was going to show you extracts, but you see, there are two plots in “Daniel Deronda”, one is the Jewish theme, and the other theme is a far more conventional one. And interestingly, it’s the more conventional theme of a woman, a beautiful woman, who thinks the world is hers, and how in the end she really has to change her ways, and is brought back to realisation of what the world is about. And in many ways, that is the part that certainly the English critics preferred. George Eliot, “Daniel Deronda” was not the great success that her other books were, and it’s written in eight parts, and it’s the only one set in the Victorian society of her day. Now, it’s actually been adapted for films three times, it was on the stage actually, with Vanessa Redgrave. I’m going to speak personally now, I find it very difficult when Vanessa Redgrave is involved in anything to do with anything Jewish, but nevermind. So the plot of “Daniel Deronda”, it contains two main strands, the heroine is a woman called Gwendolen Harleth. And she meets Daniel Deronda, she realises her family are on hard times, her father is dead, and she’s pawning jewellery, she’s gambling, and she meets the extraordinary Daniel Deronda, who, she pawns her necklace and he buys it back for her. Now, Daniel’s been raised by a wealthy man called Sir Hugh Mallinger, and we never really know at the beginning who Hugo is, but Daniel certainly believes that he is his illegitimate son.

So Daniel is raised to be an English gentleman, he has a very conventional Eaton and Oxford education, and the man he thinks is his father wants him to go into politics. One day though, Daniel is out on the Thames when he rescues a young Jewish woman called Mirah Lapidoth, she’s trying to drown herself, she’s come to London to search for a mother and bother after running away from her father, who had kidnapped her when she was a child. Daniel is moved by her tale, and he decides he’s going to try and find her family, and in order to do this he’s introduced to London’s Jewish community. He becomes very close to Mirah, she’s got a wonderful singing voice. The main thrust of the plot, though, is Gwendolen, she marries a man thinking he will save her family and she can wrap him around her little finger man called Harley Grandcourt, it doesn’t work that way. Going back to the Jewish plot… And she’s really in love with Daniel Deronda, who flips in and out of her life. And whilst Daniel is searching for Mirah’s family, he sees ordinary Jewish people in the east end of London, and in fact, the Jewish family he first encounters, it’s interesting, because some of the critics of “Daniel Deronda”, the Jewish critics in particular, think that it’s rather a negative view of the ordinary Jew, because then he meets a consumptive visionary called Mordecai, who is actually the border of this Jewish family the Cohens, he becomes friendly with. And Daniel is strongly drawn to Mordecai, and Mordecai has got a dream, Mordecai, his dream is to restore the Jewish people to their national identity, and to be restored to the land of Israel. And because he’s dying, he wants Daniel to take on the mantle, this man who is an English aristocrat, but Mordecai is convinced he is a Jew. Meanwhile, continuing with that particular plot line, Daniel finds out that Mirah has this wonderful singing voice and he introduces her into society.

And it’s at this stage that the man he thinks is his father tells him, in fact, I’m not your father, your mother wants to see you, and he goes to Venice to meet his mother, and it’s there it is revealed to him that he is in fact born a Jew. So I’m going to read a couple of extracts. This is the extract where Daniel Deronda meets his mother, his mother, it appears, had left his father, who was a pious Jew, and she had wanted the world, she had a great singing voice, she was married into the aristocracy, a very beautiful woman, a courtesan perhaps, but certainly, he meets her, and this is what she says to him when they finally meet. “You are a young copy of your grandfather. He never understood 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, I was to feel everything I didn’t feel and believe everything I didn’t believe. I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuzah over the door, to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat.” You see how well researched she is about Judaism. “To think it beautiful that men should bind the tefillin on them and women not, to adore the wisdom of such laws, however silly they might be to me, I was to love the long prayers and the ugly synagogue, and the howling and the gabbling, and the fasts and the tiresome feasts, and my father’s endless discourse about our people, which was a thunder without meaning in my ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been, and I didn’t care at all, I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father’s strictness, teaching, teaching forever, this you must be this, you must not be, pressed on me like a frame.”

Ah, here her tone changed to one of a more bitter incisiveness. “You, I see, are glad to have been born a Jew, you say so, this is because you have not been brought up as a Jew. The separateness seems sweet to you because I saved you from it. Now, Daniel Deronda finding out that he is a Jew, he returns to Mordecai, and it turns out that Mordecai is Mirah’s brother, he falls in love with Mirah, Mordecai dies in his arms, and he marries Mirah, and his vision, now that he is this Jew, but in the guise of an English gentleman, he’s going to lead his people back to Zion. And really, it’s a totally proto-Zionist novel, And this is some of the things, this is George Eliot to Harriet Beecher Stowe on the Jewish element in "Daniel Deronda”. Do you mind flicking back to Harriet Beecher Stowe, if you don’t mind? She was a very close friend of hers, and of course herself a brilliant novelist. “As to the Jewish element in ‘Deronda’, I expected from first to last in writing it that it would create a much stronger resistance, and even repulsion, that it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards the Jews is, I hardly know whether to say more pious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to.” Remember, she’s already met a couple of incredible Jewish scholars, she has studied Judaism, she has even studied Hebrew. Now this is a woman on a mission, moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come into contact.

“A spirit of arrogance and contemptuousness, dictatorialness is observable, which has become a national disgrace. There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.” This is a real core decree from a woman who is fed up with the belief in Victorian England that after all God is an Englishman. And this is very interesting what she has to say, “But towards the Hebrews, we Western people who have been reared in Christianity have a peculiar debt, and whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called educated make small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty and insulting. They hardly know that Christ was a Jew, and I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coattails and flaunts as our own lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best can be said of it that it’s a sign of intellectual narrowness, in plain English, the stupidity, which is still the average mark of our culture.

Yes, I expected more aversion than I have found, but I was happily independent in material things, and felt no temptation to accommodate my writing to any standard, except that of trying to do my best in what seems to me the most needful to be done. And I sum up with the writer of the book of the Maccabees, if I have done well, and as benefits the subject, it is what I desired, and if I have done ill, it is what I could attain.” Now it had an incredibly important influence on Jews. It was enthusiastically reviewed by Jewish scholars, the Austrian rabbi and very good scholar, David Kaufman, It had a strong influence on Christian Zionism. It was cited by Henrietta Szold, of course, as incredible American woman, so important in the history of Israel. It was cited by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who of course created the first Hebrew dictionary, and by Emma Lazarus. For those of you who are American, of course Emma Lazarus is most famous in to us in England for her words on the Statue of Liberty, so these are people who actually mention it. Now, I’m going to read an extract from “Daniel Deronda”, this is from Mordecai, that gives you a depth of how she felt about Jews, and how important it was to her to create this book. Zunz had written, and this is what she quotes, “If there are ranks of suffering, Israel takes precedence over all the other nations, if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are born ennobles the Jew, who can challenge the aristocracy of every land. If a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting 1800 years, in which the poets and actors were also the heroes.” So this is an a quote from Mordecai to his sister Mirah once they discover.

“The Shema, wherein we briefly confess the divine unity is the chief devotional exercise of the Hebrews, and this made our religion the fundamental religion for the whole world. We see then the nation, which has been scoffed up for its separatistness, has given a binding theory to the human race.” And this is an interesting quote, by, goodness, I’ve forgotten the scholar, but I’ll think of it for next week, “It’s one of the curiosities of history that a remarkable novel about Jews and Judaism predicting the establishment of a Jewish state should have been written by a Victorian female intellectual.” To write the book, she studied five languages, including Hebrew. So let me just conclude on “Daniel Deronda” by this extraordinary passage. This is Mordecai. “‘Well, whatever the Jews contributed one time, they are standstill people,’ said Lilly, ‘they are the type of obstinate adherence to the superannuated. They may show good abilities when they take up liberal ideas, but as a race, they have no development in them.’ ‘This is false,’ said Mordecai…” Remember, he is the young consumptive brother that Mirah finally discovers, and he is the one who has a dream of Zion, which he passes onto Daniel Deronda. “‘This is false,’ said Mordecai, leaning forward again with eagerness. ‘Let their history be known and examined. Let the seed be sifted.’” It’s no wonder of course that Graetz, the great historian, commented on it. “Let its beginnings be traced to the weed of the wilderness, the more glorious will be the energy that transformed it.

Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as a stream of blood in the heart and made one growth? Where else are people who kept and enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they were hunted with a hatred as fierce as the forest fires that chased the wild beast from his coven. There is a fable of the Roman, that swimming to save his life, he held the roll of his writings between his teeth, and saved them from the waters, but how much more than that is true of our race?” Mordecai speaking, remember. “They struggled to keep their place amongst the nation like heroes, yet when the hand was hacked off, they clung with the teeth, and when the plough on the harrow had passed over the last visible signs of their national covenants, and fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and planters. They said, ‘The spirit is alive, let it make us our lasting habitation,’” lasting because movable. She understood the whole notion of the Talmud as the portable homeland. Never forget that when the Jews were exiled, what happens is, the Talmud encases them in what the rabbis called the portable homeland, and she had really studied, “so that it may be carried from generation to generation, and our sons unborn may be rich in the things that have been and possess a hope built on unchangeable foundation. They said it and they wrought it, though often breathing with scant life as in a coffin or lying wounded amid a heap of slain. Hooted and scarred like the unowned dog, the Hebrew made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them to fill the bath of Gentile luxury. He absorbed knowledge, he diffused it.

His dispersed race was a new Phoenicia, working the minds of Greece and carrying the products to the world. The native spirit of our tradition was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed to draw out the compressed virtues of law and prophecy. And while the gentile who had said, ‘"What is yours is ours, and is no longer yours,’ very much a woman who’d come from a Christian background, now a free thinker, understood that Christianity believed that it had superseded Judaism and Judaism is now redundant, she’s completely overturning this in this novel. So let me just repeat this, "And the while the Gentile who had said, ‘What is yours is ours, and is no longer yours,’ was reading the letter of our law as a dark inscription, or was turning its parchments into shoe souls for an army rabid with lust and cruelty, our masters were still enlarging and illuminating with fresh fed interpretation. But the dispersion was wide, yoke of oppression was a spiked torture, as well as a load. The exile was forced to far amongst British people, where the consciousness of his race was no clearer to him than the light of the sun to our fathers in the Roman persecution, who had their hiding place in a cave, and knew not that it was day, save by the dimmer burning of their candles. What wonder that multitudes of our people are ignorant, narrow and superstitious, what wonder.” Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Can we now have a look at the wonderful Ruth Wisse talking about “Daniel Deronda”? It’s just a four minute clip. She’s of course that incredible American scholar.

• As that character of “Daniel Deronda” begins to help others in the book, so I think the book intended to change the world. This is an introduction to one of the greatest works of fiction, I think, that has ever been written. It’s an extremely exciting book of ideas like nationalism, liberalism, family Life. 20 years before the rise of Zionism, it put forth the idea that Jews had to reclaim their national sovereignty in the land of Israel. It was not ever a book that was assigned in a class, but I had heard that “Daniel Deronda” was a book about the Jews, and I had become very interested in the Jews, and I was teaching Jewish studies, I suddenly realised, one of the crucial works in any course on Zionism would be “Daniel Deronda”. This course is divided into eight lectures, each of which takes up a different part of the work, and also a different set of problems. “Pay the rent.” “But I can’t pay the rent.” “You must pay the rent.” George Eliot was a philosopher. Fiction, particularly the novel, could do greater justice to the philosophic ideas that she was grappling with than essays. Forbidden love is the driving idea behind the Hollywood treatment of Jewish intermarriage. They originally conceived “West Side Story” in which Jewish Maria was supposed to fall in love with the Italian Catholic Tony. What makes Gwendolen into the kind of person that she is, spoiled in this sense, is to be cursed with an education that flatters its subject into believing in her superiority, without making her competitive in the democratic marketplace. Tolerance becomes intolerance when it is prepared to absorb others without being conscious of the unwillingness of others to be absorbed.

Now that we are willing to grant you entry, and even to welcome you so warmly into our home, why would you want anything more? Every people needs to be able to experience itself, familially, nationally. The modern hep hep, in other words, seeping into the country, was dangerous to England, to learn to appreciate the Jews was to save England from perdition. She says, “Look, every people looks back on its own past with pride. If you feel this about the British, you must also understand how important this is for the Jewish people.” By the time Daniel learns that he is a Jew, his prejudices have given way to appreciation and understanding, the reader’s misconceptions are of course expected to follow suit. Once Daniel begins to recognise the potential of the Jew, and to see that what Mordecai wants of him is to be a leader of the Jews, then the question is, how are you going to become a leader of the Jews if they do not have a polity? Leonora’s intensity in rejecting the Jews is a match for Mordecai’s intensity in championing them. It’s in the final chapters that we see the resolution of this novel around the idea of separation with communication. Daniel is prepared to change the horizon of Jewish belief, and to learn from other races, in the course of recovering national political obligations of Judaism. It is a great privilege to be able to teach “Daniel Deronda”. This novel, almost more than any other that I know, reminds me of why, of all the fields of knowledge that one could have gone into, I chose to go into literature.

• Absolutely extraordinary. Thank you very, very much. Thanks, Harriet. Now I have a problem. I’ve got one of my usual problems, because I have quite a lot to talk about with Benjamin Disraeli, and as I’ve only seemed to have left myself about 10 minutes to do so, what I think I better do is to add another, I haven’t planned all my courses up to August, and I think I better put that in as a separate session, because I cannot do justice to Disraeli as a novelist, and particularly as a novelist of the Jews. But I think it’s important to reiterate, before we even think about Benjamin Disraeli, that George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, her motivation is very, very different. Remember, she comes from a Christian background, she’s an acute observer, she’s incredibly intelligent, she has a very good education, she’s partly self-educated, she’d studied many languages, she’d mixed in with a very interesting group of people, and having also met some interesting Jews. And remember, this is the time when in England Jews are not fully emancipated, as we’ve already established, it’s a long, slow, different process in England. But she’s aware of what’s going on in the continent, and what I find is absolutely fascinating, she has really, really studied in order to write Daniel Deronda, she’d studied Jewish history. And of course, so many Anglo Jews at the time when she is writing, and so many European Jews, the law of being part of the outside world, being part of French society, German society, English society, they were giving up their national aspirations, they were becoming citizens of the countries in which they’d lived off the Jewish religion. And of course in Eastern Europe, where the bulk of Jews are still living under Tsarist oppression, it’s the hold of religiosity, and for them, only in the Moshiach can bring them back. So in many ways, she is out of step, and she is very, as Ruth Wisse said, she’s such a pioneer, that coming from a proto-Zionist background, she had a huge influence on proto-Zionism.

But as I’ve already illustrated, she had a huge influence on many, many Jews. The fact that people like Ben Yehuda, who really forged a language, he was the one who created modern Hebrew as a living tongue. And if you think of some of the great figures who are going to be influenced, because I think we tend to forget today that Zionism was a very small minority movement, and by the time she writes “Daniel Deronda” in 1876, the word has not even been invented. It’s interesting also, she’s writing the book in a decade which is experiencing the rise of racial antisemitism, the term is first coined in Germany in 1878, two years after she writes “Daniel Deronda”. And I think that’s important too, look, the ideas behind it were already there, sort of pseudo-scientific ideas that the world is divided into races, she was totally aware of all of this. And she, as this incredibly smart woman who, she really lived her own life. She had thrown away religion in many ways, she was not an evangelical, she wasn’t really a Christian anymore, she was an agnostic, she was a free thinker. And she’s looking at the Jews more as a historic people who gave the world the great wisdom of the Torah, and basically she is saying what Disraeli’s later going to say, and for completely different reasons, that in many ways the Jews are the most remarkable race that has ever walked the world. And it’s interesting, because Disraeli is going to throw that down his reader’s throats, to the extent that I expect they wanted to more or less kill him. So I’m going to stop there, and see if we can have some dialogue on this, because I find this absolutely fascinating, let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

Diana’s saying there’s a good book, “The Marriage Question, George Eliot’s Double Life”, by Clare Carlisle.

Q: “I have believed she was anti-Semitic, is that not correct now?”

A: Eric, there’s an interesting argument at Yale University, but she did say a few, and they have tried to pull out that she did say a few not particularly wonderful things about the Jews, but let’s be honest, in the world she came from, I don’t for a minute believe she was antisemitic. Now yes, she had a certain amount of money, and then of course she earned money from translations, that’s where it all starts, and also she had wealthy friends. A lot of the intellectuals of her age were helped by wealthy people.

Yes, the movie series, Heather, is called “Daniel Deronda”. Yeah.

“I’m still surprised that anyone survived at that time in his nineties before antibiotic.” I suppose you’re talking about Leopold Zunz, yes, he lived a very, very long life. You know, they were tough, if you made it through the horrors of early childhood illness, quite often you did make it.

Q: “Who was Daniel Deronda’s father?”

A: He was a pious Jew, who according to the book, the mother leaves because she’s got a great opera voice, and she wants the world. You see, this is the dilemma, she finds her father with his constricted Judaism, she marries the man who adored her, gave her a son, and she gives the son, the man who brought Daniel Deronda up, who at the beginning he believes is his father, is in fact one of her admirers, and he wants to give her the world, and she says, “What you would do for me is to bring my baby son up as your own,” and he does. So Daniel Deronda has the perfect English education, and in a way, quote, unquote, does that make him more fitting to lead the Jews You know, fascinating, if you think about the world of Theodore Herzl, Theodore Herzl, who was greeted by some almost as a Messiah figure, he was an acculturated Jew. He was born in Budapest, he lived in Vienna, he went to the university, he went to Vienna when he was 20. He went to the, when he was 19, beg your pardon, he went to the University of Vienna, he believed in assimilation in the beginning. He belonged to a student society, he believed that the answer to the Jews was to convert, and it’s only slowly, he’s an international journalist, he’s married to a rich woman, and it’s only slowly that he realises his answer has got to be the Jewish state. And it’s a minor, minor, it’s very much minor in the Jewish world, Zionism, really up until even after the Balfour Declaration. You know, in 1933 there were only 215,000 Jews in Palestine out of a world population of 18 million.

Oh, I’m sorry, Ruth Wisse is Canadian, I apologise, Shelley, a lovely point, “Did Eliot mean to make Daniel a Moses figure? In a way, yes, I suppose she did. She knew her Bible.

This is Emily Heller, hi, I haven’t heard from you for a while. "Read ‘Daniel Deronda’ as a young woman when I was devouring the classics, and to have experienced myself acknowledged and seen as a Jew was astonishing. It remains a favourite, and I thank you for your comprehensive review.” Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, I loved the book. Look, it didn’t get wonderful reviews compared with “Adam Bede” and “Silas Marner”. And if you read the reviews, the majority of them prefer the Gwendolen Harleth story. You know, the beauty who has her comeuppance, and of course the man she marries, Grandcourt, is pure evil. And that’s the story, and that’s why I didn’t show you any clips, because the only clips I could get were about her, and not about the Jewish side, but it is on Prime. And there was an earlier version, I think in the ‘70s, I don’t know if it’s still available, where Robert Hardy plays the evil Grandcourt, a brilliant, brilliant version of it. It’s really a story worth reading.

This is Donnie, “When Herzl visited England, he was treated like a rockstar, they say. the public conflated Herzl with the dashing Daniel Deronda, whose physical description was not unlike Herzl’s appearance. One could make the point there was a direct line between George Eliot’s novel and the Balfour Declaration. 'DD’ was a popular book in England, and surely contributed to positive attitudes to Zionism amongst the Brits.” Totally agree with you, Donnie, yes, of course. Because look, George Eliot is a very important writer, and we’ve already established how important proto-Zionism was. I’d like to distinguish between two kinds of proto-Zionism, there’s one that believed that the Jews had to go back to the land so that Jesus could come again, Messianism, but there was another kind of proto-Zionism where the Jews no longer had to convert. But also, don’t forget, with particularly with low church, the Bible readers, I was reading Lloyd George for another lecture I’m giving, and I was reading how he was actually saying, “I knew far more of the valleys of the land of Israel than I did of the valleys of Wales by the time I was three years old.” And they took biblical names, so there’s this association, and yes, of course, I think the fact that Herzl was so imposing, it was a plus, we got to admit it, it was a plus. So yes, yes, and the fact that it influenced so many people who made such an impact on the Jewish world.

The fact that it’s reviewed by rabbis… Oh, and I didn’t mention, it was translated very quickly into many languages, it was translated into Yiddish, it was translated into at least a dozen languages within 10 years of it being published, and I think many of the people who read it would’ve been Jews abroad, fascinated by it. Look, one of England’s top novelists takes a Jew as a hero, that is something.

Yes, you have “Ivanhoe”, you have the image of Rebecca in “Ivanhoe”, but it’s much more complex, because you can read Rebecca in “Ivanhoe” as if you like the seductress, the Jewish temptress, is she a real character, or is she part of the whole Lilith tradition? Wonder what Later writers Virginia Wolf, T.S. Eliot thought of “Daniel Deronda”. Oh, you are going down a long, long path on that, Yehudith. We are very fortunate that Brian Chayette, who’s professor of Jewish literature, is coming in to talk about the melting pot, Israel’s annual melting pot, which I very much, he’s the one to ask that question of. I would imagine T.S. Eliot didn’t think much. I was actually at Virginia Wolf’s lighthouse the other day, I was in Cornwall, sitting on the cliffs thinking about her. Oh god, she was a complicated character, not a very nice character. She married a Jew and was horrible to him.

Yes, Rod is saying, “I was intrigued to hear you mention that Eliot picked up on the theme generation to generation, which sort often used in Jewish writing, l'dor v'dor.” Yes, think about it, look, she knew two huge Jewish intellectuals. Also, she translated Spinoza. In order to translate Spinoza, because of the woman she was, she would’ve delved into his philosophy, and never forget that even though he was excommunicated, Spinoza came from a Jewish background, she would’ve gone deeper and deeper. She understood the pull of assimilation, she understood the pull of the outside work. On one level, “Daniel Deronda” is about the choices that Jews make. His mother, the beautiful singer chose the world, and she chose the world for her son. And the irony is, her son chooses the other world, which really was the dream of his father and grandfather, because he meets Mordecai, marries Mirah, and of course he has a Jewish ceremony when he marries Mirah, he marries Mirah under the chuppah, it’s the final scene.

Abigail, “Reminds me of Moses, who was raised in the court of the Pharaoh.” Yes.

Q: Tamara, “Daniel’s mother thinks she has done the best thing for her son by liberating him from Judaism, can you comment about how prevalent such a view was at the time we find the women in the salons of Berlin?”

A: Yes, of course Tamara, it’s all around the same time. You’ve got to remember what happened historically, the Enlightenment, it’s the ideas of the Enlightenment that led to Moses Mendelssohn. Moses Mendelssohn, who is the first Jew to cross from the world of the ghetto to the European Enlightenment, he was unusual, because he was a true Jewish scholar, but he becomes one of Germany’s philosophers. But then think what happens in Germany. In France, the French Revolution, the French Revolution liberates the Jews at a price, which is compounded by Napoleon Sanhedrin. When Napoleon called together the Jews of the countries that he’d conquered in France, he posed them 12 questions, and basically this is what Count Mole said, to the Jews as individuals, everything, to Israel as a nation, nothing, so give up your ideas of nationhood. And also what Napoleon wanted is that Judaism become more and more lightly worn. Now, let’s go onto your son on Jewesses. Emancipation in Prussia, but when Napoleon’s army conquered parts of Germany, he liberated the ghettos, the street of the ghettos, the street of the Jews becomes Via Libera, but he’s defeated. And many of the princes who have regained power, they want to stop the French Revolution, so many of the rights awarded Jews were taken away.

And also, the salon Jewesses, who were they? They were the wives and daughters of the wealthy bankers of Berlin, and many other places, who the rulers needed, and they’re mixing in gentile society, and they’re falling in love with it. It’s the uneven. And so, it’s all part of the same thing. Leopold Zunz, I mentioned him because he founded der Wissenschaft, but he saw how many Jews were assimilating, and he wanted to hold back the tide. He wanted to make Judaism more scientific, more historical, he didn’t like the way Judaism was being taught in the Chaderim, he needed to bring it up to modernity. He was a modern Jew. So there are so many tensions, and what is brilliant about “Daniel Deronda”, what is brilliant about George Eliot, she’d taken them all in. And her genius is, she wields it into a novel, which as I said, was one of the least popular of her novels, because of the Jewish theme a lot of English people felt uneasy with it, what is she up to? But she was an outsider though, wasn’t she? Maybe you need to be an outsider, she was a woman against the time. Look, think about it, she went against her father, she married, she didn’t marry, she lived with a man who was not officially her husband, she wrote under a male name, because that’s the only way she thought she could be published, but she’s the editor of a radical review, she mixes with some of the greatest minds of Europe and America. This is the woman who is herself an outsider. You saw her face, she’s not a pretty, conventional Victorian woman, she’s not hanging around thinking about getting a husband, because that’s what was expected of her class. She’s middle class, remember. So I think she understood outsiderness.

This is from Barbara, “A Jewish friend grew up in Eliot’s house in the 1970s London. I can call to mind a virtually unchanged house with its wonderful comfortable feeling and lovely back garden. Visiting there as a teacher of English literature was a kind of trip to literary heaven.” Oh Barbara, how wonderful for you. It was in Surrey, wasn’t it?

This is Jeffrey Ben Nathan, “Emanuel Deutsch was an extremely important influence on George Eliot, he taught her Hebrew and Semitic languages. He’s written up in Norman Lebrecht’s ‘Genius & Anxiety’. You may have mentioned this.” Yes, I interviewed Norman, of course, and that book is another important book you should read, it’s really, really good. And he looks at Jews from 1847 onwards. And many of the dilemmas that appear in “Daniel Deronda” are covered in his book.

“Nowadays, if you were writing "Daniel Deronda” or “Ivanhoe”, there would’ve been an intermarriage.“ Not necessarily, not necessarily. Yes, you can see, this is Abigail, very profound, "Daniel Deronda” is about the choices George Eliot had to make in her own life. Yes, to an extent she made some big choices. But to Daniel, was it a choice? He made it very willingly, didn’t he? He fell in love with, he meets the super Jew. I think that question on antisemitism, scholars have said that he wasn’t that kind to the “ordinary”, inverted commas, Jewish family he first came across, who had that magnificent border Mordecai, the visionary, that she’s interested in those Jewish intellectuals. And she does say that they’ve been downgraded, which was very much the view of so many English people. If you read McCauley, for example, on Jewish emancipation, fascinating.

Q: Rod. “Did I see stones on Karl Marx’s tombstone?,” asks Rob.

A: You know, I didn’t notice. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Wouldn’t that be interesting? I put stones on Disraeli’s, but I would never go that far for Karl.

This is from Simon Shapiro, King David School in Joburg, “We studied one George Eliot novel, "Silas Marner”. How sad they didn’t choose Daniel Deronda, or even tell about it and recommend that we read it as well. And that’s at a Jewish school, how odd. We also studied the French Revolution, weren’t taught the significance of that for Jews. Oh, that’s fabulous. I love it. I love it. Anyway, that’s all, but what I am going to do, because I think Disraeli as a novelist is also something we should deal with. And really, as usual, I did, this was too important to deal with quickly.

So I hope those of you who haven’t read “Daniel Deronda” will read it, it is a good read. And have a look at Prime, it’s the modern version. And as I said, I found it fascinating that Vanessa Redgrave played Gwendolen Harleth in the stage version, which I never saw. Anyway, I wish you all good evening, and I’ll see you next week.