In reflecting upon the fact that religious language survives long after the practices and the devotion that gave rise to it have departed, Alasdair MacIntyre once observed that what “we” are left with is “a religious language which survives even though we do not know what to say in it.”Footnote ¹ Some writers and thinkers who acknowledge that religious language is, for them, effectively either foreign or dead, continue to employ it because of its beauty, or because they wish to speak to people for whom such language is still living for political, moral, or literary reasons. But why a writer for whom religious language holds no personal meaning would go to near absurd lengths to construct a narrative saturated with biblical typology (and even numerology) is difficult to imagine. The question of how such a writer would seem to know almost exactly what to say in the religious language of a tradition that she never practiced is even more difficult to understand. How could someone who couldn't say that she was among those for whom religious language was a source of binding claims to truth (as opposed to a culturally important animated corpse) speak as if things were otherwise?

Such are the challenges that have long faced readers of George Eliot's 1876 novel, Daniel Deronda, which begins in the figurative Egypt that is the West and ends with an anticipated journey to the East to begin the process of rebuilding a national Jewish center. The goal toward which the moral and imaginative movement of the novel is directed is best expressed in the words of a prophet-like character named Mordecai: “Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West.”Footnote ²

In this novel, the Jewish tradition is presented not just as a valuable relic, but as the lens through which the outlines of the “world-historic” future may be glimpsed in advance of its realization, a future in which the Jews will recover an independent political existence rather than being dissolved into an undifferentiated humanity.Footnote ³ The novel's eponymous protagonist'a young man who discovers that he is Jewish after having been raised as an English gentleman—is explicitly identified with Moses, and described as “an accomplished Egyptian.”Footnote ⁴ In addition, he is associated with the figures of Joseph, Esther, and Daniel (for whom he is named). Daniel Deronda is an instantiation of the familiar biblical figure of the insider who is raised as an outsider only to discover in his maturity (at a decisive moment of opportunity for his people) that he is an insider. The novel is steeped in typology to the point that, as Mary Wilson Carpenter persuasively demonstrated more than twenty years ago, its very division into seventy chapters appears to have been structured with a view towards the so-called Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks.Footnote ⁵ More recently, it has been argued that the novel is dependent upon biblical and (Christian) heroic epic in addition to the Bible itself. Anna Nardo has discussed the centrality of Milton's Paradise Regained (from which Eliot directly quotes) to the novel, while Barry Qualls has persuasively argued that the novel's emplotment suggests an inverted version of Tasso's 1581 epic Gerusalemme liberata, with the signal difference that, for Eliot, “the Christians are the heathens, and they need the Jews for liberation.”Footnote ⁶

Why did Eliot, a non-Jew and ex-Christian, write a novel so saturated with “religious language” that its two-plot narrative structure (with one plot centered around the fall of a young Christian woman into sin and resignation and the other around the rise of a young man who discovers his Jewish identity) appears disjointed or even clumsy without reference to its foundation in biblical narrative? As a young woman, Eliot had abandoned her once fervent evangelical faith, dismissed the Bible as a collection of “histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction,”Footnote ⁷ and, after rejecting Christianity altogether, become the translator of works by Spinoza, Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauss. To her contemporaries, she was known as a writer who was centrally concerned with questions about morality and justice but only in her capacity as “the first great godless writer of fiction,”Footnote ⁸ the so-called “Sage of Unbelief.”Footnote ⁹

The importance of Gertrude Himmelfarb's new book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, lies in the fact that she takes a historical, moral, and political approach to considering a question that has hitherto largely been explained in literary, social, or cultural terms.Footnote ¹⁰ She states the question as follows: “Why, having gone so far in the rejection of religion, did [Eliot] then make a hero of Daniel Deronda, who championed Judaism not merely as a venerable relic of antiquity, nor even as the begetter of Christianity, but as a living, vibrant religion, a religion moreover, that contained within itself the promise of nationhood and statehood?”Footnote ¹¹

In this compelling and intellectually elegant book, Himmelfarb seeks to show the paths traveled by Eliot in her “intellectual and spiritual odyssey into Judaism,”Footnote ¹² and Eliot's proto-Zionism offers a conceptual, moral, and political alternative to currently prevailing accounts of Zionism. Himmelfarb argues that Eliot's account of Jewish identity does not divide a theologically attractive Judaism from what is frequently represented as a politically suspect Zionism, but insists upon the connection between peoplehood and polity. She convincingly demonstrates that Eliot's account of Judaism is of contemporary as well as historical interest, both in terms of topical questions of interest to non-academics, as well as scholarly questions. Her book has two central contributions to make. The first, as I shall discuss, lies in its argument that Eliot, unlike most of her contemporaries, understood “the Jewish question” as a question of “the relation of Jews to themselves, to their own people and their own world,”Footnote ¹³ and that the nature of her response to the Jewish question follows from that understanding. The second, more topical contribution of her book lies in its suggestion of the relevance of Eliot's version of the Jewish question—and of Judaism itself—to ongoing controversies about the role of the Holocaust in accounts of the normative rationale for Zionism.Footnote ¹⁴

Himmelfarb suggests that in Daniel Deronda, Eliot offers an account of Jewish identity as defined by something other than perpetual victimhood. She observes that “as the Holocaust is seen as the immediate cause and ultimate rationale for the creation of the state of Israel, so it is seen as the defining event in Jewish history … Daniel Deronda … presents a very different view of Jewish history and the Jewish people. It reminds us that Israel is not merely a refuge for desperate people … and that Jews are not only, certainly not essentially, victims, survivors, [or] martyrs.”Footnote ¹⁵

Himmelfarb, an eminent historian, is best known for her studies of Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, and other Victorian thinkers and ideas, including her important work on ideas of poverty in the Victorian period, as well as for her more recent work on the British, French, and American Enlightenments. She brings to her study of George Eliot's version of Judaism her special expertise in framing historical and literary questions as questions of intellectual, moral, and political imagination. This specialized form of expertise is especially valuable given that, although the book is framed as a relatively modest inquiry into questions about George Eliot's treatment of Judaism, it gestures to a series of much broader questions in Jewish Studies with moral, political, historical, theological, and philosophical significance. This book ponders such topics as the meaning of Jewish peoplehood (with special attention to the role of Zionism), the relationship between universalism and particularism, and the notion of Judaism as a “communal faith finding its expression in a national identity.”Footnote ¹⁶

The singularity of Daniel Deronda in terms of its ambitious representation of Judaism in the English novel is difficult to overstate. In order for Eliot's project to succeed, she had, in the words of Ruth Wisse, “to represent the Jewish tradition on something like its own intellectual merits,” Footnote ¹⁷ and, more specifically, to grapple with the representational challenges of representing Jewish peoplehood for readers unacquainted with or hostile to the very concept—quite a feat for any writer, but especially for Eliot, whose knowledge of the Jewish tradition was derived from research that she conducted as an adult. Himmelfarb correctly observes that, “for good or bad,” Daniel Deronda has been judged as a political treatise as much as a novel.Footnote ¹⁸ More often than not, however, the novel has been read as a “political” work only in a narrow (or polemical) sense of the word, with little attention paid, for instance, to issues such as the correspondence between political forms and particular moral virtues, and the difference between political community and various forms of transpolitical or pre-political unity.

Himmelfarb's detailed attention to the importance of national unity and national consciousness in Eliot's treatment of Judaism is meant to counter post-colonialist readings of Daniel Deronda as a work of “hegemonic imperialism.”Footnote ¹⁹ Post-colonialists have long argued that not only Daniel Deronda but the English novel as such is an inherently imperialistic genre, the capaciousness of which is due to its attempt to swallow up other forms of discourse and subjectivity into itself in an assertion of hegemony. One wonders whether the problem, then, is with Daniel Deronda, or with the English novel itself, or both. It is possible, of course, to think of the novel as an imperial genre in a more basic, non-polemical sense, viewing it simply as the predominant genre in which most readers in the Anglophone world partake of literature (to the extent that they partake of it at all). In this context, it is striking to reflect upon the fact that there is at least one subject that the English novel, with one apparent exception, did not take up for imaginative consumption and assimilation even during its most pronounced period of hegemony (which is generally thought to be the Victorian period). “Beyond George Eliot,” as Anthony Julius has observed, “the halachic Jew has not captured the English literary imagination.”Footnote ²⁰

Daniel Deronda, of course, represents not only an attempt to represent halakic Jewry, but to offer non-observant Jews (and non-Jews), imaginative access to the experience of working one's way towards understanding oneself as bound by the law, through choice and longing, as well as a sense of duty. Daniel Deronda's journey into Judaism is inextricable from his entrance into Jewish community. His sense of himself as a member of that community begets his nascent sense of Jewish peoplehood, and, ultimately, his conception of Jewish nationality. Himmelfarb offers a subtle and politically astute account of Eliot's understanding of how the communal faith of Judaism relates to the concepts of national identity and statehood. Her discussion of the highly favorable Jewish response to Daniel Deronda reminds us that the Anglo-Jewish community of Eliot's own time, far from rejecting Eliot's account of Jewish community and peoplehood, generally embraced it.

This volume, then, might usefully be read in conjunction with Michael Clark's recent book, Albion and Jerusalem: The Anglo-Jewish Community in the Post-Emancipation Era, 1858–1887, which, despite its broad scope, entirely omits any mention of Daniel Deronda and the enthusiastic response it received in the Jewish community. An account of Jewish reactions to Eliot's proto-Zionism would complicate Clark's suggestion that the proto-Zionism of this period was exclusively religious rather than political (which leaves out the possibility that it could be both religious and political).Footnote ²¹ As a prelude to her consideration of Eliot, Himmelfarb provides a valuable survey of European attitudes towards “the Jewish question” as a question of citizenship in the work of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Fourier, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx (but not Herder, who seems relevant in this context), as well as a discussion of England's version of the Jewish question with reference to Burke, Hume, Adam Smith, Carlyle, Macaulay, Shaftesbury, and the Arnolds, among others. She then gives an account of the process by which Eliot developed an interest in Judaism, before turning to discuss Daniel Deronda and its reception, as well as Eliot's essay on Judaism (entitled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”). The epilogue reflects upon the relevance of Eliot's account of Judaism to contemporary discussions about Zionism and Jewish identity.

Overall, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot aims to explain why Eliot's account of Judaism was provocative in its own time and why it is “pertinent and challenging today.”Footnote ²² In Himmelfarb's account, there are three significant ways in which Eliot's account of Judaism challenges popular received notions: first, as I have already mentioned, she argues that Daniel Deronda suggests that “the history of Judaism is more than the bitter annals of persecution and catastrophe, and that Jews are not only, certainly not essentially … an abused and disaffected minority;”Footnote ²³ secondly, the novel suggests that not anti-Semitism, but Judaism itself created the Jewish state as “the culmination of a proud and enduring faith,”Footnote ²⁴ and thirdly, the novel depicts “the kind of Judaism that was appropriate to that state–not a defensive, beleaguered Judaism, but an affirmative, even an assertive one.”Footnote ²⁵ This last point is related to Himmelfarb's account of the way in which Eliot's version of “the Jewish question” varied from that of her contemporaries: “Her Jewish question was not the relation of Jews to the Gentile world, but the relation of Jews to themselves, to their own people and their own world… . This Jewish question was predicated upon a robust Judaism, the creed of a nation that could find its fulfillment only in a polity and a state.”Footnote ²⁶

One question here is how Himmelfarb's argument that Eliot recognized the need for an “assertive” Judaism relates to her suggestion that Eliot's “Jewish question” pertained to “the relation of Jews to…their own world” but not to “the relation of Jews to the Gentile world.” Both “assertive” and “defensive” are relational terms; each presupposes a potential source of opposition against which one would have to assert or defend oneself. The putative endorsement of an assertive sort of Judaism for the Jewish state would seem to give a broad suggestion of how the Jewish nation ought to relate to other religions – and nations. Eliot does indeed envision a strong and self-assured form of Judaism rather than a Judaism that habitually appeals to its beleaguerment or obligingly strives to defer to others by making itself disappear, and in doing so she considers the question of how Jews relate to the Gentile world as well as to their own world.Footnote ²⁷

Why an interest in “the relation of Jews to the Gentile world” would necessarily exclude or diminish Eliot's central or even primary interest in “the relation of Jews to themselves, to their own people and their own world” in her formulation of “the Jewish question” is not clear. Nor is it immediately apparent why Eliot would have taken such care to interweave the plotline centered around Daniel with the equally important plotline about Gwendolen Harleth (the young Christian woman whom Daniel saves from utter despair or worse as she contemplates the wreckage she has made of her life through self-absorption and wrong-doing) if she meant to abstract from the “Jewish question” of how Jews are to relate to the Gentile world, and to the Christianity that informs it. The structure of the novel, I think, suggests that Eliot was very much interested in both the relation of Jews to themselves and to the Gentile world.

This is, to be sure, a point on which the novel is both insistent and vague. Before he finds out that he is Jewish, Daniel Deronda observes in response to his future wife's comment that only Jews could be deeply moved by hearing an especially poignant and stirring Hebrew hymn, that “there is not really such a separation [between Judaism and Christianity]—deeper down… . Our religion [meaning Christianity] is chiefly a Hebrew religion; and since Jews are men, their religious feelings must have much in common with those of other men…”Footnote ²⁸ Beyond “feelings” common to all human beings as such, however, the novel studiously avoids suggesting what else Judaism and Christianity have in common, and the overall movement of the novel points towards the suggestion that there really is “such a separation—deeper down.” Christianity, as represented by its ministers and its laypersons alike, appears in the novel as an occasionally benign, and even, in respects, laudable, but basically impotent, or, at best, misguided and complacent faith, incapable of imparting either solace or inspiration for the future to persons who are starving for it.Footnote ²⁹ The description of how Gwendolen views Christianity is representative:

When Gwendolen most desperately needs to be saved, she turns not to her fellow Christians who have failed her in the past but to Daniel Deronda, who is to her a “corrective presence,”Footnote ³¹ a source of judgment from beginning to end: “The mission of Deronda to Gwendolen had begun with what she had felt to be his judgment of her… . Deronda had not spoiled his mission.”Footnote ³² When the novel speaks about “the great movements of the world” and “the larger destinies of mankind,”Footnote ³³ it clearly indicates that it is through Judaism, not Christianity, that these movements, including, it would seem, a mission of judgment, are to occur and these destinies to be fulfilled. More sustained attention to Eliot's insistent concern with the relation of Jews to the Gentile world, which seems to me to be an important part of her understanding of “the Jewish question,” would not have detracted from Himmelfarb's excellent account of Eliot's understanding of the relation of Jews to their own world.

In the end, I think that Eliot's interest in Judaism is hermeneutical as much as it is moral, political, and intellectual. Given the scope of her project, it may be appropriate that Himmelfarb only hints at the biblical underpinnings of Eliot's work. This means, however, that we do not get comprehensive access to the question of how Eliot's portrait of the Jewish future functions within the novel's philosophy of history'a philosophy that draws upon biblical typology and prophecy as much as it does upon Hegel.Footnote ³⁴

The question at the heart of Himmelfarb's account of how Eliot approached Judaism through her intellect and moral imagination—why Eliot turned to questions about Jewish survival and the Jewish future at a time when there was no shocking event (such as a pogrom) to prompt such an inquiry—becomes more explicable when one considers that, as Himmelfarb herself points out, Daniel Deronda, as “the last and most challenging of her novels … was, in a sense, a retrospect of her life and mind, a refashioning of the moral, social, and religious themes that had always preoccupied her, in one form or another.”Footnote ³⁵ Eliot's treatment of “religious themes” in Daniel Deronda cannot be wholly understood in abstraction from her early, profound immersion in religious texts—most importantly, the Bible.Footnote ³⁶

She wrote herself out of Christian stories that portray the Jews as condemned to perpetual statelessness or destined to return to Jerusalem only for the sake of converting soon thereafter to Christianity while refraining from writing herself into the Jewish story in which they go up to Jerusalem for the purpose of rebuilding the Temple. Her personal detachment from—and passionate interest in—the Jewish narrative of exile and return lends a peculiar combination of pathos, tension, and distance to an account of a people directed, as she saw it, from the West towards the East in a literal as well as a spiritual sense.Footnote ³⁷