Menachem Mendel

“The surroundings were of Brompton, but the voice might have come from a Rabbi transmitting the sentences of an elder time to be registered in Babli-by which (to our ears) affectionate-sounding diminutive is meant the voluminous Babylonian Talmud. ‘The Omnipresent,’ said a Rabbi, ‘is occupied in making marriages.’ The levity of the saying lies in the ear of him who hears it; for by marriage the speaker meant all the wondrous combinations of the universe whose issue makes our good and evil.” Daniel Deronda, chap. 62

Almost one hundred and thirty after it was published, the Victorian author George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, is still the subject of controversy. Her enthusiastic depiction of Jews and Zionism continues to be the subject of much discussion. In his review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, Lawrence Grossman described Eliot’s understanding of Zionism and the modern Jewish condition:

Awed by the religious history of the Jewish people, Eliot ascribed the deficiencies of contemporary Jewish life — the distorted occupational structure, the sometimes questionable financial practices and occasional uncouthness — to the condition of living for centuries as a repressed minority within Christian society. Return to a restored Jewish homeland — the groundwork prepared by future Daniel Derondas — would bring a new flowering of Judaism and the Jewish people, a nation forged by combining ancient spiritual truths with the best of modern culture.

Many have written about Eliot and Judaism. A recent treatment is Himmelfarb’s book, and one should also see William Baker’s George Eliot and Judaism (very hard to get a hold of). In Baker’s introduction, he wrote about the first time that he read Daniel Deronda.

The origins of this study rest in the Spring of 1962 when the author picked up a paperback version of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. With breaks nearly for going to the toilet he devoured the work within twenty-four hours and for weeks after he walked around as if the ground had been cut away from his feet. Such a reading aroused a Deronda type response in setting the reader to ask questions about his own dimly realized origins and nine years later he wandered in the footsteps of Mirah and Deronda to the East. In the meantime he had perhaps found some answers to one of the many questions raised by that traumatic reading: how did George Eliot know so much about the Jews, where did she get her information from?

I want to address Eliot’s knowledge about the Talmud, although any novel that begins a chapter (42) with a quote in German from Leopold Zunz’s Die Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters, deserves more attention than this short post can offer.

In a letter to Sara Hennel from October 20, 1867, Eliot wrote:

Before I got your letter, I was about to write to you and direct your attention to an article in the forthcoming (October) number of the Quarterly Review on the Talmud. You really must go out of your way to read it. It is writen by one of the greatest Oriental scholars,-the man among living men who probably knows the most about the Talmud; and you will appreciate the pregnancy of the article. There are also beautiful soul-cheering things selected for quotation.

Eliot was referring to an article on the Talmud by Emanuel Deutsch, who worked at the British Museum. Himmelfarb wrote that Eliot’s meeting of Deutsch in 1866 was “the decisive event in [her] initiation into the Jewish question.” Deutsch’s influence on Eliot was also discussed in this article.

Two of the most important sources of information that have helped scholars trace Eliot’s expanding knowledge of Judaism are a series of notebooks that she kept. These notebooks include notes and citations from books that provided background for some of her writing. Another source is her personal library whose volumes includes Eliot’s marginalia.

In these notebooks we are able to see Eliot’s extensive use of such books as Heinrich Graetz’s original German edition of his History of the Jews and the writings of Moritz Steinschneider. The following selections from George Eliot’s ‘Daniel Deronda’ Notebooks,edited by Jane Irwin, provide good examples of the historical underpinning of Eliot’s work.

I’ll end with a letter that Eliot wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe:

As to the Jewish element in ‘Deronda,’ I expected from first to last, in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance, and even repulsion, than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is — I hardly know whether to say more impious 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. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all Oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us. 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. 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” making 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 in 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 coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness — in plain English, the stupidity — which is still the average mark of our culture.

Posted on November 2nd, 2011 under Talmud • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed