II. George Eliot and Jews in her earlier writing Page 16
III. Jews in pre-1880 Victorian England Page 38
IV. George Eliot and Emanuel Deutsch Page 49
V. Theophrastus Such and Page 54
“The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep! Hep!”
VI. Conclusion Page 82
Bibliography Page 87
2
Acknowledgements
I would first like to deeply thank Mom, Dad, Molly and Alden for their love and tireless support
during this process. Your motivational energy and faith in me got me through the writing of this
thesis as well as through graduate school as a whole. Thank you for being there for me and for
your reassurances during even the most stressful times. It goes without saying that I could not
have done it without you. I love you all!
I would also like to thank my first advisor, Dr. Sarah Leonard, for her constant advice, invaluable
feedback, and continuous patience during these last twelve months. This thesis would not have
existed, much less become what it is, without your indispensable knowledge and guidance. The
inspiration for this paper came from your excellent Fall 2012 seminar HIST 367 “Memory and
the Holocaust,” which, in addition to giving me a much more sensitive understanding of one of
the most important and horrific events in human history, also catalyzed my interest in historic
literature about Jewish issues. This project came to fruition because of your involvement in it.
Many thanks also to my second adviser, Dr. Trevor Coates, for his thorough and much-
appreciated feedback on the very first draft of this paper. Without your assistance, this would
have been a very different paper indeed! Your thoughtful advice and recommendations helped
me make this thesis a far better project than it was in its earlier stages. I am so grateful that you
saw and suggested things that I might otherwise never have thought of.
I am also grateful to the following other members of the Simmons History Department, whose
perspectives, endless knowledge and wonderful classes made my experience while earning my
History M.A. an incredibly stimulating and valuable experience: Dr. Laura Prieto, Dr. Zhigang
Liu, Dr. Stephen Berry, Dr. Ulli Ryder, Dr. Laurie Crumpacker and my adviser, Dr. Stephen
Ortega. I would also like to thank LIS professor Dr. Jeannette Bastian, who, with Professor
Crumpacker, changed the way I look at archives’ role in history in their Fall 2012 LIS 443 class
“Archives and Collective Memory.” A great thanks also to History Department Administrative
Assistant Brenna Doyle, who patiently and kindly guided all of us through this process.
Also, I would like to thank the Simmons College Interlibrary Loan Department staff at Beatley
Library for their many efforts on my behalf. I know I was a demanding patron during my years
here, and you were helpful to me in every possible way. I think almost everyone who has ever
written a thesis of any kind at Simmons College owes you a considerable debt of gratitude.
Finally, to my many fellow students in the Simmons GSLIS Archives and History Dual Degree
program: your amazing perspectives and senses of humor truly enriched my education and my
life during my time in graduate school. I wish each of you the very best in the future, and I will
remember my graduate school years fondly because of you.
3
About the Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!
The nineteenth-century British writer George Eliot has frequently been identified by
modern scholars as the quintessential Philo-Semitic writer and novelist of her generation, an
author deeply concerned with the plight of Jews in Victorian England and critical of the
discrimination with which they often met. In some ways this is a fair assessment of her legacy.
At a period in the nineteenth century when it was acceptable for novelists such as Charles
Dickens and Anthony Trollope to portray Jewish characters as crooks and amoral capitalists in
books like Oliver Twist and The Way We Are Now, her work distinguished itself with its humane
treatment of Jews. Her final novel, Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, was something of a
groundbreaking work in Victorian literature in that it focused on a Jewish character as its
protagonist and portrayed Jews in England as sympathetic and, in certain instances, more
morally aware than their gentile counterparts. Eliot’s last published work, Impressions of
Theophrastus Such (1879), a collection of philosophical essays by the titular character
Theophrastus, concluded with a final chapter entitled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” in which
Theophrastus explored the reasons for anti-Jewish persecution and criticized Christians for their
hostility. He also examined different nations’ senses of cultural pride and proposed as a future
for the Jewish community a separate country where they could live, as Jews, in peace.
Daniel Deronda was highly controversial at the time of its publication. Eliot’s writing
about Jews contrasted noticeably with that of other contemporary English writers and she was
praised by Jewish intellectuals for her compassionate view of the Jewish people.1 The interest in
her fictional writing about Jews has remained steady up until the present day, and to an extent
1 Nancy Henry: “Introduction,” in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, by George Eliot, ed. by Nancy Henry
(University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1994), vii-xxxvii.
4
she is still considered a writer whose strong interest in Jewish history and religion and
sympathetic depictions of the British Jewish community was in many ways pioneering and
culturally progressive. A great deal of this study has remained focused on Daniel Deronda. A
novel of two story arcs, the second plot focused on the eponymous Deronda, the adopted son of a
British aristocrat, who, after a long foray into Jewish culture, discovers that he is in fact Jewish
by birth. When faced with the choice of marrying a gentile widow or proceeding with his life as
a Jew, Daniel elects to marry a young Jewess and live a Jewish life with her in the “Promised
Land.”
As K.M. Newton has related in his article “George Eliot and Racism: How One Should
Read “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” Edward Said’s seminal 1979 essay “Zionism from the
Standpoint of its Victims” caused a re-examination of Daniel Deronda, as Said argued that Eliot
ignored the contemporary inhabitants of Palestine and therefore condoned colonialism in her
novel.2 Some modern intellectual historians and literary scholars have been mostly positive in
their assessments of Eliot’s writings and apparently pro-Jewish mentality despite these
criticisms.3 However, other scholars and historians from the past three decades, influenced by
Said, have since pointed to the cultural stereotypes in her later fiction, as well as the strong anti-
Jewish feeling evident in George Eliot’s earlier letters and writings.4 These letters, journals and
2 K.M. Newton, “George Eliot and Racism: How should one read “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!?” Modern Language
Review 103 (2008): 654-665, Edward W. Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” Social Text 1 (1979): 7-58 3 These authors and their works include but are not limited to Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George
Eliot (Encounter Books, New York and London, 2012) 14-154, William Baker, George Eliot and Judaism (University of Salzburg Press, Salzburg, 1975) 10-230, and Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon (The Free Press, New York, 2000) 237-266. 4 These authors and their works include but are not limited to Brenda McKay, George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes
to Racial Diversity, Colonialism, Darwinism, Class, Gender, and Jewish Culture and Prophecy (Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY, 2003) 3-547, Susan Meyer, “Safely to their Own Borders: Proto-Zionism, Feminism, and Nationalism in Daniel Deronda,” ELH, 60 (1993): 733-758, Mikhal Dekel, The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Movement (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2010) 3-224, Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the
5
essays, which have become instrumental to this thesis, give us a much more in-depth
understanding of Eliot’s life from her late teens until her death and provide tremendous insight
into her mentalities. The interest in Eliot’s attitudes about Jews has produced many studies of the
development of Eliot’s feelings about Jews during her life. As a young woman, she was clearly
hostile to Jews as a religious people, yet when she wrote Daniel Deronda, she had ostensibly
undergone a transformation in her attitudes towards the Jewish community. Many biographers of
Eliot, especially Valerie Dodd, have cited her reading of great European scholars of religion and
humanism as the impetus behind her progressive thinking.5
However, many literary scholars have criticized Eliot for encouraging nationalism,
colonialism, and separatism in her published writings, especially for her apparent endorsement of
proto-Zionism. They are also skeptical of her as an author who supposedly promoted Philo-
Semitism, a phenomenon best described as the love of or respect for Jews and the Jewish
community’s influence in the world. Among others, Brenda McKay, Mikhal Dekel, Susan
Meyer, and Bryan Cheyette (the latter two who Newton also cites in his essay) have evaluated
Eliot as a writer whose work was in many ways a product of Victorian-era British jingoism.
Because she supported proto-Zionism and featured cultural tropes and stereotypes in her work,
these authors have argued that she was complicit in colonialism, imperialism, anti-Semitism, and
even sometimes racism.6 They have also discussed at great lengths the presence of the theme of
anti-miscegenation in many of Eliot’s fictional works, something about which she clearly had
strong feelings and objections. Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Eliot’s last book, an
Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993) 13-54. 5 Valerie Dodd, George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1990) 9-315.
6 McKay, George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes to Racial Diversity, Colonialism, Darwinism, Class, Gender, and Jewish
Culture and Prophecy, 211-321, Dekel, The Universal Jew,” 3-155, Meyer, “Safely to their Own Borders,” 733-758, Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society, 13-54.
6
experimental work of fiction which concluded with a “Philo-Semitic” essay entitled “The
Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” has been somewhat neglected in overviews of Eliot’s body of work. It
is sometimes treated as a sort of coda to her writing career, with little academic interest in it
beyond that.
However, many of the same scholars who have studied Daniel Deronda for its themes of
nationalism and Jewish separatism have also analyzed her essay, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,”
for its similar themes. Eliot’s treatment of proto-Zionism and British anti-Jewish sentiment in the
concluding chapter of Impressions was far more confrontational than it was in Daniel Deronda.
Her narrator, Theophrastus Such, discusses historical persecution of Jews with regards to the
negative qualities they have, according to him, been forced to develop at the hands of Christians.
The vices which Theophrastus lists are among the most negative and pervasive stereotypes
associated with Jews at that time and indeed up until this day. Rather than debunk them, he
implicitly accepts their validity when he defends Jews for developing them after decades of
enforced social isolation. He also puts forth an argument for a Jewish return to the East, a
philosophical stance which would later be termed Zionism. Consequently, scholars such as
Meyer and Cheyette have argued that this essay, like Deronda, promotes Jewish stereotypes and
nationalism in its themes.7 “[When deprived of a nation] They would cherish all differences that
marked them off from their hated oppressors, all memories that consoled them with a sense of
virtual though unrecognised superiority; and the separateness which was made their badge of
ignominy would be their inward pride…Doubtless such a people would get confirmed in vices”
7 Meyer, “Safely to their Own Borders,” 733-758, Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and
Society, 13-54.
7
Theophrastus at one point opines about Jews, implying that their “vices” (which he insinuates are
real) are the result of being disconnected from their homeland.8
Other recent authors have argued for a less literal interpretation of the work. Scholars of
George Eliot such as Nancy Henry, the editor of one of the most recent editions of Impressions
and the writer of its introduction, and K.M. Newton have proposed that the character of
Theophrastus Such, an intellectual of nebulous origins and timespan, has been treated too much
as a mouthpiece for or alter-ego of Eliot herself. Newton specifically argues that Theophrastus’
opinions, as expressed through the essays collected in the book, are in fact intended to be situated
in the imagination of a fictional character with his own persuasions and not meant to be taken
literally as the perspectives of Eliot herself.9 Newton and Henry also argue that a true
understanding of the book has been limited because Theophrastus has been so little analyzed as
his own persona. The character of Theophrastus, the fictional author of the essays in
Impressions, is a reference to the Classical Greek intellectual Theophrastus, author of the
philosophical treatise Moral Characters (a work after which Impressions is clearly modeled). It
is possible, due to Eliot’s Theophrastus having such a vague yet extensive personal history, that
he is meant to be an incarnation of the original Theophrastus. He is, however, certainly an
eccentric and to some extent a humorous personage, and, according to Henry, is not intended to
be simply George Eliot (or rather, Mary Ann Evans) under yet another name.
K.M. Newton, pushing even further, has proposed a “postmodern” approach to the essay,
meaning that scholars should treat the work more skeptically rather than assuming that its
contents reflect the absolute truth of the author’s mentality. Specifically, he has argued that the
8 George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, by George Eliot, ed. Nancy Henry (University of Iowa Press, Iowa
City, 1994), 151. 9 Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 654-659.
8
opinions expressed in the final chapter of Impressions are not to be taken as Eliot’s actual
mentality towards Jews at that time of her life, when she was, he asserts, much more
sophisticated in her thinking than she was as a young woman.10
Rather, he argues, she presented
the typical perspectives of and attitudes towards Jews of her fellow countrymen through the
fictional mind of Theophrastus Such (who is ostensibly an Englishman) and then allowed the
character to argue against them. (Although Newton uses the terms “race” and “racism” in his
essay to describe the accusations about Eliot’s attitude towards Jews, I will be discussing the
matter more in terms of culture and religion to reflect her conception of them – the word “race”
did not have the same meaning in the nineteenth century as it does today.) In this way, Newton
posits, Eliot was persuading her audience to re-evaluate their own prejudice through a persona to
whose mentality they could relate. Understanding more about Jews and anti-Jewish sentiment in
England during the Victorian era, as well as the historiography about these subjects, is clearly
relevant to this point.
Historical writing about Jews in England in the nineteenth century has often focused on
the issue of Jewish Emancipation, a movement which attempted to achieve the removal of civil
disabilities for all eligible Jewish men.11
At the beginning of the century, any Englishman who
did not religiously conform to the Church of England (this included Catholics, Unitarians,
Dissenters, freethinkers, and Quakers, as well as Jews) consequently suffered civil disabilities.
However, by 1829 all groups of non-Anglican Christians had attained legal emancipation which
removed their disabilities and allowed them to vote and hold offices at all political levels. Of all
the religious groups in England, this left only the Jewish community with civil disabilities.
10
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 658. 11
M.C.N. Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain (Associated University Presses, Inc., New Jersey, 1982) 175-198.
9
Geoffrey Alderman and M.C.N. Salbstein have noted that the Relief Acts for Jewish
emancipation in 1830 and 1833 were both stymied by a lack of support from most British
politicians.12
When Lionel de Rothschild ran for the House of Commons in 1847, his attempts to
take his seat as a Jew with a Jewish oath were repeatedly thwarted by the House of Lords until
1858. Historians do disagree about to what degree Rothschild’s frustrations were influenced by
social anti-Semitism; however, legal emancipation would not become official for all Jews until
1866, and they would continue to face other legal prohibitions until much later.
Historians on the other hand agree that Jews in England faced a political and social
climate much less hostile than in the Eastern European countries from which many of them came
or could trace their lineage. Michael Polowetzky, an independent scholar of Jewish issues in the
Victorian era, has noted that in England, anti-Jewish pogroms and enforced Ghettoization did not
exist as they did in places such as Russia and Germany, and British Jews were able to move
about freely and marry and work as they chose.13
However, they did still experience some
discrimination. Although some of the anti-Semitism leveled at Jews in England was religiously
driven, much more of it was rooted in socio-economic stereotyping. Although prejudice was not
nearly as virulent in England as it was in Russia and Germany, it did manifest itself in some
ways in English culture. Polowetzky and Himmelfarb have both written about the anti-Jewish
stereotypes often used in criticism of prominent Jewish statesmen, philanthropists and politicians
such as Benjamin Disraeli, Sir Moses Montefiore, the Rothschild family, and Sir Francis Henry
Goldsmid. They have also manifested in English literature, as Cheyette, Meyer, and many other
scholars have observed. Among other writers, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray,
12
Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain, 175-195, Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992) 49. 13
Michael Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered (Praeger Publishers, Connecticut, 1995) 23-59.
10
Anthony Trollope and, later on, Rudyard Kipling and T.S. Eliot are often cited for the anti-
Semitic tropes in their work, as well as for the themes of classism and colonialism. The former
three, Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, were contemporaries and acquaintances of George Eliot
with whom she sometimes corresponded.
“The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!, published as it was as the final essay in a book which
received considerably less popular and critical attention than Eliot’s previous works, did not stir
up the controversies of Daniel Deronda despite sharing many of the same provocative themes.
Recently, the presentation of these provocative elements have been re-examined and defended by
the scholars who have argued for a more skeptical reading of the essay and a more sophisticated
interpretation of the character of Theophrastus himself. According to this argument, the essay
should be seen as the words and opinions of Theophrastus rather than Eliot, and Theophrastus
should not merely be seen as an alter-ego of Eliot but as a realized character with his own mind
independent of the author’s. To a certain degree, I believe that this interpretation of the final
chapter and method of approaching it are valid, and I will discuss the aspects of Theophrastus’
character which I believe deserve a closer examination.
However, in this thesis I will argue strongly against a mostly postmodern interpretation of
the essay and its themes of Philo-Semitism, Jewish stereotyping and anti-miscegenation. I will
analyze these themes as presented in Impressions of Theophrastus Such and contextualize them
within the opinions about Jews that Eliot expressed through many of her early private letters and
writings, which I feel have heretofore been given a less granular and thorough examination in the
arguments for a skeptical reading of the essay. I will attempt to argue that the essay does in fact
reflect Eliot’s own perspectives by referring to her own writings, including several of her other
published works. In doing so, I will also attempt to demonstrate that Eliot’s opinions of Jews,
11
both when they were hostile and when they were friendly, were intrinsically bound to her
subscription to Christianity (defined here as simply any organized or non-organized form of faith
in Christ’s teachings) and her perception of Judaism’s influence on and relationship with it. It is
my intention to situate Eliot’s life, writings, and her final essay in the historical context of
contemporary Jewish political and social affairs, thus setting her writings, works and opinions
within the issues and events which informed them. In doing so, I will additionally explore the
idea of Eliot as a “Philo-Semite,” a term for which Eliot had a rather religiously-charged
interpretation. Finally, I will argue that the chapter, in addition to being Eliot’s last word to the
public, is also a self-revealing essay in which Eliot presented her true feelings about the Jewish
community, frankly expressed her opinions about nationality and proto-Zionism, launched her
final argument against miscegenation, and proposed what she saw as a suitable future for the
Jewish nation.
12
I. Introduction
With her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot concluded
both the book and her literary career in its last chapter, a politicized essay on the historical
treatment of Jews both in England and abroad entitled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!.” This
essay also brought to its conclusion Eliot’s complex, lifelong relationship with Judaism as far as
it was expressed in her writing. The book was markedly different from Eliot’s previous works.
Over the course of her career as an author of fiction from 1858 to 1876, Eliot had established
herself as a writer of (mostly) bucolic novels with heavy moral undertones, often concerning the
consequences of unchecked pursuits of passion that spring from the sacrifice of filial duty. By
the 1870s, she had become a widely respected, well-known and popular author whose work was
read prolifically both in England and throughout the world. Impressions of Theophrastus Such,
her final offering, would become something of a footnote to her writing career. Although it sold
moderately well due to Eliot’s strong reputation, Nancy Henry has asserted that its eccentric
narrator, unconventional format, demanding prose, and lack of recognizable plot somewhat
alienated its readers.14
Eliot’s most recent publication before Impressions was an 1876 novel, published in
serials, entitled Daniel Deronda. It would prove the most controversial work of her career. Its
dual plots concerned Daniel Deronda, the novel’s moral center and a young man unaware of his
Jewish heritage, and Gwendolen Harleth, a spoiled young woman recently married to a cruel
aristocrat but in love with Deronda. The “Jewish half” of the novel followed Deronda as he
discovers that he himself is a Jew by birth, given up by his mother (a lapsed Jewess) and raised
by one of her wealthy gentile lovers. At the novel’s conclusion, Daniel reverts to Judaism,
14
Henry, “Introduction,” xiii-xiv.
13
marries his Jewish charge Mirah instead of the newly widowed Gwendolen, and plans to leave
for Palestine with his wife.15
According to Henry, Deronda received far more attention than Impressions, which was
and is not a highly accessible work of fiction. Eliot deliberately made it a rigorous and
challenging book for her audience and furthermore wrote it in an experimental form: it was
arranged as a collection of essays authored by her fictional creation, the moralistic author
Theophrastus Such.16
In the book, Theophrastus, an intellectual descendant of the Classical
philosopher Theophrastus, presents a series of chapters, each of which explore a certain moral
quandary as demonstrated through an anecdote, an exegesis or the actions of a character who
personifies a particular problem in contemporary English society. In the final essay entitled “The
Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” he launches a defense of the Jewish people from anti-Jewish
prejudice, criticizes Christians for their persecution of them over the centuries, and proposes a
new life for the Jews overseas, in the Promised Land, where they would be separate from
gentiles and finally able to unite their language, their religion, and their people into a single
nation.
The essay, despite having themes which would have been considered unpopular at the
time, is ostensibly quite compassionate to the Jewish people, for whom Eliot had displayed
sympathy in Daniel Deronda and a few of her other works as well. However, the true “Philo-
Semitism” of the chapter is somewhat dubious. In “The Modern Hep!,” Theophrastus reiterates
many longstanding, deeply negative stereotypes about Jews, including their isolationism, their
near-hubristic pride in their own religion, their avarice and their mercantile natures, as well as
15
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009) 3-692. 16
Henry, “Introduction,” xiii-xiv.
14
their willingness to give up what is sacred to them for worldly gain through assimilation.
Theophrastus defends the Jews for having these characteristics, asserting that they have taken on
these vices as a result of having lived among gentiles either as assimilated denizens or in
insulated communities; this has caused them to develop undesirable qualities which have come
to define them.17
Theophrastus also blames past Christian persecutions of Jews for the Jewish hatred of
Christian peoples, which he claims is very virulent and has led to further isolation between the
two communities while exacerbating the Jews’ already superior sense of cultural and religious
exceptionalism. He extols on the virtues of different nations and reminds his readers that they,
too, take pride in their culture and dislike seeing it diluted by foreigners who trespass upon it. It
is here that he suggests that immigration and miscegenation often serve to sully the greatest
aspects of individual cultures, and that this in turn serves to generate greater tension between
national communities. Theophrastus finally argues that the miscegenation of peoples should be
stopped as much as possible (as long as it does not prevent those seeking haven from obtaining
it), and that this would be helped in the Jews’ situation by creating an international movement
back to their homeland in what he refers to as “Israel.”18
Theophrastus, despite the vagueness of his background, is certainly a character unto
himself who is narrating each essay in the book. However, “The Modern Hep!” is a somewhat
different case. The final chapter in some ways departs from the rest of the book’s chapters in that
it does not center on a character or anecdote personifying one of Theophrastus’ quandaries
whose story demonstrates the moral message. It is instead, simply, a mostly straightforward
17
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143-165. 18
“Israel” was not Israel then but a part of Palestine under the Ottoman Empire. Arnold Blumberg, Zion before Zionism, 1838-1880, (Devora Publishing, Israel, 2007) 159.
15
essay and an exegesis on the state of the Jews in the world without any fictional elements other
than the voice of Theophrastus himself. Furthermore, the opinions expressed by Theophrastus
about miscegenation and stereotypical Jewish “vices,” so provocative to the modern reader, are
extremely similar in form to the perspectives expressed by Eliot herself as a younger woman and
are consistent with the messages in her later published works, even including earlier chapters of
Impressions itself, discouraging miscegenation and assimilation to any great degree. When the
writings of Eliot, both private and published, are closely examined, it becomes clear that the
attitudes presented in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” is very much her own. It also becomes
clear that her feelings about Jews were, throughout her life, frequently and deeply influenced by
her own religious beliefs.
16
II. George Eliot and Jews in her earlier writing
George Eliot’s perspectives on Jews were evident in her writings even from 1838, one of
the earliest years from which any of Eliot’s correspondence survives. A very noticeable
evolution in her attitudes towards the Jewish community manifests in her letters and diaries up
until 1858, the year Eliot made a second trip to Germany and visited several important Jewish
religious sites. By tracing this evolution, it is possible to diagnose and analyze Eliot’s mentality
towards Jews from the time she was nineteen to December of 1859, when she was forty years
old.
Eliot’s surviving personal correspondence during these years seems to have been written
fairly regularly. She wrote monthly and sometimes weekly letters to friends, neighbors, relatives,
mentors, acquaintances and, later on, to publishers and colleagues, and even occasionally to
established writers such as Charles Dickens. Her letters became increasingly prolific as she
launched her writing career and widened her social circle. In her earliest surviving writings,
however, her attitude about Jews was rather hostile, an attitude she, according to Polowetzky,
likely internalized from the more anti-Jewish elements of British society.19
In one of her letters to
her former governess and mentor Maria Lewis, dated to November of 1838, she described
hearing a Jewish man singing the lyrics of a Christian hymnal song: “…for my part, I consider it
to be little less than blasphemy for such words as ‘Now then we are ambassadors for Christ’ to
be taken on the lips of such a man as Braham (a Jew too!)” she wrote.20
By calling Mr. Braham’s
recitation of what was essentially Christian prayer “blasphemy” in part because of his being a
Jew Eliot was in effect equating his Jewish identity with moral and spiritual inferiority. In
19
Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered, 23-59. 20
GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, November 6-8, 1838, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 13.
17
addition to criticizing him for belonging to a religion which she viewed as corrupt, she deemed
him hypocritical for what she viewed as a pantomime of her own, more morally righteous
religion. Eliot’s knowledge of the way Jewish history paralleled with Christian history likely
fueled this. As a teenager, she read Daniel Defoe’s 1726 work The Political History of the Devil,
which, according to William Baker, contains a long exegesis on Jewish history as it relates to the
Bible; she also read Josephus’ History of the Jews, which chronicles several characters and
events which appear in the Old Testament.21
Her simultaneous curiosity about and disdain for
Jewish belief hinted at a quiet dislike of the role Judaism played in the formation of Christianity,
as well as a possible resentment of the fact that Jews did not acknowledge Jesus as their Savior.
She would express this distaste more explicitly in coming years.
At the time of writing this letter (November 1838) she was nearly twenty years old, a
traditionally-raised, deeply religious Anglican woman influenced by the evangelicalism to which
Miss Lewis, whose letters from Eliot comprise the majority of the latter’s correspondence until
about 1842, had introduced her at the experimentally evangelical boarding schools she attended
as a youth. Her 1838 letter to Lewis conveyed her evangelical ardor: “I do think that a sober and
prayerful consideration of the mighty revolutions ere long to take place in our world would by
God’s blessing serve to make us less grovelling, more devoted and energetic in the service of
God.”22
However, the content of her letters over the next few years moved away from the tenets
of Evangelicalism, and she would go on to display an increased personal preoccupation with
individual morality and with attempting to diagnose and conform to God’s idea of righteousness
and good behavior.
21
William Baker, “Judaism” from The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, ed. John Rignall (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) 184-186. 22
GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, November 6-8, 1838, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 12.
18
Eliot’s personal writings from 1839 through 1841 show a woman very concerned with
morality, the correctness of her life in the eyes of God, and with self-examination. Her letters to
her friends and family members were frequently occupied with detailing her efforts to serve God
to the best of her ability while demonstrating an impressive knowledge of Scripture and Biblical
verse. Her spiritual life was in a sense very extroverted, as her inner dialogue about her moral
shortcomings, her belief in God’s teachings and her attempts to perfect herself was completely
accessible in her letters. She appeared to see her correspondents both as her spiritual confidants
and as confederates in her quest towards moral and religious absolution. However, she also wrote
of her wide-ranging and analytical reading about religion, including many essays on Church
history, Christian history and philosophy, various sermons and lectures, and Biblical
commentary.23
Additionally, she mentioned her study of sciences, such as geology and mathematics, and
languages such as Italian, German, and even Latin. She also mentioned reading of the works of
Shakespeare and Voltaire, poets like Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott; and Classical works by
authors such as Aesop, Cicero, and Phaedrus.24
It is very likely that her reading of these authors
(as well as her impressive knowledge of the sciences of natural world and the languages in which
those sciences were written) took her further away from Evangelicalism. The ideas she
encountered in her reading of romantic humanism challenged traditional religious conformity
23
George Eliot relates to Maria Lewis some of her religious readings, GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, August 12, 1840, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 62-64. 24
George Eliot lists to Martha Jackson some of the subjects she is learning on her own, GE to Martha Jackson, Griff, February [?] 1840, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 38.
19
and promoted the study and even the worship of the natural world, philosophies which would
influence (although not dictate) her later religious beliefs.25
In February of 1842, at the age of twenty-two, she wrote a letter to her father Robert
Evans from where she was staying in Foleshill, England, informing him of her newfound
apostasy.26
The letter contained her explanation for leaving the Church of England, which
pertained to her objection to certain “Jewish notions:”
“As all my efforts in conversation have hitherto failed in making you aware of the real
nature of my sentiments, I am induced to try if I can express myself more clearly on
paper so that both I in writing and you in reading may have our judgements unobstructed
by feeling, which they can hardly be when we are together. I wish entirely to remove
from your mind the false notion that I am inclined visibly to unite myself with any
Christian community, or that I have any affinity in opinion with Unitarians more than
with other classes of believers in the divine authority of the books comprising the Jewish
and Christian Scriptures. I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth
and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral
teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his
life and drawn as to its materials from Jewish notions to be most dishonourable to God
and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness.” 128-130
Eliot had also written a month earlier (about the same time she began refusing to accompany her
father to Mass) to her friend and neighbor Mrs. Abijah Hill Pears that she wished “to be among
25
Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 49-57 26
George Eliot, GE letter to Robert Evans, Foleshill, February 28, 1842, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 128-130.
20
the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth’s Holy Sepulchre free from a
usurped domination.”27
Her language in both letters is revealing of her interpretation of
Judaism’s influence on Christianity as a corrupting one. Her letter to Mrs. Pears indicated a clear
dissatisfaction with Protestantism and specifically Anglicanism, which was the implied “usurped
domination.” In addition to hinting at her increased leanings towards religious freethinking, it is
clear from her letter to her father that the “usurping” element was both Christian and Jewish
Scriptures. She reiterated her opinion of Jewish Scripture as being inherently corrupt or at least
misleading when she wrote that Jewish “notions” not only go against the will of God but are
insidious to the welfare of society as a whole. This demonstrated that her opinion of Judaism was
indeed bound to the nature of the relationship she believed it to have with Judaism; Theophrastus
Such makes a similar connection between the two religions in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”
and thus establishes a mental and spiritual link between himself and Eliot.28
Eliot’s defection from organized religion was the result of her years of reading, personal
reflection, and, most recently, her acquaintance with the religiously nonconformist Bray family,
whom she met in Foleshill in November of 1841. The father of the Bray family, Charles Bray,
was a positivist, believing that the only true knowledge is derived from scientific study. The
Hennells, a closely related family who were also friendly with Eliot, were highly intellectual
Unitarians whose son Charles Hennell wrote An Inquiry concerning the Origins of Christianity, a
book proposing that no miracles had been present in the creation of Christianity (something
which the early Jewish and Christian writings contradicted). Scholar Gordon Haight argues that
27
GE to Mrs. Abijah Hill Pears, Foleshill, January 28, 1842, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 125. 28
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143-165.
21
Eliot’s reading of this book had a profound effect on her and her perception of religion.29
Gertrude Himmelfarb furthermore posits that the members of the agnostic Bray family
encouraged Eliot, with their own example, to break away from traditional religion and explore it
in a more secular sense by studying religious texts.30
When encouraged to take the opportunity to
explore her own religious beliefs more deeply, she seized upon it to learn more about the
religious relationship between Judaism and Christianity, thus demonstrating that this information
potentially held a strong interest for her in the way of her religious beliefs. As evident in Eliot’s
letters, the books that she read during this period tellingly had an impact on both her perspective
on organized Christianity and her sentiment towards Jews and Judaism.
As seen in her 1838 letter describing Mr. Braham’s “blasphemy,” her feelings about the
Jewish religion and its interactions with Christianity were dismissive well before she met the
Brays in 1841 and began to explore religious non-conformity. After reading the Jewish texts
which informed Christian thought, doctrine and theology, her anti-Jewish sentiments were even
stronger. Her citation of “Jewish notions” as elements which could do harm to Christian society
demonstrated that she did blame Judaism at least in part as the foundation of the flaws she saw in
her own religion. Eliot’s decision to leave the Church of England, criticize Judaism, and indeed
reject all organized religion was certainly affected by her radical interests and her reading of a
variety of humanist texts and religious skepticism. She wrote that the early Scriptures of both
Christianity and Judaism were “of mingled truth and fiction;” this showed that she believed that
the nature of the corruption of Christianity lay in early religious mythologies which misled its
29
Gordon Haight, “George Eliot and her Correspondents,” in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) lv-lvi. 30
Himmelfarb argues that this led Eliot to read works such as the Talmud, the writings of the Medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and German Biblical criticism that included some very subversive exegeses about the two Testaments. Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 51.
22
adherents with false teachings. Newton’s arguments do not address Eliot’s preoccupation with
Christianity and the purity of her religious beliefs, which is crucial to understanding her
mentality about Jews. The connection between Jews and her own Christian beliefs would arise
again and again, each time establishing a relationship between how she felt about the two
religions and the Jewish role in the advent and promulgation of Christianity.
In 1843, Eliot began reading the works of Baruch Spinoza, the Austrian-Jewish
philosopher who had written critically about what he perceived as the arrogance of the Jews for
considering themselves the “Chosen People” of God, a belief which he claimed only discouraged
the unity of nations.31
She also began translating German theologian David Strauss’ The Life of
Jesus in January 1844, which Himmelfarb asserts caused her to have an increasingly “acerbic”
attitude towards Judaism and Christianity.32
This is plausible, as Strauss’ book attributed many
of the historical inconsistencies in the writings in the Gospels about Jesus’ life to the influence of
Jewish religious myths and prophecies about the messiah.33
Eliot absorbed many of Strauss and
Spinoza’s ideas, and her rhetoric about Jews in her letters became more severe than it had been
before. When writing to her friend Mary Sibree in May of 1847, she related her distaste for
Benjamin Disraeli’s recently published novel Tancred, which she believed insinuated the
superiority of Jews over Christians: “This is the impertinent expression of d’Israeli, who writing
himself much more detestable stuff than ever came from a French pen can do nothing better to
bamboozle the unfortunates who are seduced into reading his Tancred than speak superciliously
31
Information on Spinoza’s writings from Elizabeth Deeds Armath, entry “Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)” from The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, ed. John Rignall (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) 398-399 32
Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 55. 33
Information on Strauss from John Rignall, entry “Strauss, David Friedrich” from The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, ed. John Rignall (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) 403-404.
23
of all other men and things”34
Disraeli, a baptized Anglican who had been born Jewish, was at
this time an aspiring politician, a recent candidate for the House of Commons and a British
novelist well-known for his “Young England” novel trilogy. In essence, Eliot saw Disraeli as
promoting a false idea of Jewish exceptionalism which to her was not only arrogant but contrary
to reality.
Eliot did not initially resent Disraeli; when writing to Mrs. Cara (Charles) Bray in May of
1845 she described her mixed feelings about his political work: “I am not utterly disgusted with
D’Israeli. The man hath good veins, as Bacon would say, but there is not enough blood in
them.”35
She also expressed that she had enjoyed the first two books in the trilogy, Coningsby
and Sybil. However, the Philo-Semitic nature of his Tancred so bothered her that in February of
1848, she indicated her distaste for his philosophies in a letter to John Sibree, Jr.36
In it, she
expounded on her own beliefs as well:
“As to his theory of ‘races’ it has not a leg to stand on, and can be buoyed up by such
windy eloquence as ‘You chitty-faced squabby-nosed Europeans owe your commerce,
your arts, your religion to the Hebrews – nay the Hebrews lead your armies’ in proof of
which he can tell us that Massena, a second-rate general of Napoleon’s, was a Jew whose
real name was Manesseh. Extermination up to a certain point seems to be the law for the
inferior races – for the rest, fusion both for physical and moral ends. It appears to me that
the law by which privileged classes degenerate from continual intermarriage must act on
a larger scale in deteriorating whole races. The nations have been always kept apart until
34
GE to Mary Sibree, Foleshill, May 10, 1847, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 233. 35
GE to Mrs. Charles Bray, Foleshill, May 25, 1845, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 192-193. 36
GE letter to John Sibree, Jr., Foleshill, February 11, 1848, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 245.
24
they have sufficiently developed their idiosyncrasies and then some great revolutionary
force has been called into action by which the genius of a particular nation becomes a
portion of the common mind of humanity…The fellowship of race, to which D’Israeli
exultingly refers the munificence of Sidonia, is so evidently an inferior impulse which
must ultimately be superseded that I wonder even he, Jew as he is, dares to boast of it.
My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the
Jews and is almost ready to echo Voltaire’s vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of
Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history is utterly
revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus, but Moses was impregnated
with Egyptian philosophy and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein
he transcended or resisted Judaism. The very exultation of their idea of a national diety
into a spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other oriental tribes.
Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.” 245
Eliot seemed to have meant this final line to be applied not only to the religion itself, but to
anything and anyone pertaining to Jewish thought or culture. K.M. Newton posits in “George
Eliot and Racism” that this letter, despite its discriminatory outlook about Jews, did not
demonstrate that Eliot believed Jews to be, as an ethnicity, inclined towards evil; he also argues
that it does not reflect the way Eliot thought about Jews later in her life.37
I do agree with
Newton that Eliot did not believe Jews to be bad in by nature or that negative traits were
inherently bound to Jews as an ethnicity. I do not agree, however, that Eliot entirely dispensed
with this perception of Jews, even as she came to like them better.
37
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 654-665.
25
In the letter, Eliot rather presciently expressed the outlook she would later reiterate in The
Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Theophrastus, in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” describes
what he sees as Jews’ tendency towards arrogance about their religion, to which he states that
they are inclined as a result of being educated to their own superiority.38
Furthermore,
Theophrastus’ attitudes bear very close resemblance to what Eliot wrote to Sibree in the above
letter about the “degenerate” consequences of amalgamation. “The tendency of things is towards
the quicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this tendency; all we can do is to
moderate its course so as to hinder it from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid
effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius
which are the language of the national genius – the deep suckers of healthy sentiment”
Theophrastus writes about the amalgamation of peoples.”39
Thus Eliot and Theophrastus shared
a very similar mentality about miscegenation, one that Eliot, through Theophrastus, was
reiterating in Impressions as an argument for the safety and welfare of peoples by means of
physical and cultural separation.
The younger Eliot explained this to Sibree in her own words. Fusion, or national, cultural,
and intellectual miscegenation, would result in the decline of the better “races,” in a way she
compared to the intermarriage between the wealthier members of society with the less privileged
leads to the dilution of an entire group on a more microcosmic level. (By “races” she presumably
meant “peoples” – groups organized into cultural, ethnic and religious demographics.) The
integration of “races,” she argued, prevents nations of peoples to evolve their characteristic better
qualities, or “genius,” which eventually will become beneficial to the whole of humanity but will
only be cultivated by careful separation from other cultures. The “fellowship of race,” she made
38
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143-165. 39
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143-165.
26
clear, was not something to be desired. (Indeed, even to attempt any form of fraternity with a
people that was not one’s own was, to Eliot, a symptom of inferiority.)
In Eliot’s mind (at this time), simply to suggest that Jews were superior was tantamount
to hubris, and while she acknowledged the sophistication of poetry in the Hebrew language, she
completely dismissed Jews’ other literary accomplishments (their historical and mythological
literature were among the same writings which she believed were responsible for the inherent
flaws of Christianity). Perhaps most damningly, she deprived the Jews of the distinction of
having produced both Moses and Jesus, prophets whose divine authority she still recognized.
Moses, she claimed, benefited from his Egyptian education, and Jesus’ very genius lay in the fact
that he had created a religion which reversed the moral poverty of the one into which he was
born. Even the act of turning what was once a tribal religion into a delocalized, transcendental
worship of a single God was credited to the Jews’ neighbors in the East.40
In this letter, Eliot
condemned not only the religion of Judaism but the entire culture, literary heritage and history of
the Jewish people as inferior as well.
The outlook concerning Jews Eliot voiced in her 1848 letter was consistent with the
attitudes she displayed in the rest of her correspondence during most of the mid-to-late 1840’s,
particularly in regards to the Jewish nature of Christ. Although she no longer practiced any form
of organized Christianity, Eliot was still spiritually Christian insofar as she still regarded Jesus as
the one true prophet and practiced his teachings and his principles. She would continue to show a
preoccupation about the Jewish nature of Christ throughout her life; indeed, how she felt about
the fact that Jesus was born a Jew defined her attitude towards Jewry in general. In one
September 1847 letter to her companion Sara Sophia Hennell in which she was discussing the
40
GE to Sibree, Jr., 245.
27
philosophical nature of Jesus, Eliot wrote that “to say ‘Jewish philosopher’ seems almost like
saying a round square, yet those two words appear to me the truest description of Jesus.”41
This
was the first time in her personal writings that she distinguished Jesus from his Jewishness by
praising his superior qualities, an action meant both to acknowledge his Jewish upbringing and
recognize that he had overcome and transcended it. She echoed this same attitude to Sibree much
more explicitly, even to the point of completely rejecting any Jewish aspect of Jesus’ life or
legacy. Her rejection of Jesus as a Jewish figure reinforced that her discomfort with Jews was
firmly lodged in her belief that the original corruption of Christ’s religion lay with Jewish
teachings, and that she saw Jews as committing an immoral act by affiliating themselves with a
profane religion. Furthermore, she continued to establish her belief in the inferiority of Jewish
ideas with her quip about a “Jewish philosopher” being oxymoronic. Jewish intellectuals to her
were of dubious credibility, unless they had, like Spinoza, renounced their own Jewishness and
moved away from the religion whose false “notions” had compromised Christianity.
In the early 1850’s Eliot seemed to have been at least tenuously supportive of the idea of
Jews converting to Christianity, despite her own defection from Anglicanism and organized
religion. This may have demonstrated that she had relaxed her objections to Christianity slightly.
As she would later indicate in a May 1853 letter to her friend Sarah Sophia Hennell, she
supported the missions of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews; she
evidently saw Jewish people as improved by a move towards conversion. In March 1851, she
wrote to Mrs. Charles Bray about a new acquaintance, “On Friday we had a new man – a Mr.
Louis, born a Jew – believing in Christianity” as his body of philosophical principles. She wrote
warmly about his musical abilities on the piano and appeared impressed by him. Her respectful
41
GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, Foleshill, September 16, 1847 in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 237.
28
reaction to him seemed to indicate that she approved of his religious beliefs, constituted as they
were of a change from Judaism to the religion of Christ.
In 1854, Eliot made a trip to Germany with her (married) companion, George Henry
Lewes, the first of many foreign ventures the two would go on together. Lewes, a philosopher
and positivist who was, like Eliot, an agnostic, was married to a woman named Agnes Jervis
from whom he was estranged. According to the law of the Church of England, Lewes could not
officially leave her, as on multiple occasions he had sanctioned her adultery and thus forfeited
his right to a divorce.42
Consequently, he and Eliot lived as husband and wife without a marriage
license. Their trip to Germany was simultaneously intended to be a time for intellectual
stimulation, an opportunity for Lewes to research the life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and
also an escape from the intense criticism the couple was receiving from prominent Englishmen
for their out-of-wedlock relationship.43
By 1853, the year that she officially entered a
relationship with Lewes (a noted Philo-Semite in his own right whom she had known since
1851), her opinion of Jews was less hostile than it once had been; she had not made a negative
mention about Jews in either her letters or her diaries since the time she met him. Her personal
writings during her time with Lewes in Germany, and the subsequent four years after it, would
show a decidedly more respectful attitude towards Jewish individuals; it was evident that he had
had a benevolent effect on her perception of Jews.44
The trip to Germany lasted eight months from July to March of 1854, during which Eliot
wrote letters and maintained a journal. In August of 1854, she and Lewes together visited the
Judengasse, or Jewish Ghetto, of Weimar, which Eliot in her diary remarked was “a striking
42
Haight, “George Eliot and her Correspondents,” lv-lvi. 43
Dodd, George Eliot: An Intellectual Life, 240-241. 44
Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered, 78-79.
29
scene!”45
From Weimar, where they toured the sites of Goethe’s life, they continued to Berlin.
While there in November of 1854, Eliot and Lewes saw a performance of “Nathan the Wise,” a
German play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing about a sympathetic Jewish merchant named Nathan
who lives in Jerusalem and finds religious affinity with a Christian Templar and a Muslim
Sultan. Eliot later wrote to Charles Bray praising the play (remarking that its sentiments might
not be as well received in England, which Eliot regarded as less cosmopolitan than Europe) and
expressing her approval for its message of religious tolerance.46
(She did not, however, mention
the play’s strong Jewish elements.)
Interestingly, however, the circle of intellectuals with whom she and Lewes kept
company during the time they were in Berlin differed greatly from one another in their views of
Jewish people and Judaism. The family of Professor Otto Gruppe, a scholar of literature and
philosophy, made abundantly evident their derogatory opinions of Jews.47
When Eliot was a
guest at his home one night, Gruppe performed sections of The Merchant of Venice with his
family with Eliot as their audience. Eliot recalled in her diary that while his wife recited the
“Hath not a Jew eyes” speech, she “turned round to us and said ‘They don’t feel – they don’t care
how they are used.’”48
Eliot also remarked that Frau Gruppe and her sister seemed to have the
same attitude about Shylock as Gratiano, the anti-Jewish friend of Shylock’s nemesis Antonio.
Eliot expressed amusement at the woman’s comments in her diary.
45
George Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998) 18. 46
GE to Charles Bray, Berlin, November 12, 1854, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 2, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 185. 47
Gerlinde Röder-Bolton, George Eliot in Germany, 1854-55: “Cherished Memories” (Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot, 2006) 143. 48
Eliot, Journals, 39.
30
By contrast, however, Eliot had great praise for Eduard Magnus, a highly accomplished
portraitist and a Jewish-German artist with whom she spent time in Germany. Eliot wrote
warmly of him, calling him “an acute intelligent kind-hearted man, with real talent in his art.”49
Another Jewish artist she met, albeit one of a different vocation, was Ludwig Dessoir, a
distinguished German actor of whom Eliot wrote “[H]e created in us a real respect and regard for
him not only by his sincere devotion to his art but by [his] superiority of feeling which shone
through…Of lowly birth and entirely self taught, he is by nature a gentleman.”50
(Her comment
about his lowly birth referred to his father’s having been a craftsman, not to his Jewish heritage.)
She also socialized with Adolf Stahr, a (gentile) German literary scholar, and his wife, Fanny
Lewald, an established German writer and proto-feminist who converted from Judaism to
Christianity at the age of seventeen.51
Eliot seemed to prefer her to her husband: “Fanny
Lewald…is a Jewish looking woman, of soft voice and friendly manners. She seems to have
caught or to have naturally something of the literary egoism which is apparent in Professor Stahr,
but, this apart, she is an agreeable person.”52
Perhaps one of the most striking acquaintances Eliot made in Berlin, however, was that of
Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, a German biographer who was married to the German
salonnière Rahel Varnhagen before her death. Rahel Varnhagen, née Rahel Levin, was a
prominent public intellectual who was born Jewish but felt an extreme distaste for her religious
identity, at one point writing to a friend: “it is as if some supramundane being, just as I was
thrust into this world, plunged these words with a dagger into my heart: ‘Yes, have sensibility,
49
Eliot, Journals, 247. 50
Eliot, Journals, 249. 51
Gisela Brinker-Gabler, "Fanny Lewald." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lewald-fanny (Accessed on January 1, 2014.) 52
see the world as few see it, be great and noble, nor can I take from you the faculty of eternally
thinking. But I add one thing more: be a Jewess!’ And now my life is a slow bleeding to
death.”53
She converted to Christianity shortly before her marriage to Varnhagen. In a letter to
Sara Sophia Hennell the following year, Eliot mentioned in a postscript Varnhagen’s relationship
with “Rahel, the greatest of German women.” It is likely that after having met Rahel’s husband,
Eliot admired her for her intellectual career and intelligence; she did not, however, discuss
Rahel’s religious background.
According to Eliot scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb, Eliot during her stay in Germany began
voraciously reading the works of great German religious philosophers and humanists such as
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Christoph Friedrich
von Schiller, who were famed for their advocacy of religious tolerance, humanism, and religious
skepticism as well as the German-Jewish poet and essayist Heinrich Heine.54
Lewes’ interest in
Goethe, on whom he then was writing a biography, doubtlessly encouraged her to also read the
works of the German politician and writer, whom she studied while Lewes progressed on his
biography. Goethe promoted both Christianity and religious tolerance, two systems of belief that
Theophrastus himself would himself endorse in “The Modern Hep!” when he objected to those
who “insist on a Christianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial growth having a
genealogy [with other religions], but is a vaporous reflex of modern notions.”55
Eliot took to
Goethe strongly. She also continued to work with Spinoza, beginning a translation of his
philosophical work Ethics.
53
Barbara Hahn. "Rahel Levin Varnhagen." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/varnhagen-rahel-levin (Accessed on January 1, 2014). 54
also wrote three other articles on him during the same time, including one in which she
emphasized his declination to affiliate himself with any political or religious identity. (It was a
decision to which she clearly could relate.)
Significantly, the Jewish intellectuals with whom Eliot associated both during and
immediately after her sojourn to Germany were, with the exception of Magnus and Dessoir, all
converts to Christianity. This is perhaps not surprising. Heine expressed in his lifetime that his
conversion was made on the grounds that it was the only way to access cultural and intellectual
life in Europe even though he did not believe in Christianity as a religion any more than he
believed in Judaism (he grew to regret the conversion).60
It is clear from Rahel Varnhagen’s
writing that, as a Jewish woman, she felt that her intellectual experiences were being both limited
and suppressed because of her religious identity.61
Spinoza, one of Eliot’s philosophical
companions for the previous seven years, repudiated his own Jewishness to become a
freethinker.62
Lewald, who along with Rahel and Karl Varnhagen knew Heine personally,
converted to Christianity at the encouragement of a theology student with whom she had a
romantic understanding; like Heine, she would later regret the decision.63
All converted, although some more reluctantly than others, as a result of feeling that they
did not have access to something to which their Jewishness was the obstacle. This is telling in
that intellectual life, particularly on the continent, was very much defined by its participants’
religious identities. Jews, being in the minority, were largely cut off from the (Christian)
mainstream. Polowetzky has argued that Eliot’s later championship of the Jewish people was
60
Robertson, Heine, Kindle Edition; John Rignall, entry “Heine, Heinrich” from The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, ed. John Rignall (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) 151-152. 61
driven largely by her interactions with foreign Jews.64
This is probably true in many ways, as
Eliot personally knew few English Jews before her first trip to Germany and her time there
finally allowed her to better know and understand Jewish individuals. Although she did not
directly comment on the differences between English Jews and central European Jews, even after
returning to England she continued to associate with expatriated German Jewish intellectuals
rather than Jewish individuals from her community. It is likely that she found the plight of
foreign Jews in many ways more intriguing than that of those in England.
However, Eliot’s interactions with foreign Jews in 1854 were also important in that
through them, she exhibited a somewhat changed attitude towards Jews, and in particular Jewish
intellectuals, in general. In Berlin she showed herself to be inspired by the idea of religious
tolerance; in the home of Otto Gruppe, however, her reaction to Frau Gruppe’s anti-Jewish
remarks was rather ambiguous. About a decade earlier, she had rejected Jewish intellectualism
out of hand; she had now enthusiastically associated with several prominent German intellectuals
who happened to be Jewish. Both during the trip to Berlin and afterwards, when she interacted
with Jewish people who were frequently converts, she praised their intelligence or profundity
rather than their conversions. She did, however, de-emphasize the Jewishness of Heine in her
later article, and for the most part (with the exception of Lewald) she did not mention in her
letters or diaries the fact that any of these individuals were Jewish.
The second of the two visits to Germany, also significant in Eliot’s relationship with
Judaism, came in 1858, when she and Lewes went to Munich and Dresden and then to Prague for
another of their many foreign trips together. In July 1858 in Prague, she and Lewes visited the
alter Friedhof, the Jewish cemetery, which she described in an essay titled “Recollections of Our
64
Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered, 23-59.
35
Journey From Munich to Dresden” in her diary: “The most interesting things we saw were the
Jewish burial-ground (the alter Friedhof) and the old Synagogue. The Friedhof is unique – with a
wild growth of grass and shrubs and trees and a multitude of quaint tombs in all sorts of positions
looking like the fragments of a great building, or as if they had been shaken by an earthquake.
We saw a lovely dark eyed Jewish child here, which we were glad to kiss in all its dirt. Then
came the somber old Synagogue with its smoked groins, and lamp for ever burning. An
intelligent Jew was our cicerone and read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the
Law.”65
Here, Eliot’s attitude towards her experience with Judaism was once again changed, this
time from what it had been four years earlier. Whereas during the 1854 trip and in the years
immediately afterwards she seemed to understate or ignore the Jewish elements in the
intellectuals and works of German culture which she met or experienced, in Prague she was
actively seeking to explore the sites of Jewish heritage for the very sake of what they were, and
to learn about Jewish history and custom out of curiosity and respect. Although to modern eyes it
reads as something of an odd qualifier, her mention of the “intelligent Jew” who acted as their
guide was meant to praise the man and seemed to unite the ideas of Jewishness and intelligence.
Her remembrances of the cemetery, the Synagogue and the Hebrew book of Law were all
respectful. Her description of the “lovely dark eyed Jewish child…in all its dirt” was both a
sympathetic, even pitiable illustration of a young Jew by Eliot and a subtle acknowledgement on
her part of Jewish hardship, especially in European countries. In this passage, Eliot demonstrated
that she not only did she like and have affection for European Jewry, she now actively sought out
65
Eliot, Journals, 324.
36
and promoted (rather than de-emphasized) the “Jewishness” of her new acquaintances and
surroundings.
This fondness for Judaism, no doubt catalyzed in part by Lewes, could be also explained
by Eliot’s softened feelings towards her own native religion. Although she was still an agnostic,
she had come to have an affection for Christianity which she related in a December 1859 letter to
her friend Francois D’Albert-Durade: “I have no longer any antagonism towards any faith in
which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I
have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies. I have not returned
to dogmatic Christianity – to the acceptance of any set of doctrines as a creed, and a superhuman
revelation of the Unseen – but I see in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment that has
yet found its place in the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward
life of sincere Christians in all ages.”66
Eliot’s returning love for and appreciation of Christianity
(despite her preference for independence) demonstrated that she no longer saw Christianity as
somehow poisoned by Judaism. This having happened, she must also have ceased to think of
Judaism as a corrupter of Christianity. Her connections with Lewes and with the intellectuals she
encountered in Germany, as well as her readings of Goethe and Lessing (among others)
doubtlessly helped to predispose her to a new relationship with the Jewish religion, one which
became much more apparent in years to come.
Eliot’s diary essay from Prague, considering its date, seems deeply relevant to the events
concerning Jews in England. In July 1858, the same month that George Eliot described in her
diary trip with the Lewes to the alter Friedhof cemetery and Synagogue in Prague, Lionel de
66
GE to Francois D’Albert-Durade, Wandsworth, December 6, 1859, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 3, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 231
37
Rothschild, a Jewish politician and a son of the aristocratic Jewish banking Rothschild family,
finally took his oath of office to enter the Parliamentary British House of Commons as a sworn-
in, fully recognized Member as a result of the newly approved Jewish Disabilities Bill. This was
a major event in the nineteenth-century Jewish struggle for political rights known as
Emancipation, which indeed was for much of Eliot’s life the dominating issue for Jews in
England.67
67
Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 33.
38
III Jews in pre-1880 Victorian England
The history behind the major events concerning Jews in England during the pre-1880
nineteenth century, which happened both before and during Eliot’s lifetime, better contextualize
the attitude she displayed towards Jews throughout her lifetime; it also offers a window into what
Jews in England were experiencing during the same era.
The 1858 election, in addition to its significance to Emancipation, was also the
conclusion of Rothschild’s fourth attempt to successfully take a seat as a Member of the House,
having been denied this position the previous three due to the refusal of the House of Lords to
part with tradition.68
Although Jewish men could hypothetically run for Parliament and win, they
could not take their seats as Jews, or at least not as Jews unwilling to disavow their religion,
because the oath of swearing in required them to pledge to perform their duties with “the true
faith of a Christian.”69
Rothschild participated in three elections to become a Member of
Parliament on behalf of the City of London constituency, in 1847, 1849, and 1852, respectively,
and won in the General Election all three times. The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell,
attempted to create an exemption for Rothschild after his success in 1847 by proposing a “Jews
Relief Act.” This Act was voted down by 144 votes to 108 after one Lord Shaftesbury, an
influential member of the House of Lords, argued that the Jews did not need full citizenship, “for
a nation they [already] are,” and would continue to be regardless of their physical placement.70
Although Rothschild’s fellow members in the lower house of Parliament, including then-
Member Benjamin Disraeli, supported the Act, it was ultimately overruled by the vote of the
more powerful House of Lords. Twice more, in 1850 and 1852, Rothschild ran successfully and
68
Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain, 175-198 69
Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 33-36 70
Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain, 180-181
39
both times he was refused official entry; the second time, he was once more supported by a new
iteration of the Relief Act, which was also denied. When in 1858, the two houses finally agreed
to allow each to observe their own oaths, Rothschild was able to take his seat after pledging his
faith upon Jehovah’s name.71
This was not the beginning or the end of the matter for English
Jews, however. They had acquired the rights to run for municipal offices in the 1840’s, and many
become mayors and other local officials. However, after Catholics and Dissenters, two other
major non-Anglican religious groups in England, were granted their own emancipatory rights in
1829, a movement on behalf of Jewish civil rights was catalyzed by Thomas Babington
Macauley when he proposed, in a speech in support of the Jews, that similar measures be taken
by Parliament for Jewish rights.72
The bill failed twice in the House of Lords and was not
revisited until 1847 when Lionel de Rothschild campaigned as a Jewish politician.
Even after 1858, when the Jewish Disabilities Bill was finally passed, civil rights
problems for Jews continued to be pervasive in England. It was not until 1866 that the Jewish
Disabilities act became official for all male Jewish residents of England and not just for
exceptional cases like Rothschild. It was also not until 1867 that a final Reform Act was
established, allowing all adult men, regardless of creed, to vote in elections. No Jewish candidate
would enter the House of Lords until 1885, when Lionel de Rothschild’s son was finally raised
from the House of Commons.73
Furthermore, Jews, like the various groups of dissenters and non-
Anglican Christians, could not attend schools or colleges that were under the jurisdiction of the
Church of England. This applied to both Oxford and Cambridge, England’s two premier
71
Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 33-46 72
M.C.N. Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain (Associated University Presses, Inc., New Jersey, 1982) 175-198 73
W.D. Rubinstein, A History of the Jews in the English Speaking World: Great Britain (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1996) 36-93
40
universities, meaning that (male) Jews were excluded from the schools that could have provided
them with the best possible education and professional choices. This did not change until 1871,
when the Universities Tests Act was finally passed after a series of similarly thwarted
propositions.74
Part of the reason that the Emancipation movement in England failed to quickly gain
traction amongst gentile politicians was that Jews in England were still an extreme minority.
V.D. Lipman confirms that there were about 36,000 Jews in England in 1858 (the year
Rothschild finally took office), a number that was in fact a moderately significant increase from
the population at the beginning of the century.75
English Jews during the first five decades of the
century were indeed a tiny minority. The total population of England according to the 1861
British census (which was then taken once every ten years) was slightly over eighteen million,
three-hundred and twenty-five thousand people. This meant that the Jewish population in
England comprised less than two tenths of one percent of the overall population of England
during the late 1850’s and early 1860’s.76
However, Geoffrey Alderman posits that the fact that they were only a tiny fraction of the
population had not stopped them from developing their own communities, which tended to
congregate mostly in London and other large urban areas. Although they were not officially
barred from entering any careers or professions, Jews, like other non-Anglicans, could not enter
public schools or universities until the 1870’s. This lack of available education options meant
that they frequently established their own schools, as well as their own businesses, charitable
74
Israel Finestein, Anglo-Jewry in changing times; studies in diversity, 1840-1914 (Vallentine Mitchell, London, 1999) 102-133 75
V.D. Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain since 1858 (Holmes & Meier, New York, 1990) 12-13 76
GB Historical GIS, University of Portsmouth, “England through time – Population Statistics – Total Population: A Vision of Britain through Time.” http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10061325/cube/TOT_POP (Accessed on January 1, 2014).
organizations, and newspapers. The Jewish Chronicle, the most prominent and successful Jewish
publication in the nineteenth century, was established in 1841 and became the primary source of
information for Jewish affairs in Great Britain.77
However, according to Alderman, this self-reliance also served to make the Jewish
community even more insulated than before. Despite not being legally barred from the majority
of jobs, most Jewish men felt uncomfortable pursuing careers in fields dominated by non-Jews
and consequently entered the same financially-related professions that Jews were historically
known for entering in Eastern Europe. Alderman argues that this somewhat helped to reinforce
the idea of the Jew as a usurer and money-lover.78
This stereotype dominated most of what anti-
Jewish sentiment was present in England, something that often came out in invectives against
prominent Jewish statesmen and philanthropists of the early to middle decades of the nineteenth
century. These included Sir Francis Goldsmid, Sir Moses Montefiore and Lionel de Rothschild,
all of whom came from great banking families or had become bankers themselves.79
England was in fact in many ways a much less hostile place for Jews than most of
Eastern Europe. Michael Polowetzky has noted that England, unlike Russia or Germany, had no
ritualized pogroms or Jewish Ghettoes, or any laws prohibiting Jews from intermarrying with or
living amongst gentiles.80
This was probably due in part to the fact that for centuries since the
Jewish expulsion from Britain in 1290, they had been a very small and hidden minority in
England until their official re-entry in the seventeenth century, and fewer major sanctions
developed to limit their abilities. In 1656, Jews were officially granted re-entry from Oliver
77
Alderman, Modern British Jewry, 49 78
Alderman, Modern British Jewry, 2-50 79
Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 28-48 80
Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered, 23-59
42
Cromwell, and although they did face some limited abilities during the eighteenth century (for
example, they could not become naturalized citizens without converting before the Jewish
Naturalization Act in 1753) these issues were usually resolved relatively quickly.81
The country
was also unusual in the fact that it did not have any laws governing Jews as a particular
demographic; they were simply grouped with all non-Anglicans.
However, anti-Jewish sentiment still did exist, and often manifested itself as socio-
economic resentment. Napoleon’s imperialist efforts resulted in eventual legal emancipation for
Jews in many parts of Europe throughout the course of the nineteenth century. However, this
freedom brought with it dangerous new prejudices against Jewish people, especially those who
became successful in business ventures. This was particularly related to the beginnings of anti-
capitalism, a sentiment born in central and Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century in
opposition to the rise of free market economies. This particular movement gave rise to its own
brand of anti-Jewish resentment, for specific reasons. Those who subscribed to it believed that
capitalism could be overcome by stripping power from those who were indispensable to it;
namely, the bankers, who were frequently Jewish. This led to the vilification of Jews and the
resurgence of popular stereotypes of Jews as money-grubbers and crooks. (It was also fueled by
Catholic propagandists, who positioned themselves in opposition to the growth of capitalism and
portrayed Jews as the curriers of moral degradation.)82
Although the movement against Jewish
people, particularly against Jews in any position to benefit from free trade and laissez-faire
economies, originated in countries like France, Germany and Austria, it existed in England as
81
Rubinstein, A History of the Jews in the English Speaking World: Great Britain, 36-93 82
Michele Battini, “The Anti-Judaic Tradition and the Birth of an Anti-Jewish Anti-Capitalism,” under Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, 1-20, http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:10053 (Accessed on January 1, 2014)
well, especially among those who resented the wealth of (Jewish) banking families like the
Rothschilds.
This was particularly clear in the literature of the time. Several of Eliot’s contemporaries
are now well-known for the negative portrayals of Jews in their fictional works; this was true of
no one more so than Charles Dickens. In his 1837 novel Oliver Twist, Dickens created probably
the most controversial depiction of a Jew in modern English literature in the character of Fagin,
referred to mostly as “the Jew” throughout the text. Fagin, who exploited homeless boys by
turning them into his personal thieves, was also unhesitant to resort to murder in order to protect
his “business.”83
William Makepeace Thackeray, in his 1843 novel Vanity Fair, described a
wealthy character called Rhoda Swartz as “the black princess” whose father “was a German Jew
– a slave-owner they say – connected with the Cannibal Islands in some way or other.”84
Rhoda,
a child of mixed black and Jewish heritage, is portrayed as the spoiled benefactress of the
vaguely corrupt Caribbean slave-trade her Jewish father headed. (The fact that he fathered her
with a black woman was likely intended to further illustrate his debased personality.)
Anthony Trollope, another contemporary English novelist, depicted Jews negatively in
several of his works but most notably in The Way We Live Now, published in 1875, in which
wealthy Jewish financier Augustus Melmotte ruins himself and nearly his daughter as well
through his dishonest business dealings.85
Trollope, who detested Disraeli, was also said to have
based some of his least-flattering Jewish characters on him in his earlier novels.86
Eliot was
acquainted with all three authors personally; she socialized with Thackeray, Dickens and
83
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Wildside Press, Pennsylvania, 2007) 10-385. 84
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Barnes and Noble Classics, New York, 2003) 196. 85
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., New York, 1974) 3-810. 86
Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 28-48.
44
Trollope and corresponded with the latter two from time to time. She did not, however, discuss
Jews in her letters to them, and it is not known if the subject came up between them. The
significance of the characterization of Jews in Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope’s works,
whether their Jewish characters were rich or poor, was their deceptive and grasping natures, and
that their vice and cunning lay primarily in their amoral methods of attaining wealth or their
Machiavellian ways of maintaining it.
However, socio-economic prejudice against Jews existed alongside religious prejudice of
Jews, and there were palpable efforts from English Christians to “save” them. Many
evangelicals, of whom Eliot was one during her youth, counted among their duties the
conversion of the Jews to Christianity. In 1809, Anglican evangelicals formed the London
Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. Their rhetoric about Jews emphasized
their isolation among God’s creatures and made a religious glorification of their own mission. In
“The Obligations of Christians to Attempt The Conversion of the Jews,” their official pamphlet,
the Presbyter of the Society presented their mission as one of redeeming the Jew (called in it an
“Israelite”) from an otherwise sinful existence.87
Conversion, they believed, would bring him
back into the good graces of God by means of an introduction to Christianity:
“But amidst the general anxiety to bring sinners from darkness to light, and the utmost
parts of the heathern to an inheritance for our adorable Redeemer, one object has been
overlooked – has been overlooked for many centuries, as if it formed no part of christian
duty or exertion, though that object, above all others… urges claims on the christian
world far more binding than any other – I mean, THE CONVERSION OF THE JEWS.
87
Presbyter of the Church of England, London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. The Obligations of the Christians to Attempt the Conversion of the Jews (United States, Nabu Public Domain Reprints) 5
45
The Hindoo, the Musselman, and the grosser idolater, all at one time or other, have been
blessed with missionary labours; but the poor Israelite has been neglected – his
ignorance, his profligacy, his wretched alienation from the God of his fathers, have
excited no pity – have drawn forth no zeal, no labour of love.” 5
Their official view of Jews was clearly a paternalistic one. “Israelites,” placed on par with
Hindus, Muslims, and other peoples that the Society regarded as godless and culturally
subhuman, were depicted as barbaric and untouched by human civilization. However, their
mission of conversion, as was evident in their rhetoric, extended beyond the boundaries of
England and even the British colonies and was meant include Jews of all nationalities.88
The
unflattering depiction of Jews in the pamphlet appeared to assume their foreignness, yet Jews
within England were not exempt from their purpose. George Eliot herself at least tenuously
followed and supported their efforts, as she indicated in her May 1853 letter to Sara Sophia
Hennell when she wrote that the only and very meagre good news she had to share was that the
Society had managed to convert a single Jew over the past year.89
Indeed, English Jews of the pre-emancipation era who wished to escape their civil
disabilities, as well as some of the social prejudice that followed them around, had the option of
converting. As unpleasant as the evangelizing rhetoric about Jews may have been, conversion,
and through it cultural assimilation, allowed Jews greater access to gentile culture and politics.
Relatively few Jews chose to convert, although many did undergo at least some degree of
assimilation. Cultural assimilation, however, did nothing to change their legal status, pre-
Emancipation. Becoming members of the Church of England allowed Jewish men to attend
88
Agnieszka Jagodzińska,“’For Zion's Sake I Will Not Rest’: The London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews and its Nineteenth-Century Missionary Periodicals” Church History 82 Issue 2 (2013): 381-387. 89
GE to Hennell, 102.
46
University, pursue political careers and move more freely within English society. For Jewish
women, conversion would not allow them to pursue higher education or participate in civil life in
any way as they were still bound by their gender; becoming Anglican gentlewomen would do
little to change their social mobility. It did, however, have the potential to broaden the marriage
prospects for both sexes. The Marriage Act of 1835, as discussed by Israel Finestein in his book
Jewish Society in Victorian England, did interfere to some extent with Jewish marriage customs
with regards to the issue of marital consanguinity, which was prohibited to an extent under
English law but not to the same degree under Jewish religious law.90
However, there were no
laws prohibiting intermarriage between Jews and gentiles either before or after a Jew’s
conversion to Christianity.
Benjamin Disraeli was arguably the most famous Jewish convert to Anglicanism during
the nineteenth century. He was baptized at the insistence of his father, Isaac Disraeli, an English
Jew by birth and accomplished historian who had, despite his religion, won an honorary degree
from Oxford College for his biography of King Charles I. Michael Polowetzky, also a biographer
of the Disraeli family, posits that Isaac had become resentful of his Jewishness due to the
limitations it placed on his and his children’s lives.91
As a result, he insisted on having all of his
children baptized in the Church of England. Although he was converted at the age of twelve, the
younger Disraeli clearly harbored great sympathy towards the Jewish community. As both a
Member of Parliament and then as Prime Minister (as which he served briefly in 1868 and then
again from 1874 to 1880), Disraeli established himself as a highly distinguished orator who very
frequently spoke on behalf of the Jewish people.92
He also used his career as a novelist to honor
90
Israel Finestein, Jewish Society in Victorian England (Vallentine Mitchell, London, 1993) 54-71 91
Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered, 23-27. 92
Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered, 37-59.
47
his Jewish heritage. Tancred, the final novel in his “Young England” trilogy and the book which
Eliot criticized so severely in her 1848 letter to John Sibree, was concerned with the fractured
relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Eliot, of course, found what she saw as the
themes of Jewish exceptionalism offensive; however, she would write warmly about his Jewish
characters later in her career as she was publishing Daniel Deronda, even esteeming them above
her own. “Doubtless the wider public of novel-readers must feel more interest in Sidonia than in
Mordecai” she stated in a February 1876 letter to her publisher John Blackwood, “But then, I
was not born to paint Sidonia.”93
Her feelings about Disraeli, both concerning his political work
and his novels, came full circle from strong distaste to admiration in her later years.94
However, in some ways Disraeli’s life could be interpreted as a model of Jewish
assimilation into gentile culture. Because of his childhood conversion, Disraeli was able to
become a Member of Parliament to the House of Commons in 1837, long before any non-
defected Jews were able to attain such an office. He married a Christian woman, Mary Anne
Lewis, who was the widow of the also Christian Wyndham Lewis, another Member of
Parliament and a close colleague of Disraeli’s. He was able to ascend to the superior House of
Lords as a result of his wife’s ennoblement, and was later created the Earl of Beaconsfield, a rare
granting of a peerage to a man of Jewish origins, in his own right. He was the first and remains
the only person of Jewish descent to have held the office of Prime Minister of England. He
would not have had the same political career, nor in all likelihood the same marriage, had he
remained a Jew by religious identity. Jews, as men like Rothschild and Sir Francis Goldsmid
93
GE letter to John Blackwood, London, 25 February 1876, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 6, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 223. 94
Information on Eliot’s feelings about Disraeli from William Baker, “Disraeli, Benjamin” from The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, ed. John Rignall (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000) 93-94.
48
proved, could achieve highly in their lifetimes without converting to Christianity, but their
careers were not what they might have been if they had religiously assimilated.
Eliot grew up in a culture in which Jews were not able to vote or hold office, even after
other religious nonconformists were granted their rights. She was seventeen when Dickens’
Oliver Twist, a highly popular work that was also damning in its portrayal of a working-class
Jew, first began to be published in serials. Furthermore, Napoleon’s granting of civil rights to the
Jews, which was controversial and caused resentment and persecution of Jews long after his
downfall, affected British society’s attitudes as well.95
Eliot in all likelihood internalized her
culture’s perception of Jews, which would have explained some of her earlier resentment of
them. It was after she encountered Jewish intellectuals on the continent, many of whom had
often felt obliged to convert, that she began to exhibit more respect towards Jews. She began to
believe that the vices she perceived in Jews were in part the result of years living amongst
gentiles who did not welcome them. After she became mostly reconciled with Christianity
(although still a freethinker), Eliot began to love Judaism as well. She also began to see it as
responsible for giving the world Jesus Christ, and possibly also for creating the circumstances
which allowed his rise. It was in particular one Jewish man, both a foreigner and an intellectual,
whose presence in Eliot’s life helped solidify her love for Judaism and turn it into a cause for
her. Emanuel Deutsch, a German Rabbi and intellectual living in England at the time Eliot
returned from her second trip to Germany, would initiate Eliot into both an intensely theological
and linguistic study of Judaism. His teachings truly made the protection and championship of the
worldwide Jewish population a personal matter for her, which would noticeably affect the works
she produced after meeting him.
95
Battini, “The Anti-Judaic Tradition,” 1-20.
49
IV George Eliot and Emanuel Deutsch
Eliot’s writings between 1858 and 1874, the years leading up to the writing and
publication of Daniel Deronda, reveal her attitudes towards and interactions with Jews during
that period. They also provide a better understanding of various Jewish intellectual’s
relationships with her, and how these relationships catalyzed her interest in proto-Zionism which
manifested in her later works.
By and after 1858, Eliot had made a great transformation in her opinions about Jews
since she wrote her inflammatory letter about Disraeli and his people ten years earlier. In the four
years after returning from Germany for the second time, Eliot published three novels (1859’s
Adam Bede, 1860’s The Mill On The Floss, and 1862’s Romola). Romola, Eliot’s lone historical
novel, featured the titular character tending to – and even converting the orphan of – a group of
sympathetic, plague-stricken Jews in fifteenth-century Florence.96
Perhaps most significantly,
she began forming friendships with German-Jewish scholars and intellectuals at home in
England. In May of 1865, she entertained Theodor Goldstücker, a German-Jewish political
refugee and Professor of Sanskrit, in her house alongside Nicholas Trübner, one of Goldstücker’s
German students and the man whose personal library Eliot would use to perform her research on
Judaism for Daniel Deronda.97
She also became friendly with Frederick Lehmann, a German
immigrant of Jewish descent and an eventual politician, as well as his wife Nina, and invited him
to play violin for her and Lewes in April 1866.98
96
George Eliot, Romola (Penguin Books, London, 1980) 640-649. 97
Gordon Haight gives information on Goldstücker and Trübner in a footnote. GE to Mrs. Charles Bray, London, May 22, 1865, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 4, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 194. 98
GE to Frederick Lehmann, London, April 19, 1866, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 4, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 240.
50
However, her most significant acquaintance during those years was Emanuel Deutsch, a
German-Jewish scholar from the British Museum she met through Lehmann in 1866 who truly
introduced her to Judaic studies. It was under him that Eliot earnestly began studying Hebrew,
the lessons for which she recorded in her diary, and Eliot in turn edited his essay The Talmud
(which she called “the glorious article” in a letter to a friend.99
) She also used her influence to
help get it published in the October 1867 edition of the British publication The Quarterly Review.
When the article was met with hostility from some gentile readers because of its discussion of
Christian persecution of Jews, she wrote to Deutsch in reassurance: “We have been thinking of
you much since you parted from us yesterday, and have made ourselves all the more indignant at
the buzzing and stinging which is tormenting you…The ill-nature and nonsense you are suffering
from can have no permanent influence against you except by your allowing it to determine
you…you must be ultimately judged by the knowledge, the ideas, the power of any sort that you
give positive evidence of.”100
Eliot was now in fact defending and supporting the pro-Jewish work of an accomplished
Jewish author from the public. Additionally, she also wrote to many of her friends in praise of
the article and encouraged them to read it in the Quarterly Review as soon as possible. She
praised Deutsch as well, calling him “one of the greatest Oriental scholars, the man living among
men who probably knows the most about the Talmud.”101
Indeed, in a letter to her husband in
January 1867, Nina Lehmann remarked to Frederick that Lewes and Eliot considered Deutsch
99
GE to Mme Eugene Bodichon, London, November 16(?,) 1867, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 4, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 399. 100
GE to Emanuel Deutsch, London, December 16, 1867, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 4, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 409. 101
GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, London, October 12, 1867, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 4, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 390.
51
“the brightest German (always excepting you, I trust and believe) they ever saw;” it seems that
Eliot made little effort to hide her enthusiasm for him even among her other German friends.102
In 1868 Eliot published a work of poetry entitled The Spanish Gypsy, which featured,
among other interesting characters, Salomo Sephardo, a sympathetic Spanish Jew whose religion
is threatened by the insidious conversion efforts of the Spanish Inquisition. In this work, Eliot in
fact vilified those attempting to convert Jews to Christianity. It appears that at that point, six
years after the publication of Romola, conversion of the Jews had become in her mind an act of
ignorance and discrimination. It is likely that through her association with Deutsch, she had in
fact come to wholly reject the idea of Jewish conversion, which in her mind now constituted a
type of assimilation. Deutsch, a steadfast and dedicated Jewish scholar and Rabbi, had helped to
educate Eliot in the details of Jewish thought, history, practice and custom, and she had come to
believe, as she would later reveal in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” that Jews’ constant
guardianship of their own religion was not only acceptable but a praiseworthy practice which had
allowed the Jewish-born Jesus, while using the tenets of Jewish thought, to build his seminal
faith, which in Eliot’s mind had been the salvation of mankind.
This is a sentiment that Theophrastus himself exhibited when he wrote that “Pagans in
successive ages said, ‘These people are unlike us, and refuse to be made like us: let us punish
them.’ The Jews were steadfast in their separateness, and through that separateness Christianity
was born.”103
(This of course reiterates Eliot’s earlier expression to Sibree that “the nations have
been always kept apart...and then some great revolutionary force has been called into action by
which the genius of a particular nation becomes a portion of the common mind of humanity.”
102
Mrs. Frederick Lehmann to Frederick Lehmann, Pau, January 22, 1867, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 4, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 334. 103
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 164
52
Now, in Eliot’s mind, separatism like the one the Jews practiced in turn gave rise to the genius of
Christ.) Furthermore, Eliot believed that if Jews did convert, it would be an act of miscegenation,
which led to the degradation of those who allowed themselves to be assimilated.
Her letters over the following years showed the evidence of her studies of Judaism and
Hebrew, as well as of her wholly changed attitude about Judaism in general. In a March 1872
letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, with whom she kept a correspondence, she used the word
“Rabbi” as a term invoking peace and tranquility.104
In March of 1874, she wrote a letter to Cara
Bray in which she criticized the (Anglican) method of frightening people into correct behavior
by portraying God as strict, unyielding and unforgiving: “It is really hideous to find that those
who sit in the scribes’ seats have got no farther than the appeal to selfishness which they call
God. The old Talmudists were better teachers. They make Rachel remonstrate with God for his
hardness, and remind him that she was kinder to her sister Leah than He to his people – thus
correcting the traditional God by human sympathy. However we must put up with our
contemporaries since we can neither live with our ancestors nor with posterity.”105
In this letter, Eliot displayed a strong respect for traditional Jewish moral teachings and
preferred the practice of ascribing to God ideas of human justice and compassion than the
method of creating a threatening “appeal to selfishness” which creates fear but not a relatable
sense of justice. Deutsch, whose public lectures she had attended over the past several years and
with whom she had maintained a correspondence even after his departure for a sabbatical in
Italy, had truly made her love and appreciate Judaism, and had made the Jewish return to
104
GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, March 4, 1872, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 5, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 252. 105
GE to Mrs. Charles Bray, London, March 25, 1874, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 6, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 32.
53
Palestine a cause for her. In August 1874, Lewes mentioned in his diary Eliot’s “exhausting”
Hebrew and Oriental studies, and Eliot’s diaries from the same time mention her rigorous
Hebrew lessons, which she was teaching herself at that point. It was these studies and
preparations which would lead her to writing Daniel Deronda, and, eventually, “The Modern
Hep! Hep! Hep!.”
54
V. Theophrastus Such and “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”
The perspectives and opinions expressed by Eliot’s eponymous character Theophrastus in
her final book Impressions of Theophrastus Such are the subject of comparison with Eliot’s own
personal views and mores, precisely because they were and are so controversial. Determining the
extent to and the circumstances in which teasing Eliot’s beliefs apart from those of Theophrastus
Such is necessary and appropriate is a task which requires close readings of the two author’s
personal philosophies. Eliot’s writing regarding miscegenation, Jewish separatism and
specifically proto-Zionism in the book’s final chapter, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” also
reveal her mentality and implicate her feelings about these subjects at the end of her life.
In October of 1876, Eliot wrote a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe expressing that the
“Jewish element” in her novel Daniel Deronda, published in serials beginning in February of the
same year, seemed to have been met with less aversion than she had expected from the non-
Jewish public. (This was most likely at least in part because Lewes was protecting her as much
as possible from the most antagonistic criticism from gentile readers.106
) Nonetheless, it was
surprising: Eliot must have already had (realistically) low expectations for the way the book
would be received. She wrote to her friends and associates about the “grumbled” response she
got from anti-Jewish readers, and remarked in one letter to her publishing partner John
Blackwood that one reader, in the midst of the latest serial, wrote to her with enthusiastic
certainty that Mirah, the Jewish heroine of the novel, would soon be dead. “I suppose [he] will be
106
Lewes mentions in several different letters and diary entries from 1876 his protection of Eliot from the worst of the gentile reaction to the “Jewish element,” in particular in a letter to Blackwood in which he wrote: “Don’t allude to the disappointment [with the Jewish portion] in any letters to me – she only knows that Judaism is unpopular, not what is said otherwise about the book.” George Henry Lewes letter to John Blackwood, London, November 22, 1876 in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 6, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 312.
55
disgusted at her remaining alive” she remarked dryly to Blackwood in her letter.107
(Blackwood
himself did not think much of the subject of Jews in literature. In March 1876 he wrote to Lewes
that “the whole tribe of Israel should fall down and worship [Eliot]!” in gratitude for depicting
them sympathetically.108
A few months earlier, while in the process of promoting the work, he
asserted in another letter to Lewes that “Jews are not generally popular pictures in fiction”.109
)
However, Eliot also wrote that an overwhelming amount of the non-Jewish feedback
focused on Gwendolen, the gentile protagonist of the book and the moral foil for both Mirah and
Deronda himself. Even professional critics often lavished more attention on Gwendolen’s portion
of the book than Daniel’s: one review in the British newspaper The Times from June 5, 1876
focused almost entirely on the subject of Gwendolen’s story, dwelling on Deronda just long
enough to pose a few questions about his fate: “Is he really the son of Sir Hugo Mallinger, as
appearances and probabilities conspire to persuade us? Or is there more meant than shows on the
surface in that strange impulse of the ancient Hebrew who is resolved to claim him as one of the
peculiar people?”110
(Manifestly, the Jewish element of the novel was not popular among gentile
readers, who seemed to be hoping that the Jewish characters were simply unpleasant digressions
from the main storyline.)
Meanwhile, the “peculiar people” the critic described had a similar “strange impulse” to
embrace Deronda: Eliot received myriad letters from Jewish readers not only in England but
abroad as well praising her and her portrayal of Jews. Jewish intellectuals such as the Jewish
107
GE to John Blackwood, London, April 18, 1876, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 6, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 240-241. 108
John Blackwood to George Henry Lewes, Edinburgh, March 2, 1876, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 6, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 227. 109
John Blackwood to George Henry Lewes, Edinburgh, March 11, 1876, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 6, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 249-250. 110
Anonymous Author, “Recent Novels” from The Times, June 5, 1876, page 5.
56
Chronicle editor Abraham Benisch and Rabbi Hermann Adler wrote to Eliot expressing their
esteem of her work. Adler in particular told Eliot of his “warm appreciation of the fidelity with
which some of the best traits of the Jewish Character have been depicted” and wrote an article on
the book for the Jewish Chronicle.111
This newspaper, which Eliot at that point read regularly,
published over thirty pieces in 1876 and 1877 which discussed Deronda enthusiastically or
promoted either the book itself or an event about it.112
(The wide-ranging and very positive
Jewish reaction the book received was a likely indication of how low Jews’ expectations were
about their treatment at the hands of English novelists.)
Nevertheless, Eliot was surprised that the reception to the “Jewish” work was not even
more hostile than it already appeared to be, and she wrote in the same letter to Stowe her own
explanation for why she had as low expectations as she did.113
This explanation revealed some
criticisms of her countrymen about their treatment of Jews:
“But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is – I
hardly know whether to say 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
111
Quotation of Hermann Adler by George Eliot, GE to John Blackwood, London, September 2, 1876 in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 6, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 274-275. 112
On December 15th
, 1876, The Jewish Chronicle featured an article about Dr. Adler’s lecture on Daniel Deronda. Anonymous Author, “The Rev. Dr. Hermann Adler on “Daniel Deronda,” The Jewish Chronicle, December 15, 1876, 586. 113
GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, October 29, 1876, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 6, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954)
57
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 own 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 at Rugby 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.” 301-302
This letter is interesting for several different reasons. First, Eliot in it explicitly condemned the
British attitude of imperialism towards foreign peoples. It is the letter in which she most clearly
expressed her disapproval of the English’s patronizing treatment of “oriental peoples” outside of
her fiction, a sentiment which, rather paradoxically, seems to have led to her support of proto-
Zionism. It is also, in terms of her attitude about Jews, nearly the antithesis of the letter she wrote
to Sibree in 1848. She acknowledged in her letter to Stowe the “debt” that Western Christians
have towards Jews in their values and their religion, demonstrating that since she wrote to
Sibree, she had come to see the role of Judaism in Christianity as something for which to be
grateful rather than to censure and condemn.
58
It is evident that Eliot’s connections with German and English-German Jews and
specifically her friendship with Emanuel Deutsch made her very sympathetic to the causes of
Jews in England. K.M. Newton argues that this seeming repudiation of her former beliefs and her
censure of those who mocked or demeaned both Jews and foreigners marked a transformation of
her way of thinking and signaled that much of the jingoistic rhetoric from the last chapter of
Impressions of Theophrastus Such, her final and other significantly Philo-Semitic work, was in
fact not representative of Eliot herself but merely the words of the character Theophrastus.
Newton argues that Eliot invested Theophrastus with the mentality of the common British man in
order to better communicate with her audience.114
This is a not an implausible explanation, but
the sentiments she expressed to Stowe, particularly in regards to her criticism of English patriotic
chauvinism, are in fact very similar to many of the opinions that Theophrastus gives in “The
Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!.” Also, the fact that Eliot was at this point sympathetic to the Jewish
people did not mean that she no longer believed the negative stereotypes of them she earlier
described to be grounded in truth. The perspectives Theophrastus voices in “The Modern Hep!”
certainly recall some of the beliefs that Eliot held about Jews as a younger woman, suggesting
that despite the empathy Eliot displayed for Jews in her letter to Stowe, it is likely that she still
believed the negative stereotypes of them were founded in reality, and that to some extent her
concern for the community had become one very much influenced by her own religious
concerns.
Eliot began writing Impressions of Theophrastus Such in June of 1878 when she was
fifty-eight years old. At this point in her career she was quite well-established as a writer and
popular among critics and readers alike, having published seven successful novels including
114
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 654-665.
59
Daniel Deronda. Impressions was Eliot’s most experimental project; it was the only work of
fiction she authored which had no true storyline or plot other than Theophrastus’ musings. It was
published commercially like her other books; its intended audience was also much the same as it
had been for her novels: relatively educated, middle class (likely Anglican) English people with
common views of religion and society. Her reputation was enough to sell the book, which sold
moderately well despite the fact that it was arguably the least accessible of her published works.
Critics, however, did not receive the book very well, as Eliot rather acidly observed to William
Blackwood, the brother of John Blackwood: “Theophrastus seems to be really welcomed by the
public thought not by the [literary publication] Athenaeum…but I think I have known other
books succeed in impressing the public without the sanction of that “literary organ.”115
This
critical response was somewhat ironic, as Eliot had intended it only for the most dedicated and
educated readers.
The book was written to be as rigorous as possible for her audience; this is in part
because of the erudition of its narrator. Theophrastus Such himself is of untold age and origins:
he is, based on both his own description of himself and his criticism of contemporary Britain, a
citizen of England; however, he never reveals his own full history to his reading audience. What
he does tell about himself, in the first chapter of the book titled “Looking Inward,” is that he is a
lifelong bachelor and “an attentive companion to myself, flattering, my nature agreeably and on
plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me, and in general remembering
its doings and sufferings with a tenacity which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the
careless inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held…Surely I
ought to know myself better than these indifferent outsiders can know me, nay, even better than
115
GE to William Blackwood, Witley, June 12, 1879, in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 7, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1954) 165.
60
my intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward experience which
have chiefly shaped my life.”116
However, Theophrastus also states that while he observes (and takes amusement from)
the misdoings of others, he feels an affinity with the “blunderers” rather than a superiority to
them because he shares their faults and recognizes them. He explains that it is difficult for him to
write “an unreserved description” about his own character, as self-bias – and bias towards others
– almost always creates an inaccurate portrait in any human autobiography. He prefers instead to
provide, “in an apologetic light,” a few examples of his own shortcomings, and to be critical of
himself instead of experiencing the censure of others. Theophrastus relates that he has been
unlucky in love, that he has done his country no especial services, and has been largely a failure
as a writer and is not well-off. Although his self-description is vague, he makes clear that he is
not good-looking, and rather easy to overlook. (He also remarks that on occasion, something
clever he has said or written has been ignored when it came from himself but was met with great
approval when “appropriated” by a more outwardly appealing person.)
Theophrastus claims to have done inadvertent harm to causes by speaking on behalf of
them, and realizing in hindsight that he ought to have taken a counter position in order to see his
real cause strengthened. He recognized, however, after a period of self-commiseration, that he is
not in fact wiser or better than those of his friends who are praised and well-compensated, and
that there is no philosophical advantage to being ignored than there is to being appreciated. Any
attempt to ameliorate one’s ego only “fattens” it, he says. He writes all this in preparation for the
other anecdotes in his book, each comprising a single chapter, in which he discusses and
declaims upon the follies of his friends. His intention is not to mock or condescend, but merely,
116
George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 3-13.
61
as he puts it, “to show that in noting the weaknesses of my acquaintances I am conscious of my
fellowship with them.”117
The proceeding chapters of the book, as he states, do center on past friends and
acquaintances of Theophrastus and their mishaps, each intended as a lesson for the reader in
maintaining one’s personal morality and self-awareness, among other things. The characters
Such describes often have Classical names, and in some cases are perhaps meant to be the
original historical, literary or legendary figure itself. Theophrastus, based on his descriptions of
the sights he has seen and the people he has encountered, is quite well-traveled, and if he has
indeed met the ancient characters he describes, may also be somehow immortal or able to yoke
time. Nancy Henry argues that Theophrastus, if not simply a time-traveling intellectual
descendant of the original Classical Theophrastus, may in fact be a sort of English-born
reincarnation of the Greek Theophrastus himself.118
Theophrastus, a student of Plato and a
companion of Aristotle, was also a philosopher and the author of, among many other works, the
book Moral Characters, a collection of essays parsing and criticizing the personifications of
different weaknesses of human character.119
The parallels between the work of the fictional
Theophrastus and the writings of the original Classical Theophrastus are clear.
The contemporary Theophrastus’s characters (including, sometimes, Theophrastus
himself) are like each other in that they are often somehow lacking in self-awareness, or
awareness of either the role they play in the world or how they have played it, or simply have a
morally inconsistent character which somehow render invalid the role (or good service) they
intended to perform. More specifically, they are occasionally also guilty of transcending (or
117
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 3-13. 118
Henry, “Introduction,” xvi-xx. 119
Henry, “Introduction,” xvi-xx
62
attempting to transcend) or changing their own natures. As Henry describes in her introduction to
Impressions, the first of his characters, Proteus Merman, the subject of the chapter “How We
Encourage Research,” is a lowly lawyer and occasional journalist who, when attempting to
elevate himself by associating with several extremely erudite individuals, is shown his own
inferiority.120
Likewise, Mixtus from the ninth chapter, “A Half-Breed,” is a deeply pious, studious
young man interested in social reform and in supporting the poor; however, when he falls in love
with Scintilla, a wealthy and seemingly sophisticated woman preoccupied with the finer things,
he loses his good nature by following her example after their marriage.121
These characters’
stories carry the message that moving away from one’s true self, and attempting to emulate those
whom one is not like, carries with it a misfortune, loss of values, embarrassment, humiliation,
and often unfortunate ramifications for others as well. In short, any type of assimilation or
miscegenation is harmful to the individual and unhealthy for society, whether in small or large
degrees. (These are sentiments which, as shall later be discussed, were foreshadowed in
Deronda.)
It is a similar message that one reads in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” the final chapter
of the book. The title of the piece was a reference to the imprecation that anti-Semitic peasants
shouted while rioting Jewish villages during the infamous 1819 “Hep-Hep” pogroms throughout
Germany.122
The essay, while professedly supportive of Jews, is in many ways an argument
against miscegenation and its apparent vicissitudes. The chapter begins with Theophrastus’
120
Henry, “Introduction,” xix-xxxv 121
Henry, “Introduction,” xix-xxxv 122
The Jewish Encyclopedia, “Hep! Hep!,” http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7578-hep-hep (accessed January 1, 2014)
defense of the Jews’ preservation of the history of their culture. He points out that the legacy of
Greece and Italy, despite the wrongdoings of some of both its modern and historical political
characters, is held in great esteem nonetheless due to the accomplishments of its superior artists
and intellectuals; he also reminds his readers of the admiration Englishmen bear towards their
conquering Nordic ancestors and their gratitude for the labors they underwent which provided
the modern British with a common identity.
Theophrastus reminds his readers that despite coming to the British isle centuries after
the death of Christ and long after the advent of Christianity, they were themselves not Christians.
Nor were they monotheists, nor what a modern Briton would call “spiritual”; they had a strong
opposition to the faith of Christ when they first encountered it, and continued to oppose it even
when they were encouraged to take it up. The English, he notes, nevertheless still felt gratitude
for their ancestors, and they do not object to the fact that their progenitors were pagans as well as
colonizers. Indeed, contemporary British citizens could not claim to be persecuted or scattered;
they could, however, acknowledge the resentment felt towards them by the “Red Indians” and
the “Hindoos” as a result of their subjugation, both cultural and religious, by imperial colonial
forces. Yet none of that prevented them from feeling a love for their fatherland and a pride in
their national accomplishments.123
This pride is the mark of a worthy people, Theophrastus goes on to argue, and is
justification for martyrdom and an endurance of great hardship in the name of one’s nation.
While people are not obligated to feel more than appreciation for another culture, their individual
worth is measured by their relationship with and commitment to their own, and this is the same
measure of virtue they therefore must use to judge others. It is here that he truly begins his
123
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143-146
64
“defense” of the Jewish people. Theophrastus starts by justifying their pride and persistence in
their religion, which some call “Zealotry.”124
The fact that the Jews have been a scattered people
has ensured that they have created an identity which has become tantamount to hubris and given
to exclusivity. The arrogance which many (gentiles) cite in reference to the Jews’ use of
Scripture, which points to the many proud moments in Jewish history, to anoint themselves the
Chosen People of God, he argues, is in reality no more arrogant than the beliefs of Calvinists,
who do almost the same. The Jews’ sense of superiority, he posits, is inculcated in them from
birth, and thus they can be excused for their “self confidence.”125
Moreover, he continues, the dispersion of the Jewish people has no true parallels in
Christian history, and has led to many ugly persecutions throughout the world. It is here that
Theophrastus first reiterates the more hackneyed beliefs about the Jewish people to which he
persisted in subscribing; specifically, the idea that Jews were somehow driven by nature to
accumulate wealth and were predisposed by a natural inclination towards “cupidity.” However,
he condemns Christians for using this as a validation for wretchedly mistreating the Jews,
forcibly converting them under threat of death and freely murdering those who refused baptism.
This abuse, carried out by those who believed themselves to be avenging a Messiah who
preached mercy, essentially caused an evolution to occur within the Jewish community which
manifested itself in one of two results: either the Jewish population would assimilate with the
societies around them, eventually losing its identity as a Jewish community altogether, or it
would toughen and develop strengths not possessed by their persecutors. The weaker Jews, he
argues, did the former, the stronger did the latter and became in all ways tenacious and proud in
124
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 149 125
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 150-151
65
clinging to their Jewish ancestry.126
This latter faction, however, would also be so insulated that
it would become set in its particular vices, a phenomenon that Theophrastus claims can be seen
in the Jews’ love of usury, especially when employed at the expense of gentiles, and a pride in
“bitter isolation” from all other peoples and nations.127
“No wonder” the Jewish people have become such creatures at their worst, Theophrastus
asserts. The transgressions which Jews, according to him, have made against the Christian faith
over the centuries (he includes spitting on crucifixes and holding Jesus’s name as a profanity
among them), have been encouraged by the cruelty Jews met with from gentiles who deliberately
misinterpreted Christ’s teachings as a license to murder and rampage those to whom they credit
His death. Theophrastus reminds his readers that Christ was Jewish-born, and that His pleas for
mercy for those who are resistant to his message should extend to the Hebrew nation. Here
Theophrastus establishes his own belief in the divinity of Christ when he pleads with his readers
that the Jews’ refusal to worship Jesus as Savior is a mistake made of innocent ignorance which
must be forgiven by Christians.128
Jewish religious martyrdom, Theophrastus says, is doubtlessly
viewed with approval by Christ, unlike the “Christian” persecutions which necessarily create the
martyrs.
Theophrastus then launches a criticism of the supposed intellectuals who hold
Christianity to be in possession of a greater truth than Judaism (a viewpoint about which he
leaves unclear his own sentiments) and persist in believing that Jews hold no true altruistic
interest in any community but their own. These self-proclaimed philosophers often hypocritically
belong to parties which uphold the political interests of Jews, precisely because they wish to be
126
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 152 127
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 153 128
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 154
66
in a position to control and mitigate any advantages or rights Jews have earned in their own
favor. Such actions spring from a continued belief that Jews are driven by avarice – an idea
Theophrastus calls “medieval” – and compares this treatment of Jews with the similar treatment
of the Irish, who were, at the time, still publicly barred in England from applying for certain jobs
and professions.129
Theophrastus asserts that when Jews “drop that separateness which is made their
reproach;” in other words, assimilate to the culture in which they reside, they are, he writes,
subject to becoming indifferent to their own history and religion. This apathy that comes from
being separated from one’s heritage in turn leads to moral and ethical debasement, an
unfortunate truth to which the Jews, Theophrastus writes, have been particularly prone due to
their dispersed nature. However, he also states that their overall moral perseverance has been
remarkable and that Jews have, for the greater part, exhibited less hard-heartedness than their
tormentors and that such persistence could not have come from a people without the ancient
significance or familial piety of the Jewish nation. This especially, the good-naturedness and
love of family and tradition that Theophrastus tells his readers any unbiased observer will notice
in studying the worldwide Jewish community, is a distinctive virtue of Jewish families, as is their
care for the weak, the young, the old and the disadvantaged. This charity “overflows the line of
distinction between” Jews and gentiles, he writes.130
Gentiles, Theophrastus goes on to say, are too willing to overlook this due to their ancient
jealousy of Jewish success both in business and in politics, which many believe are, for the
Jewish community, interconnected. Once again, Theophrastus demonstrates that he believes
129
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 154-155 130
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 156-157
67
these perceptions are not without foundation. Instead of protesting these ideas, he simply writes
that all races have their vices and other objectionable qualities which have made them at times
distasteful to English minds. (Again, this is “race” in the sense of “people” or “demographic.”)
The English, however, like all peoples, take great pride in their language and dislike hearing it
sullied by foreign tongues. This does not mean that they should turn away those in need of refuge
because of these discriminations. Theophrastus does, however, suggest that it is important to
mitigate (to completely stop would be impossible) the intermingling of different peoples. It is
imperative, he writes, to preserve that essence of every nation through the creation of “more
excellent individual natives,” an interesting way of saying that a culture is best preserved through
those who epitomize its most desirable qualities.131
Theophrastus believes very strongly in the
preservation of the greatness of England. It is also here where he also arrives at the preservation
of the Jews – namely, in the form of proto-Zionism.
It is Theophrastus’s fear that the Jewish people, unlike any other nation, are destined for
an utter “fusion” with the societies in which they dwell due entirely to their lack of a fatherland.
This is a concern which he sees as valid especially because of the Jews’ tendency to monopolize
commerce in whatever country they enter; it is therefore the gentile responsibility, he says, to
ensure that “their incommodious energies” are sent “into beneficent channels.” Many noble
Jews, he says, contrary to popular belief, will arise to the challenge of galvanizing their people to
the migration to a new and permanent hearth and home; these “modern Maccabees” will, by
example, overcome the indifference of the wealthy, indigent settled Jewish men and build a
nation for their people.132
131
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 158-160 132
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 160-163
68
The Christianity that Theophrastus sees as fashionable, or in “vogue,” is commonly
inclined to forget its origins and disown the Jewish question as an irrelevant one. This apathy,
Theophrastus writes, is dangerous. The Jews persevered in their faith despite their dispersion;
this willingness to endure and continue is what gave Christianity the opportunity to arise. The
“idiosyncrasy” of Judaism is its persistence, and Theophrastus writes that it is this quality that
should be allowed to create a nation. After all, Jewish inheritance, the artifact of pious ancient
ancestors who have passed on to their future generations the physical and intellectual toughness
to weather all sorts of prejudice and bring promise to a new land, is something to be “cherished.”
By bringing together and embracing the triple identities of Jew, Hebrew and Israelite, the Judaic
people will create a language, religion and country that is at once in keeping with the timeworn
glories of their people and capable of overcoming and repairing the more recent grief and
debasement that the Jewish community has experienced. To deny them the opportunity to do so
would be cruel. Those who do are, writes Theophrastus, educating the world in the falsehood –
what he calls a “superstition” – that human welfare can be manufactured without regard to what
gave rise to human values to begin with.133
It is in some ways clear in this essay, and indeed throughout the book, that Theophrastus
was to an extent a realized character with his own opinions and perception of the world, and that
to marginalize him as little more than a shadow of Eliot is not entirely accurate or fair. Here, the
postmodern argument that both Newton and to some extent Henry propose makes sense, as a too-
literal interpretation of the text – regarding Such as little more than masked version of Eliot –
would be inappropriate. Theophrastus Such indeed has an independent personality. His words are
witty, observational, and at times quite farcical, and his tone in his writing, along with his use of
133
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 163-165
69
satire, is somewhat distinct from Eliot’s tone as the omniscient narrator of her novels and as an
essayist in her own right. Eliot was an essayist who certainly made use of humor, but wrote with
somewhat more meditative gravity, on a greater variety of subjects, than Theophrastus does in
his collection of anecdotes and short exegeses. (This is not to say that Theophrastus’
philosophies were not meant by Eliot to be serious or profound, merely that she infused them
with a writing style that was a conscious departure from her own in order to better display
Theophrastus’ very unconventional personality.) Theophrastus describes himself as a younger
man: “When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe with arduous scrupulosity, and while suffering
pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority as a dancing pupil, imagining for myself
a high place in the estimation of beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had in the
incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipe am I dancing now?” 134
His humor, choice of anecdote and colorful language set his writing apart from Eliot’s usual
narrative style. Also, the deliberate inconsistencies which Henry states that Eliot gives
Theophrastus (for example, he criticizes certain personality traits in one character while praising
and justifying them in another) are meant to demonstrate the contradictory natures of all humans
including while not specifically describing herself.135
However, based on what biography there is of Theophrastus in Impressions, important
parallels between him and Eliot can be observed. He is deeply interested in morality and with
chasing moral and spiritual perfection as far as he can; he is also deeply introspective, and
prefers self-criticism to criticism from others. His criticism of others is not meant to be
supercilious, merely the observation of the human condition, and his unprepossessing appearance
and seeming lack of interest in worldly goods are almost certainly references to Eliot’s own self.
134
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 4 135
Henry, “Introduction,” vii-xxxvii.
70
Theophrastus is also unmistakably an eccentric, even perhaps an outwardly unpleasant one,
something which Eliot may have considered herself. Most significantly, the underlying moral
messages which Theophrastus condones (for example, the idea that political altruism in a public
leader does not justify or excuse the individual’s mistreatment of his own family) are indeed
Eliot’s own. Eliot’s main agenda in the book was to demonstrate, either through or by
Theophrastus and his writings, her moral outlook of the world.
This is manifestly evident in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!.” K.M. Newton has
suggested that she imbued her narrator with more pedestrian opinions and perspectives in order
to better communicate with her audience.136
In some ways this may be accurate, especially in
Newton’s arguments that Eliot, as Theophrastus, plays on the conceit most English had for their
heritage when attempting to explain Jews’ pride in their own provenance. It is also likely that
Theophrastus’ discussion of British colonialism and its vicissitudes is a critique on Eliot’s part of
the imperialism of British conquest in the nineteenth century, revealing that it is unlikely that she
holistically or uncritically condoned the colonization of foreign lands. She instead saw
imperialistic ventures as ones that carried with them attitude of superiority and discrimination on
the part of the colonizers, as she asserted in her 1876 letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe.
However, a close reading of Eliot’s personal writings and of her fiction reveals that many
of the views her character espouses in this essay are indeed her own as well. Although Newton
argues that the opinions she expressed to Stowe in her letter contrast with and disprove the
sometimes jingoistic writing in “The Modern Hep!,” many of the passages in the chapter in fact
convey extremely similar sentiments to the ones she stated to Stowe.137
Like Eliot in her letter,
136
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 654-665. 137
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 658.
71
Theophrastus is practically disgusted by the ignorance and use of crude rhetoric by even
educated Englishmen when it comes to any discussion of the Jews. He writes that “it would be
difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [the Jews] which has not been heard in
conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglect of resemblances is a
common property of dulness [sic] which unites all the various points of view – the prejudiced,
the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally ignorant.”138
Theophrastus even acknowledges that such discrimination is common among educated
men, or at least men who think themselves educated, who try to prove their worldliness by
deriding the Jews: “men who consider themselves in the very van of modern advancement,
knowing history and the latest philosophies of history, indicate their contemptuous surprise that
any one should entertain the destiny of the Jews as a worthy subject.”139
Theophrastus’ contempt
for supposedly enlightened men dismissing the significance of Judaism’s relationship with the
future of Christianity mirrors Eliot’s ire at those of her contemporaries who had so little
understanding of the role of Judaism in their religion and their world. This suggests that Eliot
was attempting to communicate the same ideas and emotions when writing Impressions as she
was when she wrote to Stowe.
Theophrastus’ writings about Jews in this chapter also very much reflect Eliot’s own
beliefs about them as recorded in her letters and correspondence from her youth. Most notably, it
is Theophrastus’ discussion of the Jews’ hubristic self-sense of exceptionalism (induced, he
says, by centuries of persecution and no different than other nations and religions’ pride in
themselves) that echoes Eliot’s irritation, expressed with particular intensity in her letter to
138
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143. 139
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 162.
72
Sibree, at what she perceived as any suggestion of Jewish moral and spiritual superiority: “As to
his theory of ‘races’ it has not a leg to stand on, and can be buoyed up by such windy eloquence
as ‘You chitty-faced squabby-nosed Europeans owe your commerce, your arts, your religion to
the Hebrews…My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in
the Jews…Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.”140
Writing to Sibree, she assumed
that a Jew (here Disraeli) who wrote critically of the relationship between Judaism and
Christianity was in fact implying the superiority of the former religion over the latter. This
perceived implication infuriated her at the time, giving way to her insinuation that the Jews were
culturally and religiously inferior to gentiles.
These older sentiments closely resemble Theophrastus’ belief that Jews possess such self-
aggrandizing conceit as revealed in “The Modern Hep!,” in which Eliot wrote, through Such,
that: “At any rate, seeing that the Jews were more specifically than any other nation educated
into a supreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that any other nation is found to rival
them in this form of self-confidence.”141
(Theophrastus reiterates Jews’ sense of religious
superiority several times throughout the essay.) Here, Eliot was reasserting her interpretation of
the Jews’ belief in their own spiritual destiny as a type of exceptionalism; in explaining to her
readership why they are how they are she did not discard her former beliefs but reaffirmed them,
only with a more sympathetic explanation for why they had developed such qualities. Had she
moved beyond this outlook through her connection with Deutsch and her other Jewish
acquaintances she could have had Theophrastus confront and debunk those beliefs without
necessarily alienating her (supposedly anti-Jewish) readership. Furthermore, Theophrastus was
already explicitly condemning the anti-Jewish sentiment of modern England as unimaginably
140
GE to Sibree, Jr., 245. 141
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 150-151.
73
ignorant; this would have been offensive enough to any bigoted person reading the text and
therefore it does not appear that Eliot was concerned with handling the audience delicately.
Newton has suggested that because Theophrastus was not directly describing his readers
themselves as prejudiced, they therefore need not have taken umbrage at these words.142
However, it seems unlikely that Eliot as the author did not think her audience would make the
connection between such accusations and their own psyches. It would not have been necessary to
have Theophrastus espouse bigoted views she herself no longer held simply to establish him as
his own entity or for effectively communicating with the audience. To argue that Jews were
merely perceived as being arrogant in their religious beliefs, and were not so in reality, without
implying the truth of the accusations of hubris would have been sufficient; Eliot could have
written that the impression was a result of cultural misunderstandings without necessarily
offending her audience. Therefore, it is likely that Theophrastus’ words about Jewish conceit do
reflect Eliot’s own longstanding perception, one for which, instead of condemning it, she now
felt she had a clearer understanding. Her relationship with Jewish intellectuals made her
empathetic towards and even protective of the Jewish nation; however, these friendships did not
truly reform her fundamental ethos in how she thought about Jews. Rather, they simply provided
for her a sympathetic lens through which she could see Jews the way she already saw them.
Newton also posits that Theophrastus’ criticism of heavy immigration (he makes
exception only for people in need of political refuge) is not in fact reflective of Eliot’s views but
also a sort of commiseration with the audience’s fears of foreign immigration overwhelming the
country and its “corporate existence.”143
However, Eliot’s letter to Sibree, as discussed earlier,
142
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 657. 143
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 659.
74
also contained direct parallels to the opinions voiced by Theophrastus about how the "tendency
of things is towards the quicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this tendency:
all we can do is moderate its curse so as to hinder it from degrading the moral status of
societies.”144
This strongly echoes Eliot’s phrase to Sibree about such “fusion,” which she
believed acted to destroy entire nations in much the same way that class intermarriage serves to
undermine and degrade social structure. Although it is realistic to believe that, through years of
maturation as well deep study and new acquaintances, Eliot would evolve in her sympathies
towards Jews, it is very unlikely that Eliot had undergone a complete ideological transformation
when she presented the same reasoning for the same issue twice. Eliot, far from investing
Theophrastus with ideas that she did not believe herself, was in fact putting into his mind her
very own opinions about cultural intermingling.
Eliot also expressed to Sibree that countries have traditionally been kept separated in
order to hone their individual characteristics until a “revolutionary force” calls upon the strengths
of a particular country to become part of a greater humanity, thus allowing national segregation
to work in the service of mankind. In her letter to Sibree, Eliot wrote: “It appears to me that the
law by which privileged classes degenerate from continual intermarriage must act on a larger
scale in deteriorating whole races. The nations have been always kept apart until they have
sufficiently developed their idiosyncrasies and then some great revolutionary force has been
called into action by which the genius of a particular nation becomes a portion of the common
mind of humanity.”145
Theophrastus writes that “In meeting the national evils which are brought
upon us by the onward course of the world, there is often no more immediate hope or resource
than that of striving after fuller national excellence, which must consist in the molding of more
144
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 143-165. 145
GE to Sibree, Jr., 245.
75
excellent individual natives,” arguing that countries develop their greatest characteristics and
their most meritorious individuals through national separateness, and that in the face of troubles
these individuals will serve to overcome the calamities which come their way.146
Eliot and
Theophrastus together expressed a belief that, by keeping peoples separate, greater individuals
would emerge from these isolated countries whose “genius” would service their nations – and in
turn would benefit humankind as a whole – with its existence.
Newton has also defended her from accusations from other authors of anti-miscegenation
attitudes because of her championship (through Theophrastus) of proto-Zionism and her other
arguments for keeping peoples apart; Theophrastus indeed clearly expresses his disapproval of
cultural intermingling in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!.”147
In the essay, Theophrastus equates
the amalgamation of cultural identities with the contamination of language and cultures (his
rhetoric here is particularly harsh), an unfortunate phenomenon which he asserts should only be
tolerated in the exceptional case of those who are refugees from their lands of origin. He also
writes that Jews have developed their less desirable traits (including their opportunism and their
hatred of Christianity) as a direct result of centuries of Christian persecution, which, in turn, has
also occurred as the result of gentiles and Jews being unable to peacefully coexist in the same
lands. The idea that Eliot was creating a deliberately bigoted character to which her readers could
relate is also problematic here, as these are views again expressed by Eliot not only in her private
writings but in her other fictional works as well.
Eliot’s letter to Sibree certainly contained very similar beliefs about miscegenation. At
the time of writing that letter she did not believe that Jews and Christians were equal in their
146
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 160 147
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 654-665.
76
moral rectitude or intellectual accomplishments. Indeed, Eliot’s letters from 1838 to the late
1840’s displayed a clearly negative opinion of Jews. While she did not specifically mention
avarice, anti-Christian sentiment, hypocrisy or isolationism (traits Theophrastus asserts are
characteristics of Jews) as qualities she often ascribed to their people, she repeatedly implied or
stated outright their ideological, moral and spiritual weaknesses. This demonstrates that the traits
Theophrastus describes as being so particular to Jews were the same characteristics, among
others, that Eliot as a young woman believed them to have. Her diary and letters from the early
1850’s to the early 1860’ showed her evolving feelings about, and even empathy towards, the
Jewish people after the beginning of her relationship with Lewes and becoming an advocate for
religious tolerance. (They also chronicled the time during which Eliot became mostly reconciled
to Christianity, and partly through it Judaism as well.)
This sympathy allowed Eliot to see her Jewish acquaintances in a very different light:
although interpreting Jewish behavior as hubristic or self-righteous, she witnessed the cultural
causes of what she perceived as their isolationism. This helped to reform her feelings about
them, albeit without dispensing with the belief that Jews do indeed exhibit such arrogant
behavior. This gave way to her opinion that cultural miscegenation is commonly bad for Jews
and is at the root of all of their most notorious vices. Her relationship with Deutsch solidified
these feelings and furthermore made the championship of the Jewish community a great cause
for her – a cause she believed entailed separating Jews from the gentile communities in which
they had experienced abuse and persecution and creating for them a nation in which they would
have a safe and collective home.
This anti-miscegenation outlook, however, manifested itself in Eliot’s other fictional
works besides “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Indeed, some of Eliot’s earlier chapters in
77
Impressions, including the tales of Mixtus and Proteus Merman, read as caveats against straying
from one’s roots and associating with those unlike one’s self, the consequences for which being
corruption or humiliation. Also, Eliot’s aforementioned narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy
demonstrated the dangers of miscegenation through the story of a young Spanish woman named
Fedalma who lived during the Spanish Inquisition. As Anna McLauchlan relates in her 2005
dissertation “‘Gypsies and Jews: George Eliot's use of ‘race’ in ‘The Spanish Gypsy’ and ‘Daniel
Deronda,’” Fedalma, who is betrothed to marry Don Silva, a Spanish aristocrat with whom she is
in love, discovers that she is in fact the daughter of a gypsy named Zarca. In an act of filial duty,
Fedalma decides to accompany Zarca and his gypsy tribe in their quest for a new home, even
while realizing that this will take her away from Silva. Don Silva eventually slays Zarca when he
realizes that his entanglement with Fedalma and Zarca’s mission has led to the triumph of his
enemies, and Fedalma and Silva part ways forever. Silva, after his loss, devotes himself to the
cause of the Inquisition, while Fedalma continues with her life as part of the gypsy tribe.
(McLauchlan argues that this struggle between “self-fulfillment and self-sacrifice” is
characteristic of Eliot’s work, a theme that also lends itself to duty to one’s people and culture at
the expense of potentially pleasurable assimilation.)148
In The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot depicted the consequences of miscegenation as tragic and
fatal. Because Fedalma and Don Silva were from different social and cultural groups which
meant that they could not be together while simultaneously fulfilling their duties to their own
peoples. When Silva attempts to follow Fedalma into her world, his actions result in grief and
despair for both of them.149
This was all because several different peoples inhabiting the same
148
Anna McLauchlan, “Gypsies and Jews: George Eliot's use of "race" in "The Spanish Gypsy" and "Daniel Deronda” (PhD diss., University of Northern British Columbia, 2005) 43-64 149
McLauchlan, “Gypsies and Jews,” 43-64
78
land, including the Jews, whom that the Catholics, waging their own persecution against another
group, were pursuing, and the gypsys, who constituted their own tribe with its own leadership
which sometimes conflicted with the Spanish aristocracy, gave rise to a great deal of strife and
conflict, the message that Eliot was communicating to her audience.
It is Daniel Deronda, however, which carried some of the most interesting depictions of
interactions between members of cultural groups. Newton argues that Eliot was not as
preoccupied with the prevention of miscegenation as scholars such as Bryan Cheyette have
asserted; in fact, he suggests, she allowed miscegenation as long as it followed certain
paradigms.150
The Jewish music teacher Julius Klesmer, an acquaintance of Deronda’s, is
described by Newton as “alienated” from his people, the Jews; in other words, they do not enter
into his self-identity. This kind of alienation, Newton posits, was acceptable to Eliot as long as
one’s energy and personal identity were channeled into something else (in Klesmer’s case, his
music). Klesmer is able to have a happy union with a gentile heiress, Catherine Arrowpoint,
precisely because he is not an “active” participant in Jewish culture.
This is certainly valid; however, it does not establish that Eliot was not still very much
concerned with anti-miscegenation. The central Jewish character, Deronda, refuses the hand of
the widowed gentile Gwendolen, who has fallen in love with him, largely because he wishes to
actively participate in the Jewish “race.” In order to accomplish this, he must marry a Jewish
woman, which he does when he weds his true love, the Jewish Mirah. Klesmer, as Newton points
out, “looks forward to the fusion of races,” something which Eliot, as she made clear in her letter
to Sibree, did not.151
Theophrastus reiterates his distaste for fusion in “The Modern Hep! Hep!
150
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 656. 151
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 662
79
Hep!;” these two opinions are strongly consistent with one another and suggest that Eliot had
maintained her mentality about the mixing of cultures. Although Eliot did not punish Klesmer
for his belief in fusion by making his technically mixed marriage an unhappy one, she did test
the commitment of Catherine to the marriage by having her wealthy (gentile) parents initially
reject her as a result of her engagement and deny her any inheritance. Catherine demonstrates
that she is willing to give up not only money but her familial and cultural identities as well in
order to marry Klesmer.152
(Her parents later grudgingly relent and give the couple some money,
partly because they have no one else to leave it to.) In order to enjoy life with one another, they
must first (however willingly) give up their cultural identities so that their union will be made
without any kind of true miscegenation. This apparent allowance of intermarriage is thus not
really what it seems. By contrast, Eliot presented the marriage of Deronda and Mirah as a sort of
ideal: their personal happiness is simultaneously united with their culture, their religion, and
even their country as they prepare for a new life in a Jewish community in Palestine.153
One of the most convincing arguments that Eliot believed miscegenation of cultures led
to the degradation of Jewish morals is that Lapidoth, the greedy, gambling, deceptive, and
faithless father of Mirah who exploits his daughter for money, is extremely consistent with the
Jewish stereotypes that Theophrastus enumerates in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!.” Lapidoth is
an excellent demonstration that Eliot’s idea of Jews becoming corrupted by assimilation
appeared outside “The Modern Hep!” and therefore also existed outside of Theophrastus, whose
position as a representative of Eliot’s true ideas has been under scrutiny. Newton argues that
Lapidoth’s individualism, materialism, gambling nature and lack of national and religious
identity closely resemble several non-Jewish characters in Eliot’s body of work, and that he is
152
Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 200-212 153
Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 646-692.
80
therefore not meant to be a negative caricature of a Jew but a symbol of universal human
weakness.154
However, Eliot chose Jews as the vehicles for these traits in both Deronda and
Impressions for a reason: she believed that alienation from a national community causes these
traits. It is probable that she believed that anyone, Jewish or not, would develop the same traits
when separated from a sense of cultural identity; however, she also believed that such alienation
was exceptionally a problem for Jews precisely because of their history of scattered and
assimilated living (something Theophrastus recounts in The Modern Hep!). This leads back to
her argument that Jews, when mingled with gentiles and refused their own sanctioned country,
become negatively and continually affected by miscegenation. Because she believed alienation to
be a specifically (albeit not exclusively) Jewish issue, the alienated Lapidoth can indeed be read
as a culmination of negative Jewish stereotypes, ones which Eliot believed truly existed. For
Eliot, Lapidoth was a warning to her readers of the very deep dangers of assimilation.
Theophrastus concluded “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” with a reminder to his audience
about the role Judaism played in the development of Christianity, and how important it is for
Christians not to forget or disown their religious roots. This is certainly meant as a note of
sympathy for the Jewish community; however, it further links Theophrastus’ (and Eliot’s) Philo-
Semitism and support for the Jews’ return to Israel to their own Christian beliefs. This particular
type of sympathy for the Jewish community was and remains somewhat complicated.
Eliot’s Philo-Semitism is difficult to define. During most of the final three decades of her
life, she thought increasingly well of Judaism and began to genuinely care about the welfare of
154
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 662.
81
Jews and their safety in the world. However, her lifelong interest in the influence of Judaism on
Christianity in many ways drove her changing feelings about the Jewish religion and her
eventual sympathy towards its adherents. A lifelong Christian despite her youthful departure
from Anglicanism and all organized religion, she honored Jews later in her life, as she related in
her letter to Stowe, for having been the religious community which originally gave the world
Jesus Christ. (Indeed, her objection to their conversion in later decades was that Jews gave rise to
Christianity by remaining steadfast in their own religion.)
Eliot’s sympathy for Jews, however, was at least in part related to the fact that she
believed that their religion had played an indispensable role in the creation her own Christian
faith. In “The Modern Hep!” she wrote sentimentally about the Jewish nature of Christ: “The
Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart of a Jew.”155
Eliot had once rejected the Jewish nature of
Christ; now she embraced Jews because she believed that their unwillingness to bow to pagan
gods allowed Jesus to be raised a Jew and in turn build his own religion. This kind of Philo-
Semitism was related to the relationship of Judaism with the advent of Christianity; it was not a
secular love of or respect for the Jewish people but one that depended on the relationship
between the (supposed) isolationism of Judaism and the rise of Christ. This makes her personal
Philo-Semitism a complicated matter, especially considering that she continued to believe
throughout her life that the negative characteristics she described in her letter to John Sibree, Jr.
were, while not inherent in or exclusive to, certainly true of and very particular to the Jewish
people.
155
Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 165.
82
VI. Conclusion
“The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” was a culmination of George Eliot’s beliefs about Jews,
the faith of Christ, and about assimilation and miscegenation in general, which had in many and
complex ways remained consistent over the course of the four preceding decades. Throughout
her life, Eliot’s relationship with and opinions about the Jewish religion were somewhat
intertwined with how she felt about Judaism’s role in the creation of Christ’s faith. She had
earlier in her life defected from the Church of England on the “Jewish notions” which she
believed degraded not only Anglicanism but all of Christian religion and society as well. These
sentiments clearly softened over time as she reconciled with Christianity and became an
advocate for religious tolerance. As a result this, as well as her relationships with and study of
various Jewish intellectuals and gentile humanists she in turn began to embrace Judaism as well.
When she met Emanuel Deutsch in 1866, she began to believe that Jews, through their religious
isolationism, had in a way given the world the Christian faith, and thus Jewish separatism and
proto-Zionism became personal causes for her.
To argue, as K.M. Newton does, that Theophrastus’ opinions in “The Modern Hep! Hep!
Hep!” are not to be taken literally as Eliot’s mentality at that time in her life, but rather
interpreted as a condescension on Eliot’s part to the less sophisticated readers who might not be
receptive to a more respectful exegesis on Jews as she would be is certainly an intriguing
argument.156
It does Theophrastus the service of establishing him as his own character rather
than dismissing him as simply a thinly-veiled version of Eliot herself. However, to say that Eliot
did not believe the Jewish stereotypes she promoted in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” is to
overlook the relationship her Christian beliefs had with her perception of Judaism. Throughout
156
Newton, “George Eliot and Racism,” 654-665.
83
her life, the way she felt about Judaism turned on whether she felt it had affected the faith of
Christ negatively or positively. Her feelings about Judaism, both when they were resentful and
when they were appreciative, were not entirely secular.
This was a Philo-Semitism that was somewhat contingent on Judaism’s interactions with
Christianity, of which Eliot still considered herself a part. However, despite the changes Eliot
underwent in her opinions of Jews, it also meant that the lens through which she perceived them
never shifted or changed. Her perceptions about Jews in “The Modern Hep!” were as truly
reflective of her mentality as a younger woman as they were of her mentality at the age she was
when she actually wrote them. She truly believed them to be isolationists who were extremely
proud of their own religion, and whereas she condemned these traits in them before because she
disliked Judaism’s influence on organized Christianity, she condoned and even praised the same
qualities in her later years because she believed them both to be necessary to the establishment of
Christ’s faith (as well as to be characteristics developed over time in defense of Christians’
persecution of them). Eliot and Theophrastus, who were of very similar mentalities when it came
to their ideals, also described the other characteristics they believed Jews to have, including
avarice, opportunism, moral debasement and alienation from their own faith, which they posited
had developed as a result of the Jews’ centuries living among non-Christians. This, of course,
was meant as an exemplar of the dangers of miscegenation, for all peoples but especially for
Jews.
To see that Eliot seriously objected to the idea of miscegenation throughout her life,
which Newton denies that she did, one has only to look at her other works. The Spanish Gypsy
conveyed warnings about the dangers of mingling different peoples with often clashing beliefs,
as well as of the dangers of people attempting to enter a world of which they are, for one reason
84
or another, not part. Other chapters of Impressions carried the same message, and Eliot,
throughout her body of work, emphasized the importance of duty, especially filial duty, over the
indulgence of one’s own individualistic desires, and demonstrated the consequences if one
should choose the latter over the former. This, too, worked to discourage miscegenation and
assimilation by emphasizing that one should prize one’s obligation to his people rather than
pursuing any selfish desires amongst another people, which can result in alienation and, in turn,
moral degradation. Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s most famous Philo-Semitic book, is perhaps the
most important example of this. Lapidoth, suffering from the very Jewish problem (as Eliot saw
it) of alienation as a result of the “scattered” nature of the Jewish people, took on the vices
described in “The Modern Hep!” and indeed turned into an example of what Eliot believed Jews
could become if left without their own collective community in the world. Daniel and Mirah, by
contrast, were held up as a glorious example of what happens when one rejects miscegenation
and instead unites duty and nationhood with personal happiness rather than placing them in
opposition to one another.
“The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” was indeed meant as a true statement of support for the
Jewish community, and Eliot genuinely believed that Jews would be both safer and less prone to
moral debasement if they were able to return to Palestine (which she presciently calls “Israel” in
the essay). However, because she also truly believed the stereotypical vices of Jews that she
described in “The Modern Hep!” to be, while not inherent to Jews, certainly founded in reality
and in many ways peculiar to the Jewish community, it is difficult to argue that she did not
actively or consciously promote some anti-Jewish tropes in her work; it is also difficult to argue
that she supported the Jewish community without her own religiosity playing a role. Although
the fact that she both felt and wrote sympathetically about Jews at a time when many did not
85
should be recognized and appreciated, both Daniel Deronda and “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”
do, to a certain extent, serve to perpetuate negative perceptions about the Jewish community.
Eliot’s Philo-Semitism, being as it was connected with her deeply Christian identity and
interests, could not be described as a modern interpretation of pro-Jewish beliefs and support for
the Jewish people, which should be divorced from religious and all other non-secular interests.
86
Bibliography:
Primary Sources:
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, Pennsylvania, Wildside Press, 2007.
Eliot, George “German Wit: Heinrich Heine,” Westminster Review LXV (January 1856):
