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Why Did George Eliot Stick Her Neck Out For the Jews?
In doing so, she changed the course of history
For those who don’t know — and how could you not know? — George Eliot (nee Mary Ann Evans) was the literary rock star of the Victorian era. By the year 1875, she had already written a slew of novels including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and of course, Middlemarch, which is still considered by many critics to be the best novel ever written in English. Then, in 1876, she did something entirely unexpected. She wrote a novel sympathetic to Jews: Daniel Deronda.
Nothing in her social milieu would explain this shift. She herself wrote in a letter in 1848, “Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade,” a condescension which was a piece of her times.
By the 19th century, even as some restrictions against Jews were lifted and conditions became more tolerable, condescension and often revulsion remained, and seeped into the books of England’s most fabled authors. Sometimes I’ll be enjoying a novel, say by Evelyn Waugh or even a mystery by Agatha Christie, and when I least expect it, a slur pops up about the hook-nosed Jew, the greedy thieving conniving vengeful Jew — startling me, not so much for its venom but the casual assumptions that undergird the remark.
