Review: Daniel Deronda

[lethargic_man]

I recently read Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, after learning that it was what inspired Arthur Balfour to issue the Balfour Declaration. rysmiel asked for my reaction to it, so I thought I'd post the results here, in case anyone else was interested.

It was an interesting, if rather long, read. There are two intertwined threads, one concerning Gwendolen Harleth, a spoiled twenty year old deciding whether or not to marry Henleigh Grandcourt (only to have my expectations dashed when she does marry him less than halfway through - this turns out, not to the reader's surprise, to be a very bad decision indeed). The other concerns Daniel Deronda, who rescues a Jewish girl from drowning herself in the Thames, and, in the course of trying to help her track down her lost family, gets involved with a religious proto-Zionist. (Modern Zionism did not yet exist in 1865, when the story is set, but there were those who paved the way for it.)

Of course, the two characters encounter each other early on (actually, on the very first page, though there's over a hundred pages of backstory before we get back to that point in the chronology), and the two threads commentate on each other in ways which I would never have spotted had the introduction not pointed it out to me. Though from the introduction's description of many people up to FR Leavis wanting to ditch the Deronda story altogether, it seems I'm not the only one.

Actually, the commentary in this edition (Wordsworth Classic) was itself worthy of comment. General English and classical cultural references are all picked up and commented upon in the endnotes, but as regards all the Jewish stuff, the commentator's knowledge seems to be secondhand, and there's plenty of things he misses altogether, such as the composer and music teacher called Herr Klesmer, or midrashim inlined in the text.

Leaving aside the Victorian romance aspect of the book and concentrating on the Jewish half, it presents a varied panolpy of different Jewish character types - a great relief, of course, compared to how Jews were typically portrayed in fiction at the time. There is a family recognisable as what we'd call traditional today: they have a Friday night meal, but take their capels off after kiddush (though I can't be certain that wasn't usual at the time*), and after the meal the head of the household completes a business deal with Daniel Deronda, on Shabbos! We have the religious quasi-prophet. We have those who would assimilate completely, and those who would reject their Jewish heritage as narrowminded and a fetter. We even have a Jewish princess, though in the literal rather than the modern sense of the term. And, as I'm sure will delight livredor, at one stage we have the characters sitting around discussing the meaning of a particular midrash.

We also see a variety of attitudes of the general populace, from those who refer to Mirah as a "bigoted Jewess"—to understand which, I had to place myself in the Victorian mindset—to the teenage girls who know so little about Judaism they think that Jews reject the Old Testament, because it proves the New.

One thing that is missing a little is representation of the variety of denominations in Anglo-Jewry (though there is a reference to Reform Judaism when Deronda is in Germany), or of the distinction between Sephardim (Jews of Spanish/Portuguese descent, who were the first to resettle this country (from the Netherlands) after the Jews were readmitted to it) and Ashkenazim from Germany and Eastern Europe, whose "flavour" of Judaism is rather different. Today, Sephardim are a small minority here, after the country got flooded in the 1880s and 1890s by refugees from the pogroms in eastern Europe; in the 1870s when the novel was written, the balance would have been different, and it was mildly disappointing only to see the faintest of refernces to this, though I suppose I couldn't have everything, particularly in a book by a non-Jewish author.

* [Footnote extracted from relevant email, so livredor and rysmiel will have seen this already.] I was surprised to see Louis Jacobs (the founder of the Masorti movement in this country at the start of the sixties) speaking at the Maimonides one-day seminar I went to a few weeks ago bareheaded. The only rabbis I've ever seen before bareheaded were Reform ones, but Jacobs is a product of the Orthodox yeshiva world. I'd thought the custom of covering the head had become universal by the time of Maimonides (eight hundred years ago), but when I asked R. Jacobs about it, he said the disciples of Samson Raphael Hirsch were still debating whether the head had to be covered when not praying in the middle of the nineteenth century. (I gather the custom of covering the head at all times was because one could refer to G-d in conversation at any time.)