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I’m a Zionist who often walks through the campus of Columbia University, which since October 7 means I feel like Dr. Evil in a frumpy sweater. The protest chant du jour is “Min el-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya” (“From water to water, Palestine will be Arab”); a recent sign of note expresses support for the Houthis, the terrorist group whose motto includes the phrase “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.” I put myself through this because I write in the Columbia library and you court bad luck when you change a writing routine. But the slogans get to me. So recently I decided to boost my morale with Zionist works of art, preferably of the escapist variety. I thought about binge-watching Fauda, but the hairbreadth escapes from Hamas arch-villains are too stressful. As it happens, though, I was already reading a Zionist novel. It dates from 1876, and I was vaguely aware that it had a Zionist angle but hadn’t anticipated just how soaring its vision of Jewish ingathering would be. The novel had none of the ambivalence that hedges so many discussions about Israel today, even the friendly ones.
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I belong to a book group that usually reads a novel a year. (I know.) One year we tried to get through all of Virginia Woolf, but that was cramming. We try not to read ahead, so that we all stay on the same page, as it were. This year we’re doing the Victorian novelist George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda. It’s her Jewish novel, also her problem novel—two novels in one that seem to jostle against each rather than cohere. One of the half novels offers a familiar, wryly satirical portrait of callow members of the British gentry. The second is a fond depiction of London’s lower-middle-class Jews—fond, that is, for its time. As the saying goes, a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who likes Jews. Eliot’s genuine affection for the chosen people doesn’t preclude a certain obsession with their mercantile instincts or the length of their noses.
By the 1870s, Victorian England was no longer formally anti-Semitic; Jews could vote and hold office. Benjamin Disraeli, who was born Jewish, though he later converted to Anglicanism, was prime minister. But British people just didn’t like Jews very much. Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s hero, is an appealing young gentleman with an open mind and an instinctive affinity with the oppressed. When he finds himself drawn to a beautiful Jewish girl, Mirah, and undertakes to search for her family on her behalf, he realizes that his assumptions about Jews require some revision. Deronda, “like his neighbors,” Eliot writes, “had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form.” As for Jews themselves, he found them repugnant: Either they dressed too conspicuously, or they lurked in grimy streets. He had heard about the better sort of Jew, the learned and accomplished ones, but always assumed they had sloughed off their Jewishness.
Eliot was considered the greatest English novelist of her day. She came from an evangelical-Christian family and was pious in childhood, though secular as an adult. That she would write a Jewish novel, or half a Jewish novel, surprised her readers, and none more than the Jewish ones. Jewish critics rhapsodized over the Jewish narrative—“a glorious exaltation,” said one. Daniel Deronda was quickly brought out in Hebrew, purged of most of the English chapters. The English critics, for their part, loved the English story but found the Jewish one preposterous. Many said it should be lopped off. Half a century later, the great English critic F. R. Leavis was still using the language of excision, so evocative of, well, castration. There was nothing to be done about the “astonishing badness of the bad half,” he wrote, except “cut it away.”
If Eliot’s philo-Semitism was unexpected, her Zionism came out of nowhere. I should say her proto-Zionism. Eliot never uses the term Zionism, because it wouldn’t be coined for another 14 years. The historic First Zionist Congress took place seven years after that, in 1897, and, in fact, though she had died in 1880, Eliot had something to do with making it happen. At the time she was writing, talk of a Jewish state in historical Judea was confined to Jewish elites—intellectuals, politicians, philanthropists. Eliot’s fame and reach spread the message throughout Europe. “The story presented, for the first time, the possibility of a return to Zion,” writes Paul Johnson in his History of the Jews. A Russian translation of Daniel Deronda inspired Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a linguist trying to revive Hebrew as a spoken language, to move to Ottoman-controlled Palestine, where he succeeded in his endeavor. Theodor Herzl credited the novel with encouraging him to write one of the foundational documents of Zionism, The Jewish State. (Recent scholarship suggests he may have exaggerated Eliot’s direct effect on that book, but she clearly made an impression on him.) Lord Balfour, the author of England’s famous 1917 Balfour Declaration, the first and most important statement of support for “a home for the Jewish people” in the land of their birth, visited Eliot a year after the novel came out, which may have instilled or deepened sympathy for the Zionist cause. She was there before the creation.
Eliot uses Deronda to give her readers an introduction to Jewish nationalism. When he begins his Jewish journey, he’s a soul adrift. Without quite realizing it, he seeks a cause, in part because he lacks an identity. He doesn’t know who his parents are; he does know that he’s not the legitimate son of his wealthy guardian. He may be the illegitimate one, or something worse. Deronda finds purpose, if not the secret of his ancestry, in a man he meets in the course of tracking down Mirah’s relatives: Mordecai, a fiery, possibly crazy Jewish scholar and poet and a radically original apostle of Jewish nationalism.
In one scene, Deronda joins Mordecai and a group of working-class intellectuals in a pub, the Hand and Banner, where they debate what they call “the law of progress.” This turns out to be a version of the “Jewish question,” a dispute, dating back to the French Revolution, over what to do about the Jews. The question addressed by the revolutionary government was the emancipation of the Jews. Should they be granted égalite–equality? Their chief advocate in the National Assembly vowed that if the Jews were emancipated, they’d have to give up their peculiar rites and clannishness and behave like other French citizens. (“We must refuse to give anything to the Jews as a people and grant everything to them as individuals,” he famously declared.) Now Jews had legal and political rights, but the question of assimilation remained. Should they in fact be integrated into the general population, or would their malign presence corrupt British society? Mordecai changes the terms. Jews should not assimilate, he says; instead, they should return to Zion and create a Jewish state, where they would regain a spiritual and moral greatness that had been crushed in their long exile.
Mordecai, I have to say, embodies everything Daniel Deronda’s critics hated about the novel. He sermonizes in a strange, orotund mix of biblical imagery and German syntax; Eliot borrows some of her nationalism from Hegel, whose writings on the awakening and development of national consciousness were almost as messianic as the prophets’. Mordecai packs all of the above into sentences that somehow wind up sounding Wordsworthian: “The soul of Judaism is not dead,” Mordecai declares. “The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds … Let the torch of visible community be lit!” Only gathered on their own land as citizens of their own polity would the dispersed people recover the “dignity of a national life.” And of course, a Jewish state would protect the Jews.
Mordecai’s adversaries are cheerful, friendly liberals, believers in the brotherhood of man. History bends toward universalism, they tell him. “The sentiment of nationality” is dying out, says one: “The whole current of progress is setting against it.” Religion is a superstition, explains another, who calls himself a “rational Jew,” and Jews should stop being so insular, exclusionary. “There’s no reason now why we shouldn’t melt gradually into the populations we live among,” he says. “That’s the order of the day in point of progress.”
The Hand and Banner scene lays out the poles of the “Jewish question” as it would be debated for the century and a half to come: cosmopolitanism versus nationalism, universalism versus particularism, tradition versus modernity, assimilation versus separatism. The “Jewish question” would mutate into the problem of Zionism, but the issues would remain the same. Today, transnationalists hold that globalization, migration, and mass communication have rendered the nation-state obsolete. Anti-nationalists feel that a state like Israel, predicated on ethnicity or religious tradition, reeks of a determined rejection of modernity, even blood-and-soil fascism. As for post-colonialism, in the foundational 1979 essay “Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Victims,” the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said—who, as it happens, taught at Columbia for four decades—avails himself of Daniel Deronda to expose what he deems the Orientalist and imperialist premises of early Zionism. Eliot, he says, romanticizes the exotic East and effaces its people, just as the actual Zionists would do in order to justify their land grab. She displays “a total absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants” of Arab lands, he writes, those of “Palestine in particular.”
Said has a point. Eliot doesn’t bother to imagine what Deronda will do when he gets to Palestine. The narrative ends when he boards ship, and the land of Israel never rises above the level of abstraction. That’s because Eliot wasn’t writing about colonization, exactly, or Palestine, either. She was making use of Jewish nationalism to make the case for nationalism itself. The novel channels her “liberal-conservative love for the national tradition,” as the historian Bernard Semmel puts it in his George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance. By “tradition,” he means what Benedict Anderson called “imagined community”—the reservoir of national memories, national heroes, a common past.
Eliot’s other foray into proto-Zionism is an essay titled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”( hep was the Crusaders’ hunting cry when they went looking for Jews), included in her very last book, a collection of essays written in the voice of an eccentric scholar, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such. In “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” Eliot makes clear what is at stake in the preservation of national identity: moral character. The “dignity or rectitude” of the individual citizens of a nation, she says, is a function of their “relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice.” Without ideals, their ambitions would be limited to “the securing of personal ease or prosperity.” In a neat trick, Eliot makes the case for Zionism both philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic at the same time. A Jewish state would preserve the Jews from cosmopolitan capitalism and save the world from the venality of cosmopolitan Jews.
The essay is a key to the novel, for better or worse. It helps explain why Eliot juxtaposed British swells and Jewish dreamers. Nicely inverting a common anti-Semitic trope, she turns the English half of the novel into a cautionary tale of rootless cosmopolitanism. The narrative revolves around Gwendolyn Harleth, a selfish, spoiled young beauty. The narrator is quite specific about the causes of the girl’s character flaws: She was raised without moral instruction or sense of place. Her mother shamelessly favors Gwendolyn, the eldest daughter, over her four half sisters, and drags all five of them “from one foreign watering-place or Parisian apartment to another.” The narrator disapproves: “A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth.” In that spot, a child gets to know her “kindly neighbors,” and they teach her the necessary principles of mutual affection. “At five years old,” Eliot concludes, “mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world.” Gwendolyn reveals an innate potential for moral growth, but social circumstances preclude it. She marries a decadent aristocrat—not because she particularly wants to, but because her family needs the money. The marriage is horrific.
I’m afraid I’m making Eliot sound like a propagandist. She’s not. Eliot is a novelist, even when writing a preachy novel. She courts ambivalence, and Daniel Deronda is full of competing perspectives and voices. Cosmopolitanism gets its due. Eliot contrasts the deracinated Gwendolyn with the foreigner Herr Klesmer, who is, somehow unsurprisingly, at least part Jewish, “a felicitous combination of the German, the Sclav, and the Semite, with grand features, brown hair floating in artistic fashion and brown eyes in spectacles.” Herr Klesmer is an itinerant pianist who has been engaged by a wealthy family as a live-in tutor to their daughter. Gwendolyn’s lack of native ties damages her; Klesmer’s precarity is admirable because it is in service of his art. Besides, as he informs one poor philistine who has failed to show the proper respect for his talent, a great musician (which Klesmer will prove to be) is a citizen of a great nation, perhaps even of a supranational state, that of art. “A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician,” he says. “We help to rule the nations and make the age as much as any other public men. We count ourselves on level benches with legislators.” His pupil apologizes for Klesmer’s hectoring tone: “‘Herr Klesmer has cosmopolitan ideas,’ said Miss Arrowpoint, trying to make the best of the situation. ‘He looks forward to a fusion of races.’”
And when Deronda discovers that he is himself a Jew and devotes himself to bettering the lot of his people, he doesn’t blindly accept Mordecai’s nostalgic traditionalism. Judaism need not reject modernity, Deronda says: “I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief and learned of other races.” His ideal Jewish life would combine “separateness with communication”—particularism and universalism, the nation-state secure in its own identity but in dialogue with other nations, other stories, other cultures.
I can’t claim that soaking in the warm bath of Daniel Deronda’s nationalist uplift makes me less likely to shrivel in the face of the hatred I encounter on campus. When Eliot was writing, Israel had never exercised power for good or for bad, because it didn’t exist; Mordecai’s Zionist dreams seem very remote. Moreover, speaking purely as a reader, I prefer Gwendolyn—not what she represents, but her vitality as a character. The pro-English critics called her one of Eliot’s greatest creations, which is true, though they also called Deronda a dislikeable prig, which is unfair. I love them both, but I like her more. I think Eliot venerated the good Daniel and pitied poor Gwendolyn, which redounds to Gwendolyn’s advantage, from the literary point of view. Eliot turns Daniel into a moral cudgel to beat us up with. She leaves Gwendolyn to struggle like a creature in a trap.
What I find most poignant about Gwendolyn is that she mourns her plight in language clearly meant to echo Deronda’s Zionist aspirations. When she has to choose between getting married and going to work as a governess, she says she’d rather “emigrate” than be a governess. As a child, she says, she “used to fancy sailing away into a world where people were not forced to live with any one they did not like.” The similarity underscores their difference: He can sail away and she can’t. Just before Deronda leaves, he pays Gwendolyn a last visit and offers some anodyne words of comfort. She turns to him like “one athirst toward the sound of unseen waters,” and Deronda suddenly has an image of her “stretching her arms toward him from a forsaken shore.”
There was no homeland for women. There still isn’t. It is, admittedly, implausible. But I think Gwendolyn’s inexpressible longing for something like one imparts Daniel Deronda’s most Zionist lesson. With an actually existing Zion, the Jewish man need not suffer in exile. He has a place to call his own, however vague and utopian. But the Englishwoman has nowhere to go. Perhaps Gwendolyn’s spiritual homelessness is the more honest representation of the human condition. It’s certainly the more modern one. But she doesn’t make me eager to give up on Zionism.
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xenagoguevicene 