Many contemporary readers found the book’s Jewish elements baffling and alien. A mixed receptionĪnd yet Deronda is and always has been underrated. Would Jews be able to flourish in Christian England? How would the English respond to difference in their midst? These are the critical questions that Eliot poses in her final novel. It is a work of radical, almost miraculous empathy that expresses the creed of modern Zionism with foresight and clarity, some 20 years before the word even existed.Įven more important, to my mind, is the way Deronda drastically departs from the generally shallow and bigoted depictions of Jews in English literature that preceded it, presenting them as three-dimensional humans capable of living and even thriving among their gentile neighbours. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda is the outstanding novel about British Jews and nothing else really comes close. It’s a strange quirk of Anglo-Jewish history that the finest book ever published about Jews in this country was written by a gentile, but it’s indisputably true. George Eliot (1865), engraving from a portrait by Frederick Burton, Wikimedia Commons How did she pull off this singular feat? And why? Set at the zenith of Victorian England, George Eliot’s last novel displays a deep empathy towards British Jews, while also laying out the author’s firm proto-Zionist sympathies.
Who are his real parents? A chance meeting draws him into Whitechapel and the world of British Jews, with whom he has a growing affinity, before eventually discovering the remarkable story of his own birth.
Raised in an aristocratic household, Deronda longs to discover his true origins.
Published in 1876, Daniel Deronda is a unique novel in the history of 19th century English literature.
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