A Reconsideration of George Eliot`s Daniel Deronda

Against Bryan Cheyette’s claim that Daniel Deronda is an ambivalent “championing of Jewish racial particularity,” Alan T. Levenson contends that, “whether or not [Eliot’s] contemporaries recognized what Cheyette locates in Eliot’s portraits, they found it…obvious that Eliot had taken up the gauntlet on the Jews’ behalf…” Indeed, if we attribute nascent ambivalence toward Eliot’s worldview to her contemporaries, we forcibly overlook the context of Daniel Deronda, and the Anglo-Jewish discourses with which Eliot deliberately converses. Eliot was well versed in Jewish history and culture, and her notebooks suggest that Eliot’s feelings about European Jews were far from ambivalent. Eliot even read The Jewish Chronicle, which David Cesarani called a unique “institution which was both part of Anglo-Jewish history and a medium through which it was refracted.” The JC documents the reception of Daniel Deronda and other works relevant to Anglo-Jews, and provides evidence that Jewish critics found literary representations of Jews in works by Anglo-Jewish novelists —like Grace Aguilar, and Julia Frankau—painfully problematic. As Cheyette demonstrates, these novelists attempt to “transcend the Jewish Other…and replace it with an idealized image of selfhood” fit for non-Jewish consumption, a quandary Eliot was both conscious of and unencumbered by. Using the JC and other British Jewish texts of the time, this paper places Eliot’s ambitious last novel in conversation with popular fiction by and about Anglo Jews and with Zionist and anti-Zionist discourse. Eliot’s most complicated work ultimately articulates a thorough and complex counter attack against centuries of British anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.