The Messianic Potential

Abstract

George Eliot’s attitude towards Jews and Judaism can almost be enclosed parenthetically between statements concerning a Messiah figure. In her letter to John Sibree in 1848, detailing her criticisms of Disraeli, she sees messianic figures as separate from or at odds with Judaism: the Jews may have ‘produced a Moses and a Jesus, but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism’ (Letters, I, 247). Twenty-eight years later, when her composition of Daniel Deronda was well under way, her view was wholly different:

But towards the Hebrews we western people who have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called educated making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting. They hardly know Christ was Jewish. (Letters, VI, 301–2)