On the words God, Immortality, and Duty:
"how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third."--George Eliot
I never finished that biography I was reading on George Eliot, having hoped to read a few more of her novels before conquering a study of her life. But the Hungry Book Club is reading decidedly more modern novels (I read The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri this month but Mama hasn't had a chance. The book club will probably be on hiatus until Mama gets back from Thailand, the long flights of which will give her ample time to catch up!).
So I was excited to see a discussion on a new book about Eliot, Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot in a new website mentioned in the NYTimes today, Tablet, "a new read on Jewish Life." Eliot, of course, was an odd mixture of free and liberal ideas and staunchly conservative behavior, combined with a stunning intellect and keen mind. Himmelfarb notes, Eliot "was revered as a kind of sage, able to combine the most radical religious and social opinions with an absolute commitment to traditional virtues," when the philo-Semitic novel Daniel Deronda was published in 1876. Of course, I haven't read the novel, only seen part of a BBC adaptation, but know that the main character, who believes himself a Gentile, becomes enmeshed in the life of a Jewish woman he saves from her suicide attempt and eventually discovers that he himself is Jewish, having been given up by his Jewish mother who disdains her heritage. He then embraces it, marries the woman he saves, and moves to Palestine as part of the nationalist movement.
Considering the climate of anti-semitism in Victorian England (and oh, how much did I see of that while reading 50 years of Punch), Eliot's novel, following upon her masterpiece (the one I love) Middlemarch, discomfited Christian readers and encouraged Jewish ones. Himmelfarb apparently explores how Eliot comes to this point from her own more rigid Christian anti-semitism in her early life, through encounters and friendships with Jews. While I won't read the study, there being not enough time and an Eliot bio in line before it, I might put Daniel Deronda in line for my next Eliot read.
Can youremember how Punch treated Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (later elevated to Lord Beaconsfield)? Also Rufus Isaacs, the senor law office who became Vice Roy of India as Viscount Reading? My father, born 1905, therefore an Edwardian, was very distrulful of jews having been ill treated by a number of them as a boy and young man.
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