‘Beginning of the Sabbath,’ published by Anton Hohenstein c. 1868
CREDIT: Library of Congress

Shabbat, that microcosm of God’s seventh-day rest, is the subject of Judith Shulevitz’s graceful, erudite new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (the subject of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast). But the weekly renewal of candlelighting, winedrinking, and the eating of challah is only the most obvious Jewish contribution to the science and history of Time. The division of primeval void into moons and then those moons into meaningful phases; the sectioning of the week to recapitulate the week of Creation; the days themselves maintained by rulings pertaining to work and play as much as by commandments to the performance of hours of prayer—such are just the beginnings of an immense, horizon-sized scroll that also introduced the world to concepts of eschatology and messianism. What follows is a brief, 12-part clocking of Jewish Time, focusing on theology but also widening to accommodate secular theories from the likes of Einstein, Marx, and Proust.

Extra Days in the Diaspora

The Jewish calendar, which is lunar, is a calendar of witness. The Sanhedrin, Jewry’s Congress, met in Jerusalem toward the end of every month to wait for the new moon. Once the moon was sighted—or, rather, as it was a new moon, once the moon was not sighted—the Sanhedrin’s rabbis would declare the beginning of the new month, and fires would be set outside the city’s walls to alert distant Jewish communities. Often, however, these fires were snuffed or obscured, or their message falsified by neighboring sects, and, since only the Sanhedrin could pronounce the new moon (though the sages were aware, of course, that the moon in their sky was the very same moon in every sky, Jewish Law required witnesses and consensus judgment), Diaspora communities were regularly confused as to when festivals and holidays would fall within the month. Though the Torah ordains single-day observances for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Shavuot, and Shemini Atzeret, Diasporites began celebrating them for an extra day as a precautionary measure—in order to better ensure that, regardless of any miscommunication as to which was the first of the lunar month’s 29 days, the festivals would be celebrated for at least one correct day.

Shmita

The Torah ordains every seventh year a Sabbatical Year, as it says in Leviticus 25: “Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” This septennial respite is known as shmita, Hebrew for  “release” or “freeing.” After seven of these seven-year cycles, Leviticus declares a Jubilee, a special fallowing during which all debts are forgiven and all slaves must be manumitted—two tenets not currently observed in the State of Israel, though the  agricultural component of the shmita year still is.

Joshua at Gibeon

The Canaanite kings were warring against the Gibeonites, who appealed to Joshua ben Nun, successor to Moses, for help. We are told in Chapter 10 of the book that bears his name that Joshua led his army of Israelites to Gibeon to face the Amorites first and routed them. The four armies of four other kings followed, and Joshua’s Israelites fought every one. However the day of the battle was soon ending. Loath to let the day end without complete victory, Joshua asked God to still the sun above Gibeon and the moon above the valley of Ajalon—effectively extending the daylight of this decisive battle “until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.”

Hebrew Clock, Jewish Town Hall, Prague

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right—as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet. However, Prague’s Židovská radnice or Jewish Town Hall, seat of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry, built in the 16th century and extensively renovated in the 18th in the rococo style, features on its cupola “a Hebrew clock,” whose numbers are represented by Hebrew letters, and whose gears turn the hands counterclockwise. The time of Jewish Prague, then, runs in reverse—into the past. Paul Celan refers to this timepiece in his poem “In Prague,” where he memorializes two lovers, two dreams “tolling / against time, in the squares.”

Hershele Ostropoler

Hershele Ostropoler, Jewish trickster, was perhaps a fictional or composite character associated with the court of Rabbi Baruch of Medzhybizh, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. It is said that one day, in need of meal money, he pawned his sole possession: a gold pocketwatch. Later that night the pawnbroker was awakened by a noise and went down to his shop to investigate. Hershele had broken in. “Thief!” the man shrieked. Hershele said, “I’m no thief, I just wanted to know what time it was.” “And for this you woke me up?” “I’m sorry,” Hershele said, “but I only trust my own watch.”

Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), French-Jewish philosopher, believed that since time was always in motion, the single moment was unknowable. Just as one attempted to grasp an individual moment or thought, it would be gone—not necessarily replaced by another, but lost to the flow of all moments, all thoughts. While physicists of Bergson’s day, which saw the perfection of the microscope and the first experimentation with subatomic particles, observed objects and events in fixed, finite relationships, Bergson invoked a Zeno’s Paradox applied not to spatial or chronologic infinity, but to the mind itself. Bergsonian consciousness, forever eluding mensuration, would instead be characterized by what he called la durée, which has been translated as “Duration,” implying that ceaseless, Heraclitean flux of indivisible experience in which each instant becomes, instantaneously, the stuff of yesterdays, and every yesterday accrues to the account of oblivion. For Bergson it was Intuition (l’intuition), and not any intellection or formula, that would interpret the world, while such interpretation could only be expressed indirectly, symbolically—as memory, or through its practice: reminiscence, or reflection. Bergson’s vertiginous metaphysic, in which nothing is knowable, and in which consciousness can lead only to consciousness-of-consciousness, and so on in a regressus ad infinitum, brings us back to an original garden where memory frolics with fantasy, and where what we know of our pasts is forever being revised by the personalities we are always becoming.

Marcel Proust

In the opening of his vast, sevenfold novel, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), or the narrator “Marcel Proust,” dips a madeleine into his tea, which parlor ritual was a Big Bang for both literature and mind. This dipped biscuit triggers a memory, which in turns triggers another memory, which in turn triggers yet another, until thousands of pages later we realize we have read not only one the great novels of the 20th century but also a grand dramatization of Bergsonian theory (Bergson was Proust’s cousin by marriage). À la Recherche du Temps Perdu explores the world—or merely the memories displaced by the dunking of that teatime treat—through a somnambulistic, or deathly, consciousness, both timeless and without space. One never knows who, where, or when “Marcel Proust” is, what he’s doing or what his life is like while he is telling his story. Childhood experiences are seen through childhood eyes and then, in another paragraph, as if through the eyes of an adult; love is experienced as a teenager experiences love, and then lust is philosophized about in a way befitting a man of experience and wisdom. The gaze of Proust’s masterwork is synoptic, even while the irreducible point at center—the force binding together the novel’s narrator in all his ages and selves, with the writer who, lying abed in Paris, narrates the narrator—remains an insufferable cipher. In Proust, memory becomes modernity’s ultimate and terminal dimension, while the remembrancer himself seems as absent, or as deceased, as God.

Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski

For centuries Galilean and Newtonian physics had proved that it was impossible for a body to measure its own motion. By the 19th century Newton’s theories had become Laws implying that no one thing could determine its own velocity or the velocity of another without reference to an exteriority, without comparison. In applying this idea to the entirety of the cosmos, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) insisted that a comparison of velocities could be made with the use of a universal constant, which he would discover in the speed of light, the c—for Latin’s celeritas: a hurtling at 299,792,458 meters per second—of his famous formula that related energy, E, to mass, m: E=mc². Einstein’s theorizing held that there was no one temporally or spatially stationary perspective in the universe by, or from, which all motion could be judged and that because the universe’s only constant seemed to be the speed of light, it could be theorized that space and time were experienced differently—relatively—by bodies in different states of motion. The very constancy of this lightspeed, when taken in the context of Einstein’s abstract conclusions, illuminated a wholly new field of being, an imperceptible alterity previously unexplored outside of esoteric religion or mysticism—a Fourth Dimension, first postulated by Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), Einstein’s former mathematics instructor at the Zürich Polytechnic. Inextricably coiled within the three normative dimensions of space, which are length, width, and depth or height, was this new (or oldest) dimension of Time, or the superseding dimension of “Spacetime.” It was Minkowski who transmuted the two strands of Einsteinian thought, the physical and temporal, into a precious amalgam that provided the best setting for the jewel of Relativity.

Émile Durkheim

While the Hebrew root kdsh is traditionally translated as “holy,” it actually means something closer to “separate”—to remove something from the context of the everyday being to specialize it, to render sacred by means of occasion or locale. Wondering what it is that makes us conscious of time, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French Jew and the father of sociology, found himself attracted to the study of differentiation, in particular to the palpable differencing of the religious calendar, which serves to separate mundane time from religious occasion and so structures the unconscious life of the community by mediating between holiness observed privately or parochially and the public workaday. Durkheim, who more than any other thinker quested after the societal effects of time-marking and time-management, concluded that the recurrent calendar was the major force behind religion’s survival and that it was so by dint of being religion’s foremost socializer.

Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin

Franz Rosenzweig (1887-1929) of Kassel, Germany, believed not in Jewish history but in Jewish ahistory. In Rosenzweig’s prescription, the ideal Jewish life must seem achronologic—as the religious calendar re-embodies Creation, each year can mark only a new cycle of the same rituals and laws in which progress does not, indeed must not, obtain. Rosenzweig understood that each generation of Jewry achieves its own balance of sacred (specific) and secular (universal) times and that, while creation and redemption are the only two fixed points of rupture along the timescale of any religion, revelation of God’s Law had been addressed to the Jews alone and so allowed Jewry to experience elements of creation and redemption in this world, the here and now. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) of Berlin was an atheist who, toward the end of his life, began experimenting with Jewish belief, perhaps informed as much by his early-century Zionism as by the perils of a war that eventually caused his suicide. One of his later, underdeveloped theories comprised a Marxist approach to Jewish Messianism, or Messianic Time. Benjamin was particularly exercised by memory and nostalgia and considered the past the essential purview of the Jew. Citing Biblical proscriptions against soothsaying, or divining the future, Benjamin instead proposed a sort of permissible foretelling: a before-telling; an inquisition of the past that deprived that hesternal sphere of its historicism, of its entropic sense of momentum and advancement, in favor of asserting time’s eternality and the enduring value of skepticism as a mechanism for redeeming the self. Because the future was so unknowable, or taboo, for the Jew, it acquired, in Benjamin’s thought, an auratic, fetishistic mystery, a fraught potentiality—at any moment the neat, orderly progress of our collective narratives might end, and what Benjamin called the Angel of History, a Messiah previously incapacitated by our political and technological ideas of progress, might finally be actualized, redeeming us from causality.

Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky

Karl Marx (1818-1883) regarded the regulation of time with ambivalence if not suspicion; a position best characterized by his insight that when time becomes decontextualized and so commodified as money, noncommodified time—what we might call personal-time, or family-time—becomes devalued. Marx envisioned a classless future, a mechanized utopia in which historical progress could be measured, and then nullified, only by human equality. The Revolution would come, and all men would be set free in his uniquely profane, but hopefully bloodless, eschatology. But Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) doubted the permanency of Revolution and instead called for “Permanent Revolution.” (Die Revolution in Permanenz was originally Marx’s formulation, though the idea is most closely associated with Trotsky.) Marx thought that a revolutionary class could achieve its emancipation by constantly pursuing its interests through ideological education and occasional resistance, whereas Trotsky believed that one-country socialism was impossible, and that the global proletariat had to seize power over and forcibly dismantle the bourgeoisie, imposing the communist agenda from above in a newer hegemony. Marx’s relationship to Time was traditionally Judeo-Christian: cyclical but redemptive, to be resolved in a future Messianic Era whose inherent egalitarianism would militate against the personality cult of any despotic Messiah; whereas Trotsky’s relationship was one of regular violent Apocalypse as necessary and even salutary.

Death, Afterlife, Messiah

When a person dies he or she is mourned for seven days at shiva (literally, “seven”), usually at the home of the principal mourner, in visits accompanied by food and prayer. For 30 days after the death, the mourner is prohibited from marrying, for 12 months the mourner is prohibited from enjoying public entertainment. Yahrzeit, Yiddish for “time of year,” is the word for an anniversary of a death. One year after burial a gravestone can be “unveiled,” but this is custom only and not a commandment. Jewish bodies must be buried as soon as possible. While the body is being prepared—washed, dried, and dressed—it may never be left unattended. Notions of the Jewish afterlife are disputed. Reincarnation seems a possibility to some, an apostasy to others. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer said the days of the Messiah will last 40 years, Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah said 70 years; Rabbi Hillel said there will be no Messiah, and Rabbi Joseph asked that Rabbi Hillel be forgiven. The prophet Zechariah—the name means “God has remembered”—speaks of two Messiahs.

All of which I mention to underscore the fact that it was with the anticipation of a certain amount of self-discovery, among other things, that I picked up Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals? In the substantive sense, I’d abandoned liberalism long before I changed my party registration—and over essentially the same issues that had prompted most neoconservatives to part company with the party that marched off after Sen. George McGovern in 1972. But for me it was something of a long goodbye that included 10 years at the Forward, an institution that had seemed to pitch rightward with each crisis that came upon the Jewish people but had yet to reach a conservative shore.

Podhoretz doesn’t disappoint. He starts his story with the birth of Christianity. In the first several chapters he takes us through the expulsion from Spain into the ghettos of the Middle Ages. He sketches Jewish achievement under terrible conditions. But he notes that Jews emerged from the Middle Ages “knowing for a certainty that—individual exceptions duly noted— the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity.” Podhoretz reckons it “was a knowledge that Jewish experience in the ages to come would do very little, if indeed anything at all, to help future generations to forget.”

Podhoretz explores several mysteries, and he does not fail to put them in a way calculated to touch on the exposed nerves. One example: if the Jews “never took it as a mark of friendship that under Christian rule they could escape the disabilities and dangers of being Jewish simply by ceasing to be Jewish, why did they fail to recognize that the Enlightenment was offering them the same bargain in modern dress? Why were they unable to see that the French philosophes and their counterparts in other countries were in their own way no less an enemy to them as Jews than the early Fathers of the Church?”

A second mystery he investigates in a chapter on the Marxists and other radicals, including some on the right. He puts it this way: “The question thus arises of why the Jews who joined the radical camp were not put off by the egregious anti-Semitism of Marx or that of several other major figures of the socialist movement, including Charles Fourier (to whom the Jews were the ‘the leprosy and the run of the body politic’) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (to whom the Jews were ‘the race which poisons everything [and] the enemy of the human race’).” Podhoretz has mined the literature for choice nuggets, such as Rosa Luxembourg (“Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?”) and Marx, who was baptized and had a flirtation with Christianity before moving to materialism. (“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”)

Podhoretz sees America as different. Even in early days Jews here were far freer than in Europe. Podhoretz reprises the American anti-Semites. He does not flinch from what he calls the “upshot”—that it was the conservative upholders of the old order who were hostile to the Jews, whether they were rich or poor and whether they had immigrated from Germany or Eastern Europe. And as he brings the story forward he sees the emergence of the Jews as loyalists to the Democratic Party as related to the fact that F.D.R. was clearly, despite protestations to the contrary, trying to get America into the war against Hitler. Not even the “immensely popular” Eisenhower, Podhoretz notes, was able to “break up the Jewish love affair with the party of Roosevelt.”

Up to that point, Podhoretz argues, the loyalty of Jews to the Democratic Party was “in harmony with their interests as Jews.” In the second half of the book, the focus is shifted to a different question, namely “why the Jews are still liberals.” This covers an era in which Jewish interests and Jewish politics became, at least in Podhoretz’s view (and my own), far less harmonious and even fell into disharmony. Podhoretz gives this discord a rich telling, in which—with his typical courage—he doesn’t spare the leaders he supported, such as Reagan, on the occasions when he thought they were wrong. Nor does Podhoretz pace the widow’s walk, searching the horizon in hopes that the Jewish move to the right will appear in the distance.

What he does conclude is that modern progressive politics have become a substitute religion—the “Torah of Liberalism,” he calls it at one point. Early in the book he quotes a passage from I.J. Singer’s novel The Brother’s Ashkenazi about Nissan, the son of a rabbi who becomes a disciple of “the prophet Marx” and who, as Singer puts it, “never let his copy of Das Kapital out of his sight and carried it everywhere, as his father had carried his prayer shawl and phylacteries.” Podhoretz comes back to this theme toward the end, quoting G.K. Chesterton as observing: “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” That was not true of the Jewish immigrants who came to America, Podhoretz writes. “Almost all the young intellectuals and political leaders among them had stopped believing in the God of Judaism, but it was not ‘anything’ they now believed, it was Marxism.” And when Marxism failed, Podhoretz writes, the “same process that had made social democracy into an acceptable refuge from orthodox Marxism now began making liberalism into an acceptable refuge from social democracy.”

Is all lost? It happens that I read Podhoretz’s book as I was at work on a short biography of the founding editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, Abraham Cahan, and I was struck at how closely the trajectory Podhoretz describes followed that traversed by Cahan. It turns out that the bitterest feud of Cahan’s life was not that with the Orthodox Jews of his hometown in Lithuania, nor the monarchists he plotted against in Russia, nor the capitalists he railed against in America, nor the Zionists he slighted for years, nor the Communists he turned against in the 1920s. Those feuds certainly were epic. But his bitterest moment erupted in the late 1930s, when his star writer, Sholem Asch, wrote a novel, The Nazarene, suggesting Jesus should be regarded by Jews as he was regarded by Christians. Then, even while protesting that he was not religious, Cahan went into a final frenzy, denouncing Asch as a traitor and a destroyed person. He wouldn’t let up, turning out articles, speeches and even a book until, alas, he was silenced by a stroke and leaving to the next generations the search for that line in liberalism that they just won’t cross.

Eliot was, as Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in her compact and absorbing new book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, “the rare novelist who was also a genuine intellectual, whose most serious ideas found dramatic expression in her novels.” Yet if her ideas were radical, her fiction glorified the “conservative” virtues—compassion, reverence, self-control. Indeed, Eliot believed that the more freely men thought, the more disciplined their behavior must be. A famous story has Eliot talking about “the words God, Immortality, and Duty,” and saying “with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”

This makes Eliot a natural subject for Himmelfarb, the eminent conservative historian, whose admiration for the English 19th century has led her to call for a return to “Victorian virtues.” In her new book, Himmelfarb focuses on one particular strand of Eliot’s achievement: her surprising intellectual engagement with Jews and Judaism, of which Daniel Deronda was the fruit. When the novel appeared, following Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch, it left readers nonplussed, as she knew it would: “the Jewish element,” Eliot predicted, would “satisfy nobody.” After all, as Himmelfarb says, in the 1870s “the ‘Jewish question’ was of no great public concern, certainly not in England.” And there was virtually no precedent in English literature for a novel devoted to a sympathetic treatment of Jews, Jewish history, and Jewish belief. Only Benjamin Disraeli, who was prime minister when Daniel Deronda appeared, might count as an exception; and compared to Eliot’s, Disraeli’s Jewish novels Alroy and Tancred look like sheer fantasy.

Certainly Eliot did not admire Disraeli’s theories about Jewish racial superiority. Himmelfarb quotes a letter Eliot wrote in 1848, shortly after Disraeli’s Tancred appeared, in which she insists that “the fellowship of race, to which D’Israeli so exultingly refers . . . is . . . evidently an inferior impulse which must ultimately be superseded.” In this, the modern reader, even the Jewish reader, will probably agree with her: Disraeli’s loose talk about Jewish racial purity and the international conspiracy of powerful Jews now looks distinctly ugly. But Eliot went further, writing that “much of [the Jews’] early mythology and almost all their history is revolting . . . . Everything specifically Jewish is of low grade.”

This sort of anti-Semitism was common in the progressive circles Eliot travelled in. As Himmelfarb expertly shows, in a tour-de-force review of mid-19th century German philosophy, the most advanced thinkers of the age—including writers Eliot herself translated, like David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach—agreed in using Judaism as a kind of shorthand for everything they considered reactionary and superstitious in Christianity itself. When Feuerbach argued, in The Essence of Christianity, that Christianity was a man-made myth, he traced that myth back to the ancient Israelites, whose God was “nothing but the personified selfishness of the Israelite people.” Karl Marx, the descendant of a long line of rabbis, went even further, writing in his notorious essay “On the Jewish Question”: “What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly god? Money . . . . The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”

These were the influences that shaped Eliot’s mind. How, Himmelfarb asks, did she leave them so far behind as to achieve the profound philo-Semitism of Daniel Deronda? Himmelfarb finds no sudden conversion, only a series of eye-opening encounters with Jews. Visiting Prague in 1858, Eliot and Lewes went to the synagogue, where “an intelligent Jew was our cicerone and read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the Law.” More significantly, in 1866 Eliot befriended Emanuel Deutsch, a Polish-born Jew who worked in the British Museum. Deutsch became Eliot’s tutor in Judaism. Her notebooks, Himmelfarb shows, began to fill with quotations “from the Bible and Prophets, the Mishnah and Talmud, Maimonides, medieval rabbis and Kabbalistic works, as well as contemporary German scholars.” Thanks to what Himmelfarb calls this “arduous initiation,” by the time she began to write Daniel Deronda, in 1874, she knew more about Judaism than most English Jews, not to mention English Christians.

She had also been converted to the cause of Jewish national rebirth, which was Deutsch’s passion. It was two decades before Theodor Herzl would give a name and an organization to that cause, and the word “Zionism” nowhere appears in Daniel Deronda. Yet in The Jewish State, Herzl would credit Eliot with inspiring his mission. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the restorer of Hebrew as a modern spoken language, moved to Palestine after reading Daniel Deronda in a Russian translation. “By the time the state was established,” Himmelfarb writes, “Israel’s three largest cities, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa, had streets named after George Eliot.”

What earned Eliot such admiration from Jews was her treatment of Daniel, which broke the longstanding tradition of English literary anti-Semitism that stretches from Shylock to Fagin. When the novel begins, Daniel believes that he is English—he has been raised as the ward of a wealthy English gentleman—but he knows that some mystery surrounds his birth. His journey of self-discovery starts when he rescues a beautiful Jewish woman, Mirah Lapidoth, who is trying to drown herself in the Thames. His growing love for Mirah leads Daniel to investigate the customs and history of the Jews, and he forms a friendship with Mirah’s brother Mordecai, who is Eliot’s fictional homage to Emanuel Deutsch.

Mordecai—whose real name, it emerges, is Ezra, like the rebuilder of the Temple—is a passionate believer in Jewish national rebirth: “Revive the organic center: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West . . . . Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel.”

But Mordecai is dying, and he wants Daniel to become his spiritual heir, to carry on the Zionist dream. Daniel resists this burden, until the dramatic, inevitable revelation that he is himself a Jew—the son of a Jewish actress who gave him up for adoption. When he finally confronts his mother, she tells him that she wanted above all to spare him the stigma of being a Jew: “I have rid myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that make people nudge each other at the sight of us, as if we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as theirs. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. It was better for you,” she declares. But Daniel responds by affirming a Jewish patriotism that is new in English literature, as it was new in European Jewish consciousness. “For months events have been preparing me to be glad that I am a Jew . . . . It is no shame to have Jewish parents—the shame is to disown it.” At the end of the novel, he marries Mirah and sets sail for Palestine, to work for Mordecai’s cause.

It is no wonder that Jewish readers were so enthusiastic about Daniel Deronda. Eliot received grateful letters from “learned Jews and impassioned Jewesses” in Germany, Poland, France, and America, who “assured her that she had ‘really touched and set vibrating a deep chord.’” Yet as Himmelfarb shows, gentile critics were much less positive. In particular, they complained about Eliot’s decision to tell two stories in the same book. For in addition to the title character, Daniel Deronda follows at equal length the destiny of Gwendolen Harleth, a spoiled young girl whose marriage to a cruel egotist begins her painful moral education. Gwendolen is a much more familiar type in European fiction than Daniel—she looks back to Emma Bovary and forward to Isabel Archer—and many readers have believed that, without its eccentric Jewish elements, the novel would have been better. The 20th-century English critic F.R. Leavis went so far as to prepare an edited version of the book, shorn of the Deronda half and retitled Gwendolen Harleth.

Yet Eliot insisted that she “meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there,” and Himmelfarb argues convincingly that Gwendolen and Daniel are one another’s necessary complement: Daniel is redeemed by joining a larger cause, while Gwendolen is damned by pursuing her own selfish ends. As Eliot wrote, in a passage Himmelfarb applauds, every individual needs “a continual inspiration to self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease or prosperity.” The Eliot Himmelfarb gives us is more conservative and friendlier to religion than she usually appears—or, perhaps, than she actually was. But even readers more sympathetic than Himmelfarb is to feminism and freethinking will find a great deal to enjoy and ponder in The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

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