Ruth Wisse
Ruth Wisse teaches Daniel Deronda
A series of eight recorded lectures on the novel by George Eliot
Produced by the Tikvah Fund, 2019.
Reviewed by Judith Roumani*
One of the greatest of English language novels, published in 1876, revolves around and takes as its title the name of a Sephardic Jew. Sooner or later it had to enter the pages of Sephardic Horizons, and this series of recorded lectures provides the perfect opportunity. The somewhat original medium, a series of eight lectures, allows us also to savor the presence of the very personable master lecturer Professor Ruth Wisse, for many years at Harvard and now, since her retirement, a lecturer at the Tikvah Center in New York. The lectures are varied: she performs at a podium and also walks down a Manhattan street, or sits on a bench in Central Park, all the while talking about this great novel of ideas. And the ideas are ones in which many Jews personally take great interest: the relationship of Jews and the British, Sephardim in the UK, nationalism, and the origins of Zionism.
George Eliot, according to Wisse, is the greatest English novelist of her day; she lived in a century of great English literature. Born in Warwickshire (Shakespeare country), Eliot fell away from her religious upbringing and refused to attend church. She taught herself German and became a translator, essayist, and editor, writing on the weightiest philosophical issues of the day and producing a series of extremely successful and still beloved novels, in serial form, which take the pulse of social changes of the time. Her novels include The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1871-72). In Daniel Deronda (1876), her last novel, Eliot reveals an upper class of landed gentry whose foibles and superficiality are contrasted with the deep self-searchings of Daniel Deronda, an “English gentleman” of uncertain origins but high moral values.
Wisse brings her vast knowledge of the period to bear on relations between Deronda and another character with whom he interacts, Gwendolen Harleth. She is a young English lady who has fallen on hard times and who pays a terrible price after marrying for wealth and respectability instead of love. Her redemption comes with the help of Daniel Deronda. Gwendolen would have been the heroine if the novel had had a slightly different emphasis. Deronda also saves the life of a Jewish girl, Myrah, who has returned from abroad to seek her family but despairs of finding them and tries to commit suicide. He locates a host family for her, gives her hope, and helps her in her quest for her family, as well as finding her employment as a singing teacher.
Deronda’s search for his own origins leads him finally to his mother, an Italian princess, who had given him up for virtual adoption to an English lord with the condition that he should never be told that he is Jewish. Daniel’s mother wished to lead the unencumbered life of an artist (an opera singer), and also rebelled against her father, a somewhat autocratic Orthodox Italian Jew. Daniel’s grandfather left a box of family mementoes with his friend in Frankfurt. The friend finally entrusts it to Daniel. Between the meeting with his mother, and receiving the box bequeathed by his grandfather, Daniel is overjoyed to finally find out that he is Jewish, and takes on what he sees as his historical responsibilities.
Deronda chooses Jewish Myrah for his bride over the lovelorn English and non-Jewish Gwendolen, turning away from what the English would have seen as the happy resolution of assimilation. In a presaging of Zionism, the novel ends as the couple is about to leave on a journey to the East, to visit various Eastern countries and to find out whether there is any possibility for the Jews to re-achieve a homeland, a concept that the English take for granted.
Wisse shares many insights about the period and its intellectual climate. She tells us that Jews of Eliot’s time welcomed this novel; a translation into Yiddish omitted the first seventeen chapters, thus concentrating on Deronda’s discovery of Judaism and Zionism. English readers probably felt that the ending was not the happy ending they expected; marriage to Gwendolen and assimilation in a new Britain of tolerance would have given them this satisfactory closure. However, as Wisse also indicates, anti-Semitism in Europe, and lingering prejudice in Britain, meant that the assimilationist model would not be the ultimate answer.
If a novelist is well read in a certain field, then his or her critic has to be too. Wisse has carefully traced Eliot’s vast reading in German philosophy and Jewish sources, as well as her frequent European travels, which would have familiarized her with many European issues. Wisse tells us we should read Eliot’s essay on growing European anti-Semitism, her essay on “The Modern Hep Hep Hep” (1878) on nationalist incitement, alongside the novel. There are certain light and even humorous touches, but this is a novel of ideas to be taken seriously. Wisse remarks at one point that despite all his positive characteristics, Daniel Deronda does not have much of a sense of humor. In fact, the levity and insouciance of the English landed gentry, who spent their time in entertainments such as fox hunting, archery, charades, musical performances, and, when abroad, gambling, as well as the somewhat cynical attitudes of several of the characters, required--if English society were to be saved from itself in those times of profound change--to be balanced by some seriousness. Gwendolen is a compelling and complex prefiguring of what English society might well become. She might be viewed as the heroine because her tragic story figures much larger than that of Myrah, who never waivers in her faithfulness to Judaism and does not have violent internal struggles at this point in her life.
One wonders whether Eliot was aware of a major battle that had begun only a few years earlier in 1858, the struggle for the soul of Edgardo Mortara, the young Jewish boy from Bologna who was kidnapped by the pope’s police and forced to become Christian. She probably was, because the event rocked Europe; it was likely a factor in the pope’s being deprived of his secular power. One could view Daniel Deronda as a fictional response, a Jewish child who had also been forced to convert to Christianity, one of the anousim or ‘forced ones’ lost to the Jewish people but in this case miraculously retrieved. As when reading Shakespeare, one can find that this great novel is spacious enough to accommodate many interpretations. Ruth Wisse leads us into it with great confidence, mastery, and learning, the pleasure of listening to her and her presentation of George Eliot enabling us to experience the intellectual dilemmas facing Britain in that mid-to-late Victorian period of momentous change, a period hovering on the cusp of emancipation for both Jews and women.
* Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons.