At City Journal , Benjamin A. Plotinsky reviews Gertrude Himmelfarb’s latest book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot :
Is it wonderful or not wonderful? That’s what critics have been asking about the novel Daniel Deronda ever since its 1876 publication. Their answer has often been in the negative, and surely part of the reason for their low opinion is that Daniel Deronda had the bad fortune to be written by George Eliot. Just four years before, Eliot had published her masterpiece, Middlemarch , which still lays a strong claim to being the greatest novel in English. It was a tough act to follow, and any novel that tried was probably destined for poor reviews. But there was a second, less happy reason for the critics’ disappointment: this final novel of perhaps England’s finest novelist took Judaism as one of its main subjects. More, it viewed Judaism with sympathy, portrayed it with astonishing erudition, and even made the case for a Jewish state in the historic land of Israel—long before Theodor Herzl’s publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896 or the First Zionist Congress the following year . . . .
Himmelfarb does an enormous service just in reminding us of the importance of this often maligned book. More recently than the nineteenth-century critics who frowned at its Jewishness, twentieth-century academics have sneered at its Zionism, seeing in the novel the intellectual advance guard of what they regard as a despicable colonialist enterprise. And as Himmelfarb astutely points out, the Zionism championed in Daniel Deronda is of a kind very different from the Zionism that represents the State of Israel as merely “the response to the Holocaust.” Eliot, of course, was writing half a century before the Nazis came to power. In a time when nationalism was in better odor than it is today, her conviction was that the Jews, too, were a nation—one, as Himmelfarb puts it, “that could find its fulfillment only in a polity and a state.”
