Talmudic Transmission in Daniel Deronda

Abstract

George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, tells of the eponymous Deronda’s discovery of his Jewish roots and of the moral coming-of-age he inspires in a British gentlewoman named Gwendolyn Harleth. Published in 1876, the novel took its British audience to a terra incognita: to the Judengasse, to the synagogue, to the Sabbath table, and to the inner sanctuaries of Jewish thought. Eliot, who had much earlier abandoned her Anglican upbringing as well as her belief in a divine Authority, nonetheless remained throughout her life intensely interested in religion and in the relationship between morals and the human spirit (Paris 420). i A student of languages, belief systems, history, and many contemporary Victorian issues, she was stimulated intellectually to understand Judaism and to counter British anti-Semitism.