1 - Introduction: the Jewess question

Summary

At the heart of the most celebrated Victorian novel of Jewish identity is the untold story of a Jewess. In the teeming London streets where Daniel Deronda searches for the relatives of his rescued waif Mirah Lapidoth, he comes across the obsequious pawnbroker Ezra Cohen and his exuberant family and hears mention of Ezra's lost, unnamed sister. The affair is clouded in reticence and embarrassment: both Deronda and the Cohens are reluctant to say or hear more. However, the need to resolve this enigma is obviated: Deronda discovers that Mirah's brother is not the unctuous Ezra but the mystic Mordecai Cohen. And Mordecai reprimands Deronda for his intrusiveness: ‘There is a family sorrow … There is a daughter and a sister who will never be restored as Mirah is.’ The absence in the Cohen family is not, after all, Mirah, whose ‘restor[ation]’ anticipates the national redemption of the Jews signalled at the end of the novel. In contrast, the fate of the anonymous daughter who might have been her remains forever undiscovered. Is she, as the conventions of the Victorian novel would suggest, dishonoured? Or is she, as the Jewish context of the Cohen family might also suggest, converted to Christianity, and thus equally alienated from them? The two possibilities point to two contrary themes in the representation of the Jewess evident not only in Eliot's text but also more generally in nineteenth-century culture: on the one hand, the dangerous carnality of the Jewish woman, and, on the other, her exceptional spirituality and amenability to restoration, conversion or radical assimilation.