Daniel Deronda

"Middlemarch includes a substantial proportion of writing about relations between the professions, trade and the landed gentry and the moral and ethical issues that affect those relationships. I think Daniel Deronda is a quite beautiful description of the identity dilemma and what we would today call diversity issues. It explains how conditioning by nurture can confuse someone, as it confused Daniel, who only really found his understanding of his origins when he met the unconfused if vulnerable young woman Mirah. Everything changes but plus ça change, plus c’est le meme chose . Diversity has become, rightly, an enormously important issue in our time. But I don’t think the ethics behind diversity have changed very much. Although George Eliot, who was something of a social reformer, was thinking and writing about the changing times in which she lived, the lessons she gives us are an exemplifier we can use when facing similar issues today. “The use of language is extremely important and that people are extraordinarily negligent in their use of language.” I think ethical issues are a continuum. If you read the court speeches of Cicero, for example, you see exactly the same kind of moral and ethical problems being confronted within his historical matrix as we face today – by analogy at least. Yes, I think she is a moral education. If I have a pupil barrister, or a parliamentary researcher – or even a child – when they get to an appropriate stage I always say to them, ‘If you can find the time please read Daniel Deronda because it is part of the essential bibliography for life.’ There isn’t anything to the novel without that. The essential part of the book is about the character’s Jewishness, partly because it is a great storyline. But it couldn’t have been written without the Jewish theme. And don’t forget that at the time George Eliot was writing, pogroms were still taking place against Jews in otherwise civilised parts of the world. In Russia, for example, which had at the time possibly the most civilised aristocracy, and elsewhere."

"I consider Daniel Deronda a fine piece of Jewish literature, under my definition that it doesn’t have to be by a Jewish person as long as they write about the Jewish experience in a profound way. In this book, Eliot confronted anti-Semitism and the Jewish question in a way that her peers were not, either in literature or in their lives. It is about a Victorian gentleman who did not realise that he was Jewish but in the course of the novel he discovers the circumstances of his birth. It’s a book about identity, culture, religion and nationalism. Eliot had it all – artistry, intellect, curiosity. She illuminated her characters from within, showing the reader their hearts and minds. She created a whole world in her fiction, enveloping the reader. All this and she seemed to invent Zionism on her own, years before the first Zionist Congress. Eliot is a great writer for many reasons, but what impressed me most was her imaginative sympathy. She chose Jews and the Jewish question as the frame for an exploration of identity. Her commitment as an artist involved research and investigation. She did a huge amount of research. She visited synagogues to see what the service was like. She talked to Jewish people, she looked at Jewish texts, she read Spinoza , she even studied Hebrew. This book is a brilliant work of Jewish literature and also an extraordinary work of exploration. She’s an investigative writer, a researcher, and a wonderful example of somebody who didn’t stick to the old dictum “write what you know”. Daniel Deronda , which I read when I was about 17, was tremendously important to me because it made me think I can write about the Jewish experience, but also that I can write about anything I can research. So it inspired me doubly – in my work as a Jewish writer, and in my work on topics not strictly connected to Jewish themes. Eliot showed me that you should write about what you know but also about what you learn. I took this lesson to heart when I chose to write about scientists in Intuition and environmentalists, technocrats and rare-book dealers in The Cookbook Collector . Eliot is the great explorer of Victorian novelists, and I often think of her as I write. Those things are indeed fading from memory. In terms of writing about the contemporary Jewish community, there are many rich strands to pick up. Writing about assimilation is very interesting. Talking about intermarriage or people who return to religious Judaism is interesting – why do some people feel compelled to go farther away and others feel inexorably drawn back to their roots? Themes of identity and the persistence of belief in the modern world are all tremendously rich themes for writers to explore. They’re not themes that are limited to the Jewish community, but there’s a lot of good material there."