The BBC’s 2002 television adaptation was an Andrew Davies bodice-ripper which centered on the love story and studiously avoided any intimation of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Before her death in 1880, she refused an offer to be buried in Westminster Abbey, whether because of her aversion to organized religion or because of her anger at a society that condemned her for living in sin.ĭaniel Deronda is not considered her greatest novel by any means, and some academic critic-notably FR Leavis-suggested cutting out its Jewish theme and republishing it under the title Gwendolyn Harleth. “In terms of its practical effects,” wrote the British historian Paul Johnson, Daniel Deronda “was probably the most influential novel of the 19th century.” Chaim Weizmann’s assistant Nahum Sokolow said “Deronda paved the way for Zionism.” Golda Meir had a copy on her shelf.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda reinvented Hebrew as a living language after reading the novel. Theodor Herzl was seen reading it on the eve of the first Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897. Leaders of the Zionist movement embraced the novel. Before long, she fell in love with Deutsch’s lively mind and took to calling him “rabbi”-Hebrew for “my teacher.” He addressed her as ‘Mrs Lewes’.įive years later, in 1881, a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia provoked mass emigration to America and the stirrings of a return to the Holy Land, the Daniel Deronda dream.

George Eliot, enraptured by his 60-page monograph, hired Emanuel Oscar Menahem Deutsch to teach her Hebrew once a week. This open marriage was so offensive to public morals that George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, was forced to form her own discreet circle, seeking friends among fringe people-artists, crackpots, penniless intellectuals.Īmong those who entered her life at this time was a low-paid curator at the British Museum, a polyglot bachelor from Berlin who had just written the first study in English of the Babylonian Talmud. The novelist, born 200 years ago this weekend, moved into a house near Regent’s Park in 1854 with George Henry Lewes, a married journalist whose wife, Agnes, was living with the founding editor of the Daily Telegraph, Thornton Hunt, and bearing his children. At the height of her fame, while every respectable Victorian household had a copy of The Mill on the Floss in the bookcase, George Eliot became a social outcast.

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