By Mira Fox July 10, 2026
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
If I’m being honest, I did not enroll in a course on famed English novelist George Eliot’s final book, Daniel Deronda, out of any particular interest in the book. The last Victorian novel I read was Wuthering Heights, and that was for English class in high school. I’ve never attempted Middlemarch.
I just missed the classroom, the ability to dig into and discuss texts with a group. I was hungry to read something longer and harder than I might without some structure. The Daniel Deronda class, taught by comparative literature and Judaic studies scholar Danielle Drori at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, was simply the most reading-heavy course on offer in the month of June.
But Daniel Deronda, it turns out, introduced the idea of Zionism — or a sort of early version of it — to England, and to Europe. I had no idea that Eliot was so early to the idea of Zionism that she beat Theodor Herzl, the man hailed as the Father of Zionism, to the idea by two decades. Some of Israel’s early leaders loved the book so much they kept copies of it with them at all times. On the flip side, Palestinian scholar Edward Said was so frustrated by the novel’s depictions of a Jewish homeland as a noble aspiration that he wrote a lengthy aside on it in his own book, The Question of Palestine.
Daniel Deronda follows the story of the titular character, a young man raised as the ward of a member of the English gentry, who discovers his real parents were Jews. (I’ll apologize here for spoilers, but the book is 150 years old so I hope you’ll forgive me.) Except the novel is actually mostly about someone else altogether: a deeply flawed, self-centered and very compelling young English woman named Gwendolen Harleth who is grappling with the clash of her own desires against the boundaries and expectations of society, womanhood and marriage.
For the first half, I was confused about how this novel could possibly have anything Jewish to say. Gwendolen was fascinating, but Deronda gets far fewer pages and less emotional depth; his main character trait is being the Good Guy. Deronda is so famously flat and unconvincing that famed literary critic F.R. Leavis argued he should be excised from the novel and it should be republished as Gwendolen Harleth, freed from “the insufferably boring stretches” — those are the Jewish parts — that “loom so large.”
And then there are the other main Jewish characters. A beautiful damsel in distress named Mirah is very sweet and dainty but has no other personality to speak of — a manic pixie dream girl before her time. And the spiritually zealous Mordecai is so obsessed with the idea that Jews must return to Israel that he literally speaks of nothing else.
Most of the argument for Zionism, and Judaism more generally, is delivered via Mordecai’s didactic monologues in which he makes unconvincing grand statements like “Israel is the heart of mankind.” At the end, Daniel and Mirah wed and sail off to Jerusalem to save Judaism, and perhaps all of Europe. (How, exactly, one man who only recently discovered he was Jewish will affect such great change upon arriving in the Holy Land is so left so mystical and unclear that Henry James joked that for all anyone knew, Deronda and Mirah were simply having tea parties once they got to Israel.)
I’m not saying I agree about cutting out all the Jewish characters, as Leavis proposed. But I do think that they’re boring, unconvincing and didactic — as did my entire class. This is the case for Zionism that inspired Eliezer Ben Yehuda to resuscitate the Hebrew language? This is the novel Golda Meir kept on her bedside table?
Jews today are still writing about how her book helped inspire and affirm their own Zionism and Jewish identity. It’s true that some of her descriptions of Jewish history, and the yearning for a national identity, are moving. And Eliot painted an impressively prescient vision of the debate over Israel’s founding that would unfold over the next century.
Yet Eliot’s portrayal of Jews feels more than flat: It’s antisemitic. Of course, Eliot is a product of her era, so it’s unsurprising that some of her Jewish side characters are depicted as lowly and ugly, even as some of the other more minor Jews are human and well-rounded. But the real antisemitism is Eliot’s fetishization of Jews.
Her Jewish characters aren’t allowed to be real people; they’re figureheads. Eliot did her research — she was well-versed in biblical studies thanks to her evangelical education, and in Jewish mysticism thanks to her translation work. The book is peppered with references to Jewish sages like Ibn Ezra. But the Jewish characters speak far more of grand spiritual and political aims than they do of daily life, like prayer or keeping kosher. The Jewish characters serve as an instrument to inspire Gwendolen to live a more meaningful life. And Gwendolen stands in for England more generally — the message being, seemingly, that Jews will inspire Christian England to find its own grand national identity.
Reading Daniel Deronda, I was struck by its similarities not with founding Zionists of yore, but with today’s Christian Zionism. Eliot’s interest in Jews seems to stem from her worries about the vacuousness of English life, and her hope that Jews might somehow save Western society — Christian society, that is. She describes Judaism’s ancient roots as inherently noble, almost mystically powerful. But ultimately, it’s the same vibe as the preachers today who wrap themselves in Torahs or blow the shofar; they want to co-opt some mystery of Judaism to elevate their own beliefs and messages.
We’ve come a long way in social acceptance since Eliot’s time, yet this misconception is surprisingly sticky. Reading Daniel Deronda — or at least its Jewish parts — felt not dissimilar from watching the hit Christian TV show The Chosen, which mines Judaism for a sense of mysterious authenticity, or Amazon’s House of David, which gives Judaism an esoteric Game of Thrones-adjacent magnificence.
That exalted depiction might seem flattering on the surface, but Judaism isn’t mysterious or ancient; it’s very much alive. It’s the everyday practice and identity of millions of people who live in the U.S., and in Israel and in Europe. And as is so clear in Daniel Deronda, the more magical you make us, the less human we get to be.
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This story was originally published on the Forward.