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Reviewed by: George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism Tamar Heller (bio) George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism, by Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton; pp. vi + 216. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, £55.00, $69.95. "My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews," declared George Eliot in 1848, adding that "everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade" (25). Almost thirty years later, however, she would speak of the "peculiar debt" Christians owe to "the Hebrews": "Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called educated making small jokes about eating ham....They hardly know Christ was Jewish" (171). The Eliot who learned to challenge, rather than to echo, the pervasive anti- Semitism of her day is the subject of this study, by Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton, which argues for the influence of Jewish mysticism on Eliot's novels. While Daniel Deronda (1876) is unsurprisingly the text Nurbhai and Newton analyze most thoroughly, they depart from earlier criticism that dates Eliot's interest in Jewish thought only from this later work. Instead, Nurbhai and Newton claim that "throughout her fiction, at least from Adam Bede, one can discern a substructure shaped by kabbalistic ideas" (2). According to this study, Eliot's greatest debt to kabbalah lies in her appropriation of the Jewish myth of the golem—Hebrew for "unformed mass" (1)—which, like Adam, symbolizes the created being that needs to be given both life and spirit by its creator. Nurbhai and Newton connect Eliot's use of Jewish mysticism to her desire to elevate the status and aesthetic value of the novel; as they see it, kabbalah provided "the metaphorical and allegorical potential to enable the novel to compete in complexity and philosophical range with tragic drama and epic poetry" (2). Joining critics who have perceived the limitations of reading Eliot solely as a realist, Nurbhai and Newton focus on how mythology enables Eliot to create a "unifying sub-structure" (190) that addresses issues of individual, national, and even transnational well-being central to her narrative project. Such an underlying mythic structure, Nurbhai and Newton argue, would have been particularly important to Eliot because of her own loss of faith, which drove her to search for alternative philosophies to lend meaning to human aspirations. Usefully summarizing some of the ways in which Eliot—moving away from her shallow dismissal of Jewish culture—would have become familiar with Jewish mysticism, Nurbhai and Newton [End Page 692] mention a variety of influences in the 1850s, including Eliot's admiration for the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (himself influenced by mystical thought) and her exposure to German-Jewish intellectual life on her trip to Germany in 1854. While eventually she became, according to George Henry Lewes, as "profoundly versed in Jewish history and literature" as "learned Rabbis" (15), Eliot would also have been aware of the Romantic narratives influenced by kabbalistic thought, such as Frankenstein (1818)—the classic golem tale—which she revises in her own Gothic, The Lifted Veil (1860). Nurbhai and Newton identify a number of themes in golem myths that appealed to Eliot: the symbiotic relation between creator and created—a relationship that, as in Frankenstein, can go radically awry; the need for wholeness both of body and spirit; the search for perfection not only of the individual but—as the golem can signify the Jewish community—of an entire people. By acknowledging Eliot's debt to Romantic versions of the golem myth, however, Nurbhai and Newton make their argument less convincing; Eliot may not be so much influenced by kabbalah as by Mary Shelley's revision of it. Given this caveat, however, Nurbhai and Newton locate a number of perceptive parallels between Eliot's narratives and golem myths. In Middlemarch (1871-72), for example, Rosamund is a golem figure whom Lydgate wishes to mold into the ideal decorative woman but who instead destroys her would-be creator. In Daniel Deronda Mirah "represents the soul of Judaism," the "'Shekhinah' or feminine potency" that, in uniting with Deronda, enables his assumption of a Messianic role for his people (162). As these...
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