Writing Politics by David Bromwich

Author:David Bromwich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

GEORGE ELIOT

The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep! (1879)

GEORGE ELIOT was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), who wrote Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch, three of the greatest realistic novels in English. Among the mid-Victorian generation, she was distinctive in another way, providing, by her translations of David Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, a link to the German philosophic idealism that unified theology, ethics, and historical consciousness. The essay reprinted below shares a common motive with Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda: it traces the causes and deplores the persistence of anti-Semitism in English society; and Eliot embarrasses her readers with a particular record of the debt of the Christian to the Jewish religion. She rests her case for a Jewish homeland not only on the need for some shelter against persecution, but also on the good (to the cause of human variety) of supporting the vitality of more than a single culture. “Hep! Hep! Hep!” is said to have been the shout of Christian crusaders rounding up Jews to kill or expel.

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