Literary Secularism Chapter 2 – Benjamin Disraeli and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
[The text below is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of my 2007 book, Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction. The Introduction / Chapter 1 can be found here.]
In the original chapter, I open with a section on George Eliot’s personal process of leaving behind organized religion as a young woman. Her secularization was important in shaping her world-view, which we see expressed in many different forms throughout her fiction. However, Eliot's was not a secularism grounded in hostility to religion freely chosen, but rather to forms of religion that result in coercion and exclusion. I’ll omit that opening section here.]
The “Jewish Face” in Historical Context
The Jewish thread of Eliot's Daniel Deronda has been much-discussed by critics since its publication, but it has in recent years come to be recognized as an important intervention on behalf of English Jews at a key transitional moment for the community. According to historian David Feldman (Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840-1914), the 1870s represented a critical moment for English Jews. It came after the removal of Jewish Disabilities—laws that prevented Jews from voting or working in professions that required a Christian oath—but before the large waves of immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe reset the image of Jewish identity. As importantly, Eliot writes her novel in the wake of the rise of Benjamin Disraeli, a converted Jew, to the Prime Ministership in 1871. Her novel questions the potentially positive value of the idea of religious community and poses the revelation of personal belief as potentially transformative. It attacks the question of secularization from both ends, and suggests that secularism from within a religious minority can appear to mean something different than it does from the perspective of a religious majority.
One of the most ambitious aims of Eliot's novel is her attempt to move the representation of English Jews beyond the rhetoric of race. At the time, race, rather than religion, was the dominant explanation of Jewish difference from the point of view of the Christian majority, and it entailed a wide array of stereotypes with which the reader is only too aware. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot aimed to humanize Judaism by creating a sympathetic, genteel protagonist, without denying the possibility that devout Jews might wish to continue to their primary orientation to the world through the lens of Judaism. Though this conscious desire might seem to work against the idea of universal values, Eliot argues that the choice to identify oneself as different within the framework of a common humanity can be a prerogative of a secular humanist project.
At the time of Eliot's writing, the tendency racialization of Jews was actually in a period of relative decline (racialization would of course return with a vengeance with the advent of anti-Semitic pseudoscience a few years later). As Feldman points out, anti-Semitism in England remained relatively mild in comparison to the extents it reached in France (with the Dreyfus Affair) and Germany. However, despite the decline in external restrictions against Jews, the cultural marginalization of Jews was still very much in effect in many segments of English life. Many English representations of Jews in the 1870s are characterized by fears of racial contamination, a widespread paranoia about extra-national penetration by Jewish converts, and moral and erotic ambiguity. The “Jewish Body” Sander Gilman identifies in the German racial science of the time undoubtedly also exists in some form in popular images in England (indeed, many of Gilman's examples in The Jew's Body refer to English figures, including Jack the Ripper and Benjamin Disraeli). These images unerringly mark Jews as threateningly foreign and also often racialize them as “black” and “oriental.” The overlapping of the Jew as foreign, black and Oriental is particularly suggestive, as it echoes the racial logic of English Imperialism, then at its apex. Perhaps ironically, all three of these attributes clustered particularly densely around the baptized Jew Benjamin Disraeli, who served as Prime Minister in 1868, and then again between 1874 and 1880, and who was himself responsible for popularizing the rhetoric of "imperialism" in important ways.
Eliot's novel responds to the representation of Jews in the world she knows best, that of the other novelistic images of the Victorian era. Eliot knew the novels of people like Dickens, Trollope, and even Disraeli, quite well; all of them (including even Disraeli) actively participated in the trafficking of Jewish stereotypes of miserliness, contamination, and amorality. These earlier (and, in the case of Trollope, contemporary) figures led Eliot to create unprecedented characters like Mordecai Cohen and Mirah Lapidoth, Jews who adhered to none of the stereotypes. Since the larger history of literary images of Jews in English literature has been amply chronicled by writers like Michael Ragussis (Figures of Conversion) and Anne Aresty Naman (The Jew in the Victorian Novel). Here, I will concentrate on just one facet of this history of representation, that of the representation of the Jewish face.
English writers of the nineteenth century write about the faces of Jewish men with intense fascination. At times, it is a horrified fascination, as if the fabricated veneer of the Jewish gentleman conceals a suppressed monstrosity. But there is also a degree of awe and admiration, even in the writing of those not entirely sympathetic to the idea of Jews moving freely in English society. The Jew's face is exciting, mobile, alien, beautiful, and displaced all at once.
The method of this section is in part inspired by the trace of nineteenth-century racial science in the mouth of a late twentieth-century American anti-Semite, who claims, "If you can blush you're not a Jew” (cited in Mary Ann O’Farrell, Telling Complexions, p.2). The epithet's deadly conjunction of affect registered on the face, the overtones of complexion, and the epistemology of racial-religious difference, points to an image not unlike that of Anthony Trollope's Ferdinand Lopez, a shamelessly opportunistic anti-hero, whose face in The Prime Minister is utterly affectless and carefully anatomized by the narrator. In the wide array of nineteenth-century representations of Jewish faces, minor Jewish characters and villains are figured as unmistakably Jewish, but the “close-ups” of the faces of more central Jewish characters tend to involve a much more complex problem of representation. Nevertheless, the faces represented by nearly all writers except Eliot do reproduce prevalent stereotypes about Jews. Eliot too foregrounds the face, though she does so specifically to challenge the dominant pattern of representation.
An early image of the Jew's face appears in Walter Scott's 1820 novel Ivanhoe. It is Rebecca's father Isaac, in his first appearance in the text, wandering into the great hall of Cedric “the Saxon”:
His features, keen and regular, with an aquiline nose, and piercing black eyes; his high and wrinkled forehead, and long grey hair and beard, would have been considered as handsome, had they not been the marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race, which during those dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character, in which there was much, to say the least, mean and unamiable.
Isaac's features are “regular,” almost “handsome,” but for the peculiar marks (which are not named) of his peculiar race. To the extent that these marks are read by Scott's narrator as unmistakable, and to the extent that they are inextricable from the history of Isaac's “race,” the image here is somewhat more discrete than many mid-century images of Jews that are considerably more ambiguous. Scott's ambivalence about his subject here is hardly unique, but the coordinates of the Jewishness of Isaac's face are distinct. Isaac's nose, eyes, forehead, and hair all defined and marked as non-Jewish, while his particularly "Jewish" features remain unmarked. (As an interesting side note, Rebecca’s face is described quite differently in the novel – not at all marked by racial difference. Rather, Rebecca is classically beautiful with a “well-formed aquiline nose.” Scott’s Jewish woman is merely exotic and orientalized in her fashion choices, not marked as racially other.)
Appearing on the scene not too long after Ivanhoe, the face of the young, dandyish Benjamin Disraeli was thought to be particularly striking in appearance. Foreshadowing late nineteenth-century pre-Raphaelitism and the cult of decadent style most famously embodied by Oscar Wilde, Disraeli's dandyism seems to be an experiment in demonstrating aristocratic stylishness regardless of his access to aristocratic social privilege. Some of Disraeli's most famous personal appearances are recorded by his biographers as highlights of his travels in the Orient, while other episodes mark his presence in London. Having walked down a London street in a particularly outrageous outfit, he told William Meredith, “The people made way for me as I passed. It was like the opening of the Red Sea, which I now perfectly believe from experience. Even well-dressed people stopped to look at me!” (cited in Sarah Bradford’s Disraeli). Early biographers were taken aback by this self-aggrandizing, religiously-inflected joke:
We feel, as we read this account, that the fellow was shaking his sides with laughter. What an image it was, that of the Red Sea, and how characteristic of the man to make use of it! We can visualize the scene - this one self-possessed, foppish, ironical Israelite going up Regent Street, between two walls of nearly petrified Gentiles! Such a young man does not need our sympathy. We need His. (Leon H. Vincent, Dandies and Men of Letters)
Warmly appreciative of Disraeli's gall, Leon Vincent's image of one Israelite and two walls of Gentiles reads Disraeli the way many contemporaries did—as a characteristically Jewish, and yet also utterly exceptional, individual. But aside from dress and showy manners, the young Disraeli's face is seen as disturbing in these early texts; writers express considerable fear and astonishment at his anomalous beauty. Here is a witness of one of his first political speeches, made while running for a House of Commons seat in 1835, N.P. Willis:
Disraeli has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem a victim to consumption. His eye is as black as Erebus, and has the most mocking and lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of scorn that would be worth of Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick heavy mass of jet black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's." (cited in Leon Vincent, Dandies and Men of Letters)
Like Scott's image of Isaac, N.P. Willis's image of the young Disraeli bears an emphasis on anatomical completeness—Willis makes the rounds of complexion including the eyes, mouth, and hair. The emphasis on the "jet black ringlets" of Disraeli's hair plays against the snaky dynamism of his "scornful" mouth. Perhaps these ringlets might be seen as pointing, from a secularized and converted standpoint, to the pyot (prayer-curls) Disraeli might have worn had he been a practicing Jew at a continental Yeshiva. And yet the suggestion of pyot here is ambivalent, possibly even unconscious. Rather than reading for the Disraeli's Jewish birth, or insisting on Disraeli's racial difference, N.P. Willis disperses the name of that difference and inflects his shock at Disraeli's difference with a decided sense of awe.
Several decades later, Anthony Trollope creates a Jewish infiltrator named Ferdinand Lopez with a Disraeli-esque scowl in The Prime Minister. Written immediately after the beginning of Disraeli's second rise to the Prime Ministership in 1874, The Prime Minister marks the instability of Jewish cultural identity created by Disraeli's disturbance at the top rungs of English society. As Michael Ragussis discusses, Trollope writes several novels in the 1870s with Jewish criminals in key roles, the most important of them being The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Way We Live Now, and The Prime Minister. (See Brian Volck’s essay “Changing My Mind About Anthony Trollope” [2021] for a nicely nuanced account of the persistent anti-Semitism in Trollope’s writing from this period.)
Conversion is a factor for many of the Jews populating these Victorian novels, mainly because conversion tends to cause anxiety for the majority community. No one is actually seen to convert to Anglicanism; conversion in Trollope is simply a device by which Jews have succeeded in infiltrating English society. Michael Ragussis observes a pattern that is directly evident in
Trollope's Prime Minister:
It is 'said,' 'supposed,' and 'suspected' of persons that they are Jewish, for in this world there is no Jewish badge, and Jewish origins are hidden, suppressed; Jewish identity often seems without substance, the product of whispers and rumors, sometimes no more than mere fabrication, so that the most meaningless
detail of one's life can lead to the erroneous charge of Jewish identity. . . . In this way the signifier 'Jew' circulates freely, in the possession of any person to bestow on any other person of questionable (especially foreign) origins. (Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 242)
In The Prime Minister, the force of the gossip around Jewish difference attaches itself to Trollope's Ferdinand Lopez. For while his presumed Jewish origins are at the center of the plot of the novel, Trollope never specifically verifies Lopez's actual birth in the text. Rather, the accusation of Jewishness is simply flung at Lopez with an escalating violence until it peaks, and then transforms, with Lopez's marriage to Emily Wharton. Initially, Lopez is described in fairly neutral terms as a “probable Jew,” but as he begins to succeed in his courtship other men in the novel begin to refer to him more darkly. He becomes "that greasy Jew adventurer out of the gutter," and a "nasty Jew-looking man". It is also this moment in the novel that Lopez's "swarthy colour and false grimace and glib tongue" are for the first time described. Importantly, after the marriage, the word “Jew” usually embodied in some way (“greasy”; “black”), scarcely appears at all. The Jew's body as potential contaminant gives way to the Jew's body in action. Lopez becomes "scornful" and "scowling,” "begrudging,” a "shameless, fraudulent swindler," and a "scoundrel.”
However, when he is first described by the narrator of The Prime Minister, Ferdinand Lopez has a very different mouth, and seems scarcely swarthy, or scowlish at all. But the form of the portrait has a good deal in common with N.P. Willis's image of Disraeli:
He was certainly a handsome man — his beauty being of a sort which men are apt to deny and women to admit lavishly. He was nearly six feet tall, very dark, and very thin, with regular, well-cut features indicating little to the physiognomist unless it be the great gift of self-possession. His hair was cut short, and he wore no beard beyond an absolutely black moustache. His teeth were perfect in form and whiteness, . . . But about the mouth and chin of this man there was something of a softness, perhaps in the play of the lips, perhaps in the dimple, which in some degree lessened the feeling of hardness which was produced by the square brow and bold, unflinching, combative eyes. They who knew him and liked him were reconciled by the lower face. The greater number who knew him and did not like him felt and resented, - even though in nine cases out of ten they might express no resentment even to themselves, - the pugnacity of his steady glance. (from Trollope’s The Prime Minister)
As with the Willis image of Disraeli, the references to the face are striking. Trollope describes the “regularity” of Lopez's features almost entirely in the negative: his face would not register with a physiognomist; he has cut hair, and no beard. Lopez's negativity is a classic figuring of a Trollopian “crypto-Jew”: his features are surprisingly straight (no crooked nose), he is surprisingly tall (not hunchbacked). He seems to be absolutely not irregular. Trollope then describes Lopez in terms of the extremeness of some of his features—teeth and hair, both of which are unusual because of the absolute contrast in color (white and black). At this point, Trollope's eye moves down, and the clarity of the earlier image dissolves in favor of a softening, dimpling mouth. The initial eroticism in Trollope's image (a beauty that "men are apt to deny and women to admit lavishly") is sharply undercut by a litany of features that produce an almost entirely incoherent, irresolvable image. Lopez's face does not hang together, but with its hard-soft, straight-fuzzy, features, is rather a type of textual collage. The “straight, not crooked” elements, which read as attractive at the beginning of the paragraph, are overridden by the much clearer image of the “bold, unflinching, combative eyes” and “pugnacity” that dominate the latter part of the paragraph. At the end of this paragraph, there is almost nothing left to
like about Lopez's face.
By way of contrast, and to enhance the objectivity of these observations, it might be helpful to compare Trollope's representation of Lopez's face with the first physical description of Lopez's (Christian) friend, Everett Wharton:
Everett Wharton was a good-looking, manly fellow, six feet high, with broad shoulders, with light hair, wearing a large silky bushy beard, which made him look older than his years, who neither by his speech nor by his appearance would ever be taken for a fool, but who showed by the very actions of his body as well as by the play of his face, that he lacked firmness of purpose. (The Prime Minister)
Where Trollope accounts for Lopez's teeth, hair, eyes, lips and dimple in great detail, the noble-born Everett is marked as simply a “good-looking fellow.” Also, some traits, such as the beard, distinguish him, perhaps ironically, from Lopez. But his most important attribute might be “the play of his face,” a phrase which suggests mobility of features, though it describes very little physically. Everett's “play” is a way of loosening him from the strictures of Trollope's moral image-making; Everett is to be forgiven if he has not yet found “firmness of purpose,” but Ferdinand Lopez's soft points prove to be diabolical.
Daniel Deronda: “More than English”
The representation of the Jewish face is at the core of Eliot's novel as well, though here it takes on a slightly different hue. Where novelists such as Trollope and Scott offer an image of the Jewish face as a mark of absolute (racial) difference, Eliot creates a representation of a Jewish face that aims to indicate a depth of moral feeling. While the pattern created by earlier writers might lead us to predict that Eliot will mark the face of her Jewish protagonist as a sign of his difference, in the novel Eliot self-consciously reverses that trope. The reversal starts with Daniel Deronda’s backstory—he was raised by an English gentleman named Sir Hugo Mallinger, but discovers at age 25 that his biological parents are continental Jews. Long before he has concrete knowledge or even strong suspicion of this, Deronda nurtures a knowledge of Jewish culture seemingly as a result of chance encounters with Jews in London. The revelation of Judaism has the potential to have tragic results (or, as in Trollope, be the source of scandal), but is instead, in Eliot's narrative, a formative and constructive opportunity for Daniel Deronda.
Deronda's physiognomy is as exceptional as that of the other Jewish faces we have seen, but it gains from what Eliot aims to convey with it. Rather than simply commenting on static religious difference, Deronda's face is the site of his ethical struggle as well as his pursuit of self-knowledge. For before Deronda learns of his heritage directly, his relationship to Judaism is performed by his face, in scenes of complective discoloration and blushing at moments where his identity is hotly at issue. It is by repeatedly blushing that Deronda gives the lie to the anti-Semitic stereotype of affectless, shameless Jews, but Deronda's blush also represents the kernel of his difference. At the novel's conclusion, Deronda's Jewish difference precludes him from participation in the novel's major heterosexual marriage plot—a plot that would point him towards Gwendolen Harleth—and reorients him for a different kind of fate. Most importantly, Eliot's novel argues that Deronda engages in a free choice when he claims his Jewish difference publicly, and that such a choice in fact shows his full inclusion and belonging in the mainstream of liberal English culture. In other words, even as Deronda develops as a Jew he simultaneously develops as an Englishman. It is an early instance of hybridity: Deronda is at once a version of a prevailing representation of “the Jew” and a completely original fiction, at once classically “straight” and strikingly different, at once Englishman and Jew.
In the first detailed description of his face in Daniel Deronda, George Eliot focuses on the non-resemblance of Daniel Deronda's nose to the English noses in the Mallinger family portraits. As with the first image of Lopez in Trollope's novel, Deronda's nose is compared to a portrait of Sir Hugo Mallinger's nose, which has been given "something more than justice" (166). Deronda's face, the passage leads us to understand, has no shade of Mallinger-ness about it; the passage points away from a conventional sort of revelation, in which Daniel might turn out to be the illegitimate child of Sir Hugo. As with Lopez, Daniel Deronda is defined at least partially negatively, and this lack of pointing can be thought of as in fact a shadowy reference to his Jewish lineage. But unlike Trollope's Lopez, Eliot's narrator follows up the image with lavish admiration: "Still he was handsomer than any of them, and when he was thirteen might have served as model for any painter who wanted to image the most memorable of boys."
Another similarity between Deronda and Lopez is the way their Jewish parentage seems to direct the sensibilities of both characters long before the narrative is posed to reveal the truth of their birth. With Lopez, the closest the narrative comes is the throwaway revelation that his father was a traveling jewelry peddler (Trollope, 501). Given the role of the "Jew jewellers" Messrs. Harter and Benjamin in Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds, this may be as good as a confirmation of his parentage—and yet it is not a confirmation, and no confirmation of his religious identity is ever given in the novel.
Finally, the early (pre-revelation) image of Daniel Deronda shares with Lopez an unfinished, “softened” quality, although it does not figure on Deronda's face, but rather his gender identification:
This state of feeling [Sir Hugo's paradoxical affection stemming from Deronda's non-resemblance to him] was kept up by the mental balance in Deronda, who was moved by an affectionateness such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details, while he had a certain inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine. (322)
If Deronda's religious identity is torn between Anglicanism and Judaism, does his “feminine” aspect come from his Jewishness or his Anglicanness? Deronda's later "throbbing" with Jewish-religious feeling under the tutelage of Mordecai might be read as the passive position described here, but his assumption of the reins of the leadership of the Jewish community with the aim of organizing a national homeland seems to stem from an "inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine" that is the antithesis of passivity. It is in visually intense characterizations like these, which both share with and significantly depart from other representations of the Jew's face, that simple racial explanations of Deronda's Judaism are most directly challenged.
The complexity of Eliot's mapping of religious difference to Deronda's face might even be evident in the very first scene of the novel, in which Deronda crushes Gwendolen Harleth's winning streak at the gaming table with a powerful ironic look:
There was a smile of irony in his eyes as their glances met; but it was at least better that he should have kept his attention fixed on her than that he should have disregarded her as one of an insect swarm who had no individual physignomy. Besides, in spite of his superciliousness and irony, it was difficult to believe that he did not admire her spirit as well as her person: he was young, handsome, distinguished in appearance - not one of those ridiculous and dowdy Philistines who thought it incumbent on them to blight the gaming-table with a sour look or protest as they passed by it. (11)
The reference to the “Philistines” that Deronda does not here resemble points to Matthew Arnold, who in Culture and Anarchy links “Philistinism” with English middle-class “Hebraism,” ignoring the influence of actual communities of Jews practicing “Hebraism” on Protestant English culture. The layers of meaning that go into Deronda's supercilious look are linked to this chain of meaning, as Deronda disapproves of the narrow amorality of gambling (we later find out that speculative commodities trading supports the Harleth family's fortune). The irony of the passage plays on the circularity of Arnold's categories, ironically marking Gwendolen, in this scene of "dull, gas-poisoned absorption," as the Philistine—and Daniel as the Jew.
The inclusion of the pristinely beautiful, unquestionably English heiress Gwendolen Harleth in the metaphoric web of “Jewish” signifiers, is strengthened by background details that begin to surface. The Harleth family fortune, we learn, came into being with Gwendolen's grandfather, who owned a plantation in the West Indies. This is somewhat distasteful to the aspiring Gwendolen, and it seems "to exclude further questions" (24). Almost immediately following the disintegration of Gwendolen's luck at the gambling table, that same fortune is annihilated by irresponsible financial speculation. Here, it might be the Harleths that are coded as aspiring Jews, who have made their money by a highly lucrative, if morally dubious, type of work26, and who are now attempting to marry into “society” on the fumes of their former fortune. Speculation on global commodities is of course precisely the manner in which Lopez attempts to make money and establish himself in England in The Prime Minister, though for him it proves to be more a fatal addiction than the passport to Parliament he desires.
The difference of Daniel's face is first described at length when he is looking at the portraits in the Mallinger house, wondering if he might be, “under the rose,” a descendant of that house:
In Sir Hugo's youthful portrait with rolled collar and high cravat, Sir Thomas Lawrence had done justice to the agreeable alacrity of expression and sanguine temperament still to be seen in the original, but had done something more than justice in slightly lengthening the nose, which was in reality shorter than might have been expected in a Mallinger. . . .But in the nephew Daniel Deronda the family faces of various types, seen on the walls of the gallery, found no reflex. Still he was handsomer than any of them, and when he was thirteen might have served as model for any painter who wanted to image the most memorable of boys (166)
Daniel's perceives himself in the hall of Mallinger portraits through a process of serial misprision. First, Sir Hugo's classic English expression and temperament are misrepresented by a nose slightly too long. What is encoded in the aberration does not stem from an indiscretion on Sir Hugo's part: the painting of his nose signals neither a “Hebrew” profile nor any Pinocchial excess of the libido. Rather, the comic indiscretion only points to the disjunction that is Daniel's own face, which has nothing of agreeable Mallinger alacrity, but rather a marked beauty of a different order.
In the space of the same chapter Daniel's beauty is cast in terms that eschew overtly feminine traits, and that rise out of an image of soft receptiveness into the clear cut of a sharp profile and a hard line:
The voice, sometimes audible in subdued snatches of song, had turned out merely a high barytone; indeed, only to look at his lithe powerful frame and the firm gravity of his face would have been enough for an experienced guess that he had no rare and ravishing tenor such as nature reluctantly makes at some sacrifice. Look at his hands: they are not small and dimpled with tapering fingers that seem to have only a deprecating touch: they are long, flexible firmly-grasping hands, such as Titian has painted in a picture where he wanted to show the combination of refinement with force. And there is something of a likeness, too, between the faces belonging to the hands—in both the uniform pale-brown skin, the perpendicular brow, the calmly penetrating eyes. Not seraphic any longer: thoroughly terrestrial and manly; but still of a kind to raise belief in a human dignity which can afford to acknowledge poor relations. (186)
As with much of Eliot's rhetoric of beauty both in this novel and elsewhere, Deronda's physical attributes are integrated into the whole package of his talents, his ethical orientation, and his expressivity. Eliot places his "lithe powerful frame" and his temperamental gravity in a relation of structural dependence with his singing voice. But Deronda's manly gravitas is inflected by the exoticism of the painting and the painter to which his face is compared. Though Deronda fails to resemble in the genealogy of Mallinger portraits, his features are figured as proper to Renaissance painting—Titian in particular. This reference to Titian may seem to have little direct bearing on the epistemology of Deronda's religious difference, and may even be a way of marking Deronda's nose as more noble in the Roman sense than Jewish in the “nostrility” sense. However, when read with reference to Deronda's "uniform pale-brown skin," the “Italian” resonance of Titian marks Deronda as somehow racially other—as in the sense of Trollope's provocative phrase: "some inferior Latin race," or Mr Bult's comparable characterization of Daniel Deronda's Herr Klezmer (whose Jewishness may be read in his name30) as "a Pole, or a Czech, or something of that fermenting sort." (241)
Eliot's research into European Jewish life and her intimacy with Jews like the scholar Emanuel Deutsch (who provided the model for Mordecai in her novel) gives her access to some sense of how Victorian-era English Jews saw each other. For even while Deronda draws attention in the “Anglo” world for his looks and his look, he is recognized as possibly Jewish by the Jews he meets in Europe, something Deronda finds unsettling. The most striking incident of apparent recognition occurs when Deronda is traveling alone in Frankfort, and goes to visit an Orthodox synagogue. Deronda makes eye contact with an elderly (Jewish) man, who disrupts Deronda reverential experience of the Hebrew service:
[H]e felt a hand on his arm, and turning with the rather unpleasant sensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt to bring, he saw close to him the white-bearded face of that neighbour, who said to him in German, 'Excuse me, young gentleman - allow me - what is your parentage - your mother's family - her maiden name?'
Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling: he was inclined to shake off hastily the touch on his arm; but he managed to slip it away and said coldly, 'I am an Englishman.' (368)
At this point in the novel, Deronda has no sure knowledge of his parentage. So the anxiety of the scene, indirectly presented in the “unpleasant sensation” of the man's touch, may have as much to do with the fact of his personal doubts about his origins as with the imputation that his mother is a Jew. But the genealogical confusion embedded in the Englishman/Jew distinction here (Are you a Jew? [No,] I am an Englishman) may be less revealing than the mediating function of Daniel's body as it is located between the two mutually exclusive identities currently in play. For with What is your parentage? and the technically unrelated answer I am an Englishman comes from a person touching another, and a strong sensation of repulsion and resistance. Eliot casts this in general terms ("the rather unpleasant sensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt to bring"), but every one of Deronda's encounters with Judaism plays on embodiment and affect, suggesting the complexity signified by Jewish religious practices and beliefs for Daniel in this portion of the novel.
When Daniel walks into a Jewish-owned secondhand book store in London, looking for Mirah's lost brother, he meets the man who is later identified as Mordecai. Mordecai stops him in the middle of a sale, and causes another moment of anxiety:
'You are perhaps of our race?'
Deronda coloured deeply, not liking the grasp, and then answered with a slight shake of the head, 'No.' The grasp was relaxed, the hand withdrawn, the eagerness of the face collapsed into uninterested melancholy, as if some possessing spirit which had leaped into the eyes and gestures had sunk back again to the inmost recesses of the frame; and moving further off as he held out the little book, the stranger said in a tone of distant civility, 'I believe Mr Ram will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir.'
The effect of this change on Deronda - he afterwards smiled when he recalled it - was oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if some high dignitary had found him deficient and given him his congé. (387)
It is striking that both of these scenes of inquiry involve men grasping hold of Deronda. Jews who read his face as Jewish clearly want Deronda to be Jewish, so the physical component, the grabbing, in both encounters also functions as an invitation. However, this passage differs from Deronda's encounter with Kalonymos in the Synagogue, in that Mordecai's question is explicitly along racial lines. Deronda's answer is therefore also more explicit—he gives a meek, embarrassed negative, accompanied by a telling discolouration, which is followed by Mordecai's withdrawal of his hand.
It is the fact that Deronda “colours” here, in reaction to being addressed as a Jew, that makes this passage in particular the crux of Eliot’s reworking of Deronda’s religious and national identity. “Colour” suggests both the registering of affect (a blush) and a darkening of Deronda's already dark complexion—it alludes self-consciously to that complexional difference. But Deronda’s blush is, it must be said, no more slippery than the conventional erotic blush that populates much nineteenth-century writing. In Telling Complexions, Mary Ann O'Farrell traces the course of the blush through nineteenth-century English fiction, from Jane Austen through Henry James. O'Farrell reads the blush in the novel as both a "somatic act of confession," a sign of shame and embarrassment at forbidden pleasures, and also a way of expressing pleasure itself. Perhaps the most enabling aspect of O'Farrell's reading of the blush is the way its particular deployment in the novel is a form of writing the body. That is to say, for O'Farrell, the blush is a specifically linguistic invention that is also the most emphatic form of embodiment possible in nineteenth-century fiction:
[A]s an act of interpretation, identifying the blush entails imagining it as the writing of the body, and, thus, as the product of somatic agency, a means to dispel the alternative fantasy that the obdurate body is obstinate in its refusal to speak. The blush can seem, then, to partake of both body and language— supplementing language with an ephemeral materiality—and novelistic usage would even suggest that, by means of the blush, body and language are identical and simultaneous in function and effect (O'Farrell, Telling Complexions 3)
If for O'Farrell's blushing protagonists, “the body” specifically denotes a desiring body that is implicitly English, for Daniel Deronda, the blush is a “writing of the body” the content of which is Jewish difference. But even though Deronda's blush is a pointedly “Jewish blush,” even a “Jewish closet blush,” one that is unique to his face, it trades on the constitutive indeterminacy of the concept of race in Eliot's novel. Indeed, since the blush is so profoundly involved with expressing what cannot be put into words, it may be the case that Daniel Deronda's blushes all come to throb with a common “blood,” which is to say, the meaning of the verb “to colour” is determined by its use in other instances in the novel. The novel, in short, develops a discourse of "colouring," that refers as one of its essential meanings, to eroticized Jewishness.
The Mediterranean faces in Daniel Deronda are visual synonyms for each other. Every "refined" Jew in the novel has a complexion and a profile indistinguishable from a Spaniard or an Italian. Eliot's narrator has a great deal of affection for the complexion she sometimes calls "pale-brown" (as in the Titian passage above), and sometimes "olive." But most tellingly, the word she uses is "rich." Rather than working up a familiar gothic axis of pale beauty and its dark, violative antithesis, Eliot structures the entire poetics of light and texture in the novel on a scale between rich (as in dark) and poor (pale). When Deronda “colours,” it can be read along the color-texture spectrum put in place elsewhere in the novel—his darkening is an enriching of tone that moves him away from the barren territory of pallid, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon gentry and towards a much more active, Mediterranean indeterminacy. The event is the more striking because of the unusual work the word "colour" does in becoming an active verb in passages like the one above, with an agency and, it seems, an agenda of its own.
Before long, Daniel Deronda no longer feels the need to draw back when Jews touch him and invite him into their community. Preceding his awareness of his Jewish lineage, Deronda begins to have an erotically charged relationship with Jewish religious culture, specifically mediated through Mordecai and partly through his love interest, Mirah. Judaism, he discovers, is not an esoteric relic from the past, but "something still throbbing in human lives,” which is to say, a theologically and culturally dynamic way of being modern:
But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her yearning after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world; and in the idling excursion on which he immediately afterward set out with Sir Hugo he began to look for the outsides of synagogues, and the title of books about the Jews.
Though it is almost a casual passage, this is one of the most important and memorable defenses of the religious minority experience in the entire novel. For Eliot, Jewish difference is not a minor matter of theology, but a vital—and irreplaceable—“vesture of the world.” The explorations of the texture of this difference for a mainstream readership alone makes the novel a unique contribution to Victorian literature’s representation of Jews. But of course, Eliot wants to do still more.
The end of the novel marks a move from a covert, racialized inscription of Jewishness on Daniel's body to that of an open discourse of Jewish community, which anticipates Benedict Anderson's concept of the nation as an “imagined community.” This transformation is accompanied by a rapid increase in the instances where Deronda blushes or “colours.” These later colourings occur not in response to the entreaties of other Jews, but as a result of various forms of less benevolent presumption. Though they are in some sense less loaded, the later colourings remain complex events. For instance, when he “colours” in response to his mother's suggestion that he must be in love with a Jewess to be so keen on committing to Judaism, it is both Deronda's realization of a desire he had not articulated and an expression of embarrassed resentment at his mother's crude pragmatism. Also, when Gwendolen, having just watched her husband drown, prematurely figures her life with Deronda in it, Deronda again “colours.”
“Colouring” expresses both his foreclosing of Gwendolen's romantic designs on him and points to his recent revelation, the content of which he is not yet prepared to share with her. In their conversation, the hint is expressed as geographical uncertainty (a hint of Deronda's nationalist plans): "'I am quite uncertain where I shall live,' said Deronda, colouring.”33 Deronda “colours” yet again when Sir Hugo dismisses Deronda's anxiety over his grandfather's chest in Mainz: "I hope you are not going to set a dead Jew above a living Christian."
Finally, Deronda “colours” significantly when coming out as a Jew to Gwendolen. Only here, his colouring seems to stem not so much from what he cannot say to her as from the excess of what she communicates to him: "'A Jew!' Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping through her system. Daniel coloured and did not speak.” This moment can be read against the other three scenes between Daniel and Gwendolen I have discussed—his shattering, ironic glance at her at the gambling table, their exchange of blushes at Diplow, and finally his hint to her at Genoa. In each of the earlier scenes, there is the communication of an ethical idea from Daniel to Gwendolen, accompanied by a certain erotic current she responds to in turn—with a blush. But in this final announcement, Daniel points to his own image rather than hers, to a meaning that does not include her. In place of blushing, after she says “A Jew,” Gwendolen has only the movement of a "confused potion." The circuit of meanings is irreparably closed to her.
It is in this scene with Gwendolen that Deronda makes his most explicit statement of intent regarding his nationalist intentions. The idea of Israel is certainly strong in his conversations with Mordecai, but there it is generally Mordecai speaking. Moreover, when Deronda announces his plans to his mother in Genoa, he speaks more in terms of “community” than of “nation.” If Deronda accesses Judaism through Mordecai, receiving it almost passively, nationalism is specifically Deronda's invention. He does hint at his design when he meets Kolynomos in Mainz, but it is to Gwendolen (who has come to depend upon his attention and moral guidance with analogous passivity) that he fully expresses his dream:
'I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there . . . The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe. That is a task which presents itself to me as a duty: I am resolved to begin it, however feebly.'
Deronda's dream of Israel is articulated through a figure of the British Empire. Deronda's presentation of an ideology of Jewish nationalism is extraordinarily precise and well-ordered, especially given that the Zionist movement had not yet come into its own. But Deronda makes one extremely revealing reversal in the figure. For where the Jews are "scattered over the face of the globe" as a dispossessed and displaced people, the English are scattered specifically as its masters. Deronda's idea of establishing a "national centre" for the Jews seamlessly reverses the trajectory of the British Empire, which began with a national center, and then expanded outwards as that center grew more and more powerful. Deronda's Israel, then, either presumes too much (i.e., that the diaspora has sufficient economic strength and political coherence in its scattered form to rebuild its “centre”), or fails to see the power of precedent and of history to complicate narratives of self-determination.