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the Jewish longing for a homeland attracted her because it grounds our better impulses in a specific community. Eliot believed, as she explains in her tract on Judaism, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”—a title referring to the modern world’s aimless bustle, that “a common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man.” We have seen how Dorothea and the young Deronda flounder with only a sense of common humanity. They lack “that noble partiality which is man’s best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical.” The Jews, George Eliot feels, offer this. She marvels in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” that although they are “expatriated, denationalized, used for centuries to live among antipathetic populations,” yet somehow they cherish a sense of corporate existence “unique in its intensity,” “that sense of belonging which is the root of human virtue both public and private.” The fact that the Jews retain this sense even as a scattered people makes their existence relevant to the modern dilemma. Some may reject their heritage. We see Mirah’s father, Lapidoth, who has stuck to mocking Jewish custom and Daniel’s mother, the Princess, whose assimilation has led her only to lonely desperation. But if these parents have spurned the “kinship of Israel,” the children can reclaim it. Twenty years before Hertzl, George Eliot is in tune with the first stirrings of the Zionist movement, making her prophet Mordecai urge: “Revive the organic center: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth of its religion be an outward reality . . . Let the torch of visible community be lit.”

Judaism also conforms to the novelist’s ideals in that she sees its sense of community, morality, and religion to be one. Speaking of Israel Mordecai asks: “Where else is there a nation of whom it may truly be said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made it one growth?” And the virtuous Jewish characters all evince such self-integration. Mirah’s religion is said to be “of one fibre with her affections and had never presented itself to her as a set of propositions.” Mordecai has “a mind consciously, energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies, but not the less full of conscience and tender heart for the footsteps that tread near.” And even the ordinary Ezra Cohen becomes extraordinary when, as he enters his home after a day of successful moneymaking, religious custom blends with family affection:

The two children went up to him and clasped his knees: then he laid his hands on each in turn and uttered his Hebrew benediction; whereupon his wife who had lately taken baby from the cradle brought it up to her husband and held it under his outstretched hands to be blessed in its sleep. For the moment Daniel Deronda thought that this pawnbroker proud of his vocation was not utterly prosaic.

When worship blends so thoroughly with domestic virtue, and faith with culture, religion need not be feared as mere theology or sect. George Eliot depicts Judaism as a complete and coherent way of life, a faith expressing itself in terms of custom and duty, the valuation of kinship and community, reverence for the past and future. And Daniel Deronda, in a unique resolution in Victorian fiction of the condition of being orphaned (one that also prefigures the artist figure’s later self-exile from mundane bourgeois society in the interests of a higher calling), is able to subscribe to it with his whole soul.

But if I grasp how much Judaism comes to mean to George Eliot, I am also struck by how little it has ever come to mean to me. For, as I have said, I, too, like Daniel Deronda, discovered, after believing otherwise, that I was of Jewish origin.

My mother resembled Daniel Deronda both in denying her Jewish heritage and in having ultimately to reveal it to her children. I learned of my mother’s early years in an orphanage as well as of her relationship with Scott Fitzgerald only when I was a teenager and she published the first of her books, Beloved Infidel (1957), the title that of a poem Fitzgerald had written for her. The movie version, starring Gregory Peck as Fitzgerald and Deborah Kerr as my mother, appeared two years later. Neither the book nor the movie made any mention of my mother’s five older siblings or of the fact of her family’s being Jewish. She had to tell Robert and me about these siblings and about the Jewishness on a 1959 trip to England because one of her brothers, upset at the family’s erasure from her history, revealed the “real Sheilah Graham story” to a London tabloid. I was just short of seventeen, about to begin my senior year at Rosemary Hall, where on a daily basis I chanted the responses in the Book of Common Prayer and sang the words of Episcopal belief of the anthems and the hymns. Despite my being an atheist, I was steeped in Christian liturgy, my experience at Rosemary building on Sunday school attendance at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. I had never set foot in a synagogue. In fact, back in Beverly Hills Hawthorne Elementary I had been one of the very few children left in school on Jewish holidays!

When my mother explained about her family in our room at the Dorchester Hotel, I turned to face the mirror behind me and stared hard at my reflection for some sign of difference. As best I could tell, I looked the same as a moment before. “You should have told us,” I said. When I got back to school for my senior year, I went around letting people know that I was now “half-Jewish,” though some, like my friend Pam, disliked my news. My mother begged me to show discretion (they’re going to know this has nothing to do with Trevor Westbrook, she said), but