Non-Jews can teach us a lot about ourselves.
"Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips." — Proverbs 27:2
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This is a guest essay written by Odelia Glausiusz, a content specialist and graduate of English Literature from Kings College London.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
In an essay titled “Concerning the Jews” written by Mark Twain in 1898, he concluded with the following, now-famous words:
“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.”
“He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sounds and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.”
“The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”1
This concluding paragraph expresses admiration and disbelief in due turn. Twain recognized the miracle of Jewish continuity, and marveled at a dispersed people who remained a cohesive unit, a scattered nation with no political power who outlived the many seemingly invincible empires that persistently attacked them over two millennia.
It is, to say the least, rare for a Jew to hear this sort of praise from a non-Jew. As Stanford University professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin noted, Twain’s efforts to “challenge anti-Semitism stand out in sharp relief” against a backdrop of ubiquitous virulent antisemitism from his contemporary authors in the last decades of the 19th century.2
And it is the words of another non-Jew, George Eliot, which can perhaps help us, if only partially, address Twain’s giant question: What is the secret of our immortality?
George Eliot is well-known as the prolific realist Victorian novelist of “Middlemarch” fame. But she (George Eliot was the male pseudonym under which she wrote; her real name was May Ann Evans) is lesser known as a champion of Jews. Her 1876 seminal novel “Daniel Deronda” presented an unusually sensitive and complimentary depiction of Jews. It even went so far as to support the idea of Jews returning to Israel and building a homeland there — despite the novel being written two decades before the birth of an organized Zionist movement.
Yet Eliot did not always see Jews in such a favorable light. In an 1848 letter to a friend, Eliot wrote:
“My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews … Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.”3
In a startling turnaround in “Daniel Deronda,” Judaism is “championed” as a “living, vibrant religion,”4 a heritage that bestows pride rather than shame. The title character, Daniel Deronda, is brought up as an English gentleman and later discovers his hidden Jewish roots. Unusually, he is actually “pleased to discover that he is Jewish and proud of his ‘race.’”
In a letter to her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1876, Eliot derided the “empty knowledge” that underlined the insults directed at Jews by English Christians, writing:
“The best that can be said of it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness — in plain English, the stupidity — which is still the average mark of our culture.”5
Eliot may as well be attacking her own earlier “intellectual narrowness” here, in forming judgements about Jews before attempting to understand them. Where she once saw everything specifically Jewish as “of a low grade,” in “Daniel Deronda” she championed Judaism’s distinctness, and in turn, she was championed by her Jewish readership.
Rabbi Dr. Hermann Adler, who would later, in 1891, become Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, called Daniel Deronda “the first work in English literature in which full justice is done to my race and faith.” He continued:
“It is, indeed, astonishing how the authoress could have gained so deep an insight into our mode of thought and our literature, which her work betokens. Her reading must have been very extensive. But that is not sufficient to account for the fidelity and truthfulness of her descriptions. We should ascribe it to that power of divination which is a distinguishing mark of true genius.”6
So, what changed Eliot’s viewpoints? And what drew her towards writing this “astonishing” work?
A Journey of Understanding
Alan Levinson pointed towards the “veritable compendium of paths” which conducted Eliot towards a “principled philosemitism,” including her encounters with contemporary Jews such as Emanuel Deutsch.7
Arguably the most pertinent of these paths was her extensive research into Jewish literature, history, and culture. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb underlined the “formidable amount of research” that Eliot undertook into “the literature, history, creeds and practises of Judaism.”
Her research notebooks, Himmelfarb detailed, “comprise hundreds of pages of excerpts from the Bible and prophets, the Talmud and medieval commentators, modern German scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement (the scientific study of Judaism) … She also took lessons in Hebrew, for which purpose she acquired Hebrew dictionaries, lexicons and grammars. In the published volume of her notebooks, the list of books she consulted comprise twenty-three pages.”
As Jane Irwin, editor of Eliot’s extensive “Daniel Deronda” research notebooks, posited: “Her comprehensive intelligence, sustained by her learning, freed her from unconscious prejudice.”8 Eliot’s personal journey of learning reverberates through Daniel Deronda, as she calls on her reader to likewise seek to understand the Jewish experience.
Herein lies the first key lesson Eliot’s transformation can teach us: To judge a people without first attempting to understand them is to accord them a false and flawed judgement. This begs the questions: Do we really understand ourselves? Do we really understand our Jewish brothers and sisters who don’t look, act, and think like us? Do we dismiss Judaism (or parts of Judaism) as archaic or simply “not for me” before attempting to deeply understand it?
Separateness with Communication
Eliot’s journey of learning led her to the realization that specificity, rather than being “low grade,” is actually what sets Judaism apart, what renders it unique.
In “Daniel Deronda,” she celebrated the kindness of the Meyricks, a Christian family who readily and warmly welcome Mirah, a Jewish refugee, into their home. Yet she also took care to highlight the way in which the Meyricks consistently belittle Mirah’s Jewish identity, viewing it as an inconvenient detail that will surely, overtime, fade away.
When Mrs. Meyrick cheerfully comments, “If Jews and Jewesses went on changing their religions, and making no difference between themselves and Christians, there would come a time when there would be no Jews to be seen,” Mirah responds passionately:
“Oh please not to say that,” said Mirah, the tears gathering. “It is the first unkind thing you ever said. I will not begin that. I will never separate myself from my mother’s people … I will always be a Jewess. I will love Christians when they are good, like you. But I will always cling to my people. I will always worship them.”9
Mab, one of Mrs. Meyricks’ daughters, is reluctant to indulge Mirah’s “inconvenient susceptibility to innocent remarks” and retorts: “Everything in the world must come to an end some time. We must bear to think of that.”
Meanwhile, when Mordecai, an eminent Jewish scholar, is discovered to be Mirah’s long-lost brother, Mrs. Meyrick’s gladness is tempered by her frustration at a brother “who would dip Mirah’s mind over again in the deepest dye of Jewish sentiment,” dashing her hopes that “the intensity of Mirah’s feeling about Judaism would slowly subside, and be merged in the gradually deepening current of loving interchange with her new friends.”
Isabel Armstrong pinpointed the “instinctive and unexamined anti-Semitism” which Eliot uncovered here: The contemporary view that assumed “Jews have no place in and no entitlement to belong to civil society.”10 For all the Meyricks’ warm embrace of Mirah, they also display a latent antisemitism in their explicit wish for Mirah’s “inconvenient” Jewish identity to fade away; for her to become, in other words, more like them. Despite making space for Mirah within their home, the Meyricks struggle to make space for Mirah’s diverging identity.
This is a theme which Eliot picked up on in a later essay, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”, named after the so-called Hep-Hep pogroms in 1819 against Ashkenazi Jews. It is a remarkable essay about cosmopolitanism, Jewishness, assimilation, and separateness, in which Eliot eloquently argued in favor of Jews maintaining their separate and unique identity as a nation. She powerfully wrote:
“Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the corpus vile on which rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their name flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred and contempt, they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one call this an evil pride?”11
She not only celebrated a Jewish pride that, against all odds, continues to burn strong, but goes so far as to argue for the very necessity of a distinct and separate Jewish culture and identity. She noted that throughout Jews’ tumultuous history, two possibilities presented themselves: to either merge into the populations around them, or to harness “the separateness which was made their badge of ignominy” into their “inward pride, their sense of fortifying defiance.”
Indeed, if Jews were to “drop that separateness … they may be in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism.” In other words, Eliot picked up on the way in which a loss of Jewish pride can easily slide into assimilation and the loss of a Jewish identity altogether.
But this is not to say that Jews ought to become a closed-off nation, banding tightly together in defiance of the rest of humanity. Eliot rather suggests that unless a Jewish distinctness is maintained, Jews will lose that unique heritage which they could otherwise draw on in dialogue with others.
In “Daniel Deronda,” Deronda’s Jewish father is described as follows:
“From his childhood upward, he drank in learning as easily as plant sucks up water. But he early took to medicine and theories about life and health. He travelled to many countries, and spent much of his substance in seeing and knowing.”
“What he used to insist on was that the strength and wealth of mankind depended on the balance of separateness and communication, and was bitterly against our people losing themselves among the Gentiles; ‘It’s no better,’ said he, ‘than the many sorts of grain going back from their variety into sameness.’”
What is described here is a man who has absorbed a wide range of wisdom, yet who recognizes the dangers of his Jewish heritage becoming subsumed by outside influences. He argues not for “sameness,” but for individuality, for it is with that very individuality that Jews can offer something unique to the world.
The late, great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks worded it more profoundly. Writing about the danger of antisemitism, he captured the importance of an affinity with other nations coupled with a pride in maintaining what makes us as Jews different:
“Anti-Semitism — the hatred of difference — is an assault not on Jews only but on the human condition … Cultural diversity is as essential to our social ecology as biodiversity is to our natural ecology. A world without room for Jews is one that has no room for difference, and a world that lacks space for difference lacks space for humanity itself.”12
Perhaps this is the answer to Twain’s question. Jews have remained immortal because they have never been afraid of remaining different. In “Daniel Deronda,” Mordecai asks:
“Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one growth — where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they were hunted with a hatred as fierce as the forest-fires that chase the wild beast from his covert?”
Eliot attempted to raise her readers above the notion that Judaism is merely “a sort of eccentric fossilised form” — as Daniel Deronda originally conceives it — but is rather, as Mordecai eloquently phrases it: “an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames.” Dispersed across the world, Jews remained bound by “their religion and law and moral life.” They clung to what made them different, and remained clinging to it, with an obstinate tenacity, in the face of fierce hatred.
And Eliot, a non-Jewish author, recognized that maintaining a separate Jewish identity is important precisely so that Jews have something unique to contribute to the world stage. As Gertrude Himmelfarb highlighted, Eliot “did not think of Judaism as an alien of extraneous element in Western civilisation. She read the Jewish sources, ancient and modern, in the same appreciative spirit that she read the classics and literature of her own culture. And she placed them in the same cultural continuum.”
Maintaining a distinct Jewish character, Eliot realized, allowed for a dynamic conversation between cultures.
‘Let someone else praise you…’
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explained the puzzling statement in Proverbs 27:2 — “Let someone else praise you, and not your own mouth; an outsider, and not your own lips.” — by noting that:
“Tanach (the Hebrew Bible) is perhaps the least self-congratulatory national literature in history. Jews chose to record for history their faults, not their virtues.”13
In other words, Jews focus relentlessly on how to improve. They forcefully confront their mistakes and battle with them. They aim for a better future. They do not blindside themselves by convincing themselves that they are infallible.
But sometimes we need to hear what we’re getting right. We need to reaffirm our pride in what we’ve achieved. To step back and take a look at the bigger picture. When an outsider praises us, we can renew our confidence in what we are getting right and work to bolster, maintain, and add to our rich legacy.
What if Jews themselves were to marvel at their longevity in the same way that Mark Twain did? What if they were to realize that they are part of a miraculous chain of unbroken tradition? What if they were to realize, as George Eliot did, that maintaining that chain requires a strong pride in a distinct Jewish identity?
What if they were to stop being afraid of being different?
Twain, Mark, “Concerning the Jews”. Harper’s Magazine, March 1898.
Fisher Fishkin, Shelley. “Mark Twain and the Jews”. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Vol. 61, No.1, Spring 2005, pp. 137-166. p. 138.
The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-78), I, 246-7 (to John Sibree, 11 Feb., 1848).
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot.” New York, Encounter Books, 2009.
Letters, VI, pp. 301-2 (29 Oct., 1876).
Anon., ‘THE REV. DR. HERMANN ADLER ON “DANIEL DERONDA”, Jewish Chronicle, 15 December 1876.
Levinson, Alan. “Writing the Philosemitic Novel: Daniel Deronda Revisited”, Prooftexts; a Journal of Jewish Literary History, 28.2 (2008), pp. 129-156, p.131. For more information on Emanuel Deutsch, see Himmelfarb, pp. 65-67.
Irwin, Jane. “Introduction”, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda notebooks, ed. Jane Irwin, (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. xlii.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Armstrong, Isabel. Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p.169.
Eliot, George. “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, n.d.) [1879].
Sacks, Jonathan. “Not Only One” in The Jonathan Sacks Haggadah, p.56.
Sacks, Jonathan. “Not Reckoned Among the Nations”. Covenant and Conversation.
Yisrael was and is called to be different. Not to assimilate. "And the nations will say, what a great and wise nation this is". "Be setapart as I am setapart" said YHVH.
Japanese national myth has them descended from some god....Arabs in the 19th century 20th century decided that the Quran made them a "nation." And they are without blemish....as you write the Jewish literature shows our shortcomings. And the gentile world uses that against us....especially now the Muslims...we're "betrayers of prophets." I read Daniel Deronda on the way to my first visit to east Mediterranean and then Israel in '73. Would she be our friend today when Israel is still be accused of genocide and brutality on such as Madam Amanpour/PBS/.CNN. We do have Douglas Murray, Brendan O Brien and any number of conservatives. The progressive movement defines itself by hostility to Zionism and Israel.