Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, British novelist Howard Jacobson reflects on Daniel Deronda, a novel by 19th-century author George Eliot that captures the idealistic roots of the Zionist movement.
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There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that Theodor Herzl, on his way to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, carried under his arm the novel Daniel Deronda, by Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name, George Eliot.
Whether or not the story is true, the association is apt. We live in a time when the debate over Zionism has been crushed into a rhetorical bloodbath, when even some Jews have lost sight of the definition of the word. Amid the noise, Eliot’s novel captures the moral and emotional beginnings of a movement that now both captivates and enrages the world.
But first, let us backtrack. You might think, given how large a part university campuses play today in the dissemination of anti-Zionism, that there would have had to be some reckoning, between marches, with George Eliot’s pro-Zionist fervor. But that’s to give away my age. A well-read student body can no longer be assumed. Still less a student body that is familiar with the works of George Eliot. And even where the name of that greatest of Victorian novelists rings a bell, her politics vis-à-vis the Jews don’t.
Would it matter if they did? Well, it should. Every ideology has a history, and it is crucial, if we are to be intelligent and informed about ideas we find abhorrent, that we understand their origins, their onetime necessity, the hope they once inspired.
