Daniel Deronda: George Eliot’s Book of Exodus 

Eileen H. Watts

As if in response to God’s command to Moses to “Bring up this people, and an angel will lead them to the Promised Land” (Exodus 33:12), toward the end of George Eliot’s 1856 novel, Daniel Deronda, Daniel says, ”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 center, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe” (Daniel Deronda, Chapter 69).

My imagined dialogue between Moses and Eliot’s Zionist character sets the stage for the thrust of this study: to read the novel as Eliot’s re-imagined Book of Exodus in order to understand her two main goals: 1) to argue for the re-establishment of a Jewish nation, and 2) to warn Englishmen of the ethical and spiritual cost of anti-Semitism.

In an earlier essay on Daniel Deronda for Lehrhaus, I investigated the relationship between the novel’s feminist and Zionist themes in relation to Rav Soloveitchik’s Fate and Destiny, suggesting that women could employ the same approach and tactics as Zionists used to create independence. In this essay, I explore the novel’s Zionist and philo-Semitic themes in relation to the novel’s richly-layered references to the Book of Exodus, suggesting an allegory in which Eliot’s Jewish characters represent the Children of Israel, and its Christian figures, the Egyptians; for, in Ruth Wisse’s words, for Eliot, “to learn to appreciate the Jews was to save England from Perdition” (Allan Arkush, “For George Eliot…” Mosaic; Ruth Wisse’s lectures on Daniel Deronda – see below, n1).

Thus, I propose that Eliot (nee Mary Anne Evans, 1819-1880) intended the novel as a cautionary tale for Christian Englishmen to avoid going the way of Pharaoh’s Egypt – its reign drowned by history. Moreover, understanding the novel in these allegorical terms explains the heretofore unidentified organic connection between the novel’s two parts: its infamously derogated ‘separate’ Christian and Jewish storylines, discussed below.

Summary of Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda’s 800-plus pages comprise eight books, the first four of which concern Christian Gwendolyn Harleth and a cast of Christian characters, and the second quartet of which concerns Daniel and a host of Jewish characters. The first storyline reveals that Gwendolyn’s formerly aristocratic family has lost its benefactor and that the young woman has just lost everything at the roulette tables. Desperate for money, she pawns a turquoise necklace, which is soon returned to her anonymously. Fearing homelessness, Gwendolyn marries the wealthy but cruel Henleigh Grandcourt, despite learning of his mistress and four children who reside in a coal-mining district. After months of enduring psychological abuse at Grandcourt’s hands, Gwendolyn watches him drown off their yacht.

The second storyline explains that the Harleths’ benefactor, Sir Hugo Mallinger, has raised Daniel as an English gentleman. Daniel’s mother, the Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein, nee Charisi, rejected her father’s Judaism and bequeathed her late husband’s fortune and her two-year-old son to Sir Hugo on the condition that he conceal the child’s Jewish heritage from him. Leonora eventually informs Daniel of her father’s chest of Jewish documents, which she has long intended to burn.

Daniel happens to see Gwendolyn at the roulette table, is taken with her beauty, and secretly redeems and returns her pawned necklace. The two are romantically drawn to each other, but when he learns his true identity, the Christian Miss Harleth is no longer marriageable. Later, by chance, Daniel rescues his future wife,  a poor, Jewish, eighteen-year-old girl, from suicide in the Thames. Through searching for her long-lost family, Daniel meets Mirah’s thirty-year-old brother, Mordecai, who is dying of tuberculosis. Mordecai voices Eliot’s arguments for a Jewish homeland, and upon his death, Daniel and Mirah marry and move to Palestine to fulfill Mordecai’s (and Eliot’s) vision. This second narrative offers readers an education in Judaism and Jewish history, including its biblical roots, rituals, philosophies, and Eliot’s insistence on the humanity of Jews.

Background, Critical Reception, and England’s Lingering Anti-Semitism

George Eliot’s immersive and extensive education in Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, Kabbalah, Hasidism, and Jewish history has been well-documented. Numerous books and articles on Jewish aspects of her works, particularly Daniel Deronda, bring to light the extent to which her knowledge of Judaism informed her writing.

Twenty-first-century scholarship alone testifies to the flourishing interest in Eliot’s integration of Judaism into her novels. Nurbai and Newton’s 2002 George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism explores how Jewish mysticism informs Eliot’s work. Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 2009 The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot retraces the why and how of Eliot’s Jewish journey, her studies with Hebrew scholar Emanuel Deutsch, and her interest in Zionism. Josh Glancy’s 2021 article “George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: How One Novel Reshaped the Image of British Jews” points out similarities between Daniel and Moses, and also investigates the lasting effects of Eliot’s at-the-time radically dignified, sympathetic characterization of Jews – while noting eminent British critic and Cambridge don F. R. Leavis’s proposed publication of the novel’s Christian part only, to celebrate the novel’s 1976 centennial. Most recently, Ruchama Feuerman’s 2025 article, “George Eliot’s Ground-Breaking Novel about Jews” examines the novel’s presentation of Jews as complete human beings, with spiritual, intellectual, and emotional lives. But to my knowledge, no one has yet reconciled the two ‘separate’ parts of Daniel Deronda, the Christian and Jewish storylines — nor fully explored its Daniel-cum-Moses parallels.

Regarding those two distinct storylines, it is important to note that Daniel is present in the opening chapters with Gwendolyn. In fact, the scene in which he redeems her necklace leads to the heart of Eliot’s vision for England – to accept and respect its Jews as equals, even saviors of the English soul. For example, in Chapter 2, we are told that Gwendolyn “plays roulette not because of passion, but in search of it.” If she represents the British people, as Ruth Wisse suggests, the girl’s empty soul reflects Eliot’s fear of bigotry’s effects on them.^[1] For in pawning her necklace, Miss Harleth complains, “these Jew dealers were so unscrupulous in taking advantage of Christians unfortunate at play” (Chapter 2). Unfortunately, this expression of prejudice is not unique to Gwendolyn.

Even though Jews had been readmitted to England by Cromwell in 1656 after a three-and-a-half-century ban, and were even admitted to Parliament by the Jewish Relief Act of 1858, Eliot believed that the country’s Jews were still not treated as equals culturally or socially. Her letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, anticipating Deronda’s negative reception, explicitly states Eliot’s feelings about the British attitude toward Jews, and any peoples who are different from the British. She wrote to Stowe:

“As to the Jewish element in ‘Deronda,’ I expected from first to last in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance and even repulsion than it has actually met with…. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us.”^[2]

England’s “arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness” is embodied by the likes of Grandcourt, but even Gwendolyn, Hugo Mallinger, and various secondary characters make anti-Semitic remarks that give voice to Eliot’s “national disgrace.”

To wit: With Daniel at a Jewish-owned book store, the narrator says, “In most other trades you find generous men who are anxious to sell you their wares for your own welfare; but even a Jew will not urge Simson’s Euclid on you with an affectionate assurance that you will have pleasure in reading it” (Chapter 33). Even Sir Hugo is not immune. Upon Daniel’s decision to return to Germany to claim his grandfather’s chest rather than visit Gwendolyn, Sir Hugo tells him, “I hope you are not going to set a dead Jew above a living Christian” (Chapter 59). Another character says of Mirah,  “She will see no Jew who is tolerable. Every male of that race is insupportable—‘insupportably advancing’—his nose” (Chapter 37). Perhaps most surprising, when Daniel’s mother asks his forgiveness for giving him away, she says, “Have you the cursing spirit of the Jew in you? Are you not able to forgive me?” (Chapter 52). Ironically, Leonora appears to be the most anti-Semitic figure in the novel, for she felt Judaism enslaved her. (For more on Leonora, see my earlier Lehrhaus article.)

Echoes of Exodus

In the biblical narrative, baby Moses is rescued from the Nile and raised as a Prince of Egypt, only to become the ruin of Pharaoh, and the Hebrews’ savior, leading them to the Promised Land. Here, in Eliot’s narrative, two-year-old Daniel is rescued from what his mother believes would be a life of slavery to Judaism and is raised by an English gentleman, only to embrace his (Daniel’s) true heritage and transport it to Palestine with a chest of his grandfather’s papers, (metaphorically holding either the Bones of Joseph or the Ark of the Covenant), to recreate the Jewish nation in the Promised Land. However, it is his relationship with the alluring Gwendolyn Harleth that links the novel’s Jewish and Christian worlds. Marrying solely for financial security, Gwendolyn weds the Pharaonic and abusive Grandcourt. Fittingly, he ends up drowning off his yacht, Gwendolyn silently watching.

Gwendolyn loves Daniel, but he marries Mirah Lapidoth, the young Jewish wanderer whom he saved from suicide by drowning.  Ezra Mordecai Lapidoth, her consumptive older brother, seems to me the voice of God’s messenger, if not God Himself in Eliot’s Exodus, he who teaches Daniel the Law and spiritual/political necessity of a Jewish nation. For example, in his meetings with the Philosophers Club, a group of Jewish men who meet regularly to discuss the status of Jews in England, Mordecai says to them: “Revive the organic center: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality,” and to Deronda, “You must be my hopes – see the vision I point to – behold a glory where I behold it… [then] our race shall have… a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defense in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American” (Chapter 42). Moreover, Mordecai speaks to Mirah in “thou’s.” Evoking the King James Bible’s language, he addresses her as ‘thou’ four times in the space of two pages (Chapter 61). This use of the biblical pronoun is notable because Daniel Deronda is Eliot’s only novel set in her own time (1864-1866). Thus, Mordecai’s repetition of ‘thou’ seems intentionally biblical, if not divine.

I suggest that, as mentioned above, since the novel’s publication in 1876, respected scholars, including F. R. Leavis and Henry James, have not properly understood Eliot’s knitting together of her novel’s Christian and Jewish worlds; critics on both sides have insisted that the book’s two halves be published separately. (See Himmelfarb, 136-140). But Eliot insisted that everything in her text belonged there; indeed, that “it was all of a whole” (73).

Indeed, the mechanics of Eliot’s Exodus allegory appear as early as Chapter 4 (of 70) when Gwendolyn is described with imagery alluding to Pharaoh’s dream of impending famine (Genesis 41: 22-24): “Always she was the Princess of exile, who in time of famine [should have]her breakfast-roll made of the finest bolted flour from the seven thin ears of wheat” (Chapter 4) (Emphasis added). Referring to Gwendolyn as a Princess anticipates her marriage to the tyrannical Grandcourt, and linking her to Pharaoh’s dream lends weight to his role as the novel’s Pharaoh figure. But most significantly, this passage evokes Joseph in Egypt, the genesis of Exodus.

Thus, if we pay attention to the novel’s integration of the Book of Exodus, its use of names (Shemot, meaning names, is the Hebrew title of Exodus), its use of Jewish history, and its impassioned arguments for a Jewish nation, we can see that in Daniel Deronda Eliot offers anti-Semitic England a way to avoid becoming Pharaoh’s Egypt. This is writ small when Daniel redeems Gwendolyn’s pawned necklace, and she later tells him twice, “It shall be better with me because I have known you” (Chapters 36, 69). In short, Eliot saw England’s acceptance of Jews as human beings as its redemptive path to becoming a more moral society, possibly the same sort of moral society God intended for the Children of Israel in the Book of Exodus. According to Himmelfarb, Eliot believed that the “Jewish Question” in her time involved accepting that “Judaism… was of a whole with the culture and history of mankind” (Himmelfarb, 73). She points out that Daniel “embodies the wholeness of Judaism” because he combines the virtues of an English Christian gentleman and a Jew. This puts a finer point on the Daniel-cum-Moses allegory, as Moses also embodied the virtues of an Egyptian Prince and a Hebrew.

Eliot’s Names

Supplementing their roles in her re-imagined Exodus, Eliot’s characters’ names tie them to events in Jewish history, strengthening her biblically-based  argument for a Jewish homeland. For example, Daniel, meaning “God is my judge,” is the maternal grandson of Charisi, meaning “merciful grace,” and the biological son of Leonora, meaning lion and light, and her cousin, Ephraim Deronda. The biblical Ephraim was one of Joseph’s sons whom Jacob blessed and adopted, and who became identified with one of the twelve tribes and the founding of Israel. Thus, the fact that Daniel’s father is named Ephraim anticipates the son’s mission – to found the Jewish nation. And Jacob’s blessing of Joseph’s younger son amplifies the novel’s themes of family, tradition, and leadership.

Daniel learns of his true parentage and heritage only because his grandfather’s friend, Kalonymos, keeper of Charisi’s chest of Jewish documents, happens to recognize Daniel at a synagogue in Frankfurt (where Daniel goes to learn more about Mirah’s Judaism) and forces Leonora to tell the young man the truth of his Jewish identity. Historically, Kalonymos was a prominent Italian family in the Middle Ages and was responsible for spreading Ashkenazi Judaism in Italy, France, Greece, and Germany. In the Talmud, Kalonymos was the father of Onkelos, a convert who wrote the definitive Aramaic Targum (interpretive translation) of the Torah. (See The First Families of Ashkenaz by Dr. Tamar Ron Marvin). Eliot’s Kalonymos’s first name is Joseph, tying him, like Ephraim, to the children of Israel’s descent to Egypt.

Eliot’s choice of the name Mirah Lapidoth for Daniel’s future wife is also linked to Exodus, but in an ironic reversal. Mirah is a form of Miriam, the name of Moses’ sister, who watches from the Nile’s banks to ensure her baby brother is rescued. When she sees Pharaoh’s daughter, the Princess, take the basket from the river, she further ensures that the baby is nursed by his mother (Exodus 2:1-10). Eliot’s inverted allegory here is ingenious: Daniel rescues Mirah from drowning in the Thames and places her with the Meyricks, a kind but anti-Semitic Christian family who take care of her, just as Pharaoh’s daughter provides for Moses.

The Mirah/Miriam allusion also consists of the young girl’s connection to her long-lost brother, Ezra Mordecai Lapidoth, who instructs Daniel in Judaism and inspires him to help establish a Jewish nation in Palestine. Thus, just as the Egyptian Princess saved Moses and raised him as an Egyptian, so Daniel’s mother saves and places him with Christian Hugo Mallinger, who raises the boy as an English aristocrat, promising to conceal his heritage. But Daniel and Mirah also save each other: she from suicide and he from a life without purpose. Yet Eliot’s name symbolism does not stop there. Lapidoth was the name of Deborah’s husband in the Bible (Judges 4:4) and refers to illuminating flames; he is Midrashically said to be so-called because he carried her wicks to the Tabernacle, which accurately describes Mirah and Mordecai.

Mordecai, of course, evokes the Purim story, in which he prevents Haman’s planned destruction of the Jews, restoring their right to defend themselves (Esther 8:9-11). Eliot’s Mordecai urges Daniel and Mirah to create a Jewish nation that would defend itself, as any other country does. Even though he is called Mordecai in the novel, his first name is Ezra, evoking the learned scribe and priest who helped rebuild the Jewish community and spread Torah after the Babylonian exile (Ezra 7:11-25). Here we see Eliot’s deep knowledge of the Hebrew bible and Jewish history informing her characters and her intentions for them. (For thorough accounts of Eliot’s Jewish education, see Feuerman and Himmelfarb.)

The Novel’s Parallels to Exodus and Jewish History

Eliot’s intentions for her novel are also evident in its numerous allusions to the Book of Exodus. In one of Mordecai’s emotional speeches about the need for Jews to found their nation, he tells Daniel, “The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward: the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of corn” (Chapter 42). Mentioning the Nile and a land of corn plants the novel in Egyptian soil, alluding to Joseph’s interpretations of Pharaoh’s dreams, foreshadowed in Chapter 4’s reference to “a time of famine” and “seven thin ears of wheat,” quoted above.

Although Eliot provides no burning bush per se, out of which God spoke to Moses in Exodus, (“And He said: ‘Fear not to face Pharaoh, for I will be with you, and you will find favor in his eyes, and this burning bush is a sign for you that I have sent you’” (Exodus 3:12), she does offer this exchange between the just-saved Mirah and Daniel. He says, “You had a covering for your head.” She replies, “My hat? It is quite hidden in the bush,” to which he responds, “ I will find it” (Chapter 17). The metaphorical bush turns out to be Mordecai, burning with a Zionist passion that not only does not consume him, but is kindled in Daniel and Mirah.

Eliot also repeats the word ‘burn’ six times in close proximity with regard to Leonora’s temptation to burn her father’s chest of religious documents. She confesses to her son: “I have hidden what was his. I thought once I would burn it. I have not burned it. I thank God I have not burned it!… Once, after my husband died, I was going to burn the chest. But it was difficult to burn; and burning a chest and papers looks like a shameful act” (Chapter 51). To my mind, Leonora’s frantic repetition of the word harks back to the burning bush, and this, coupled with Eliot’s use of the word ‘stranger’ to describe Jews some dozen times, also suggests intentional allusions to Exodus. In Egypt, the Children of Israel were strangers in a strange land; what Leonora didn’t burn amounts to her son’s heritage.

Daniel describes the chest’s contents to Mordecai this way: “My grandfather, Daniel Charisi, preserved manuscripts, family records stretching far back, in the hope that they would pass into the hands of his grandson. And now his hope is fulfilled, in spite of attempts to thwart it by hiding my parentage from me… Some of them I can read easily enough—those in Spanish and Italian. Others are in Hebrew, and, I think, Arabic; but there seem to be Latin translations” (Chapter 63). In other words, a chest containing the history of Daniel’s Sephardic family, a chest which he will take to Palestine, here represents Joseph’s sarcophagus and the Ark of the Covenant, which were also taken to the Promised Land. While Joseph’s bones linked the Children of Israel to the Abrahamic Covenant (as Joseph was Abraham’s great-grandson), the ark of the Ten Commandments linked Israelites to the Sinaitic Covenant. In this sense,  Daniel’s grandfather’s chest preserves physically not only his family’s ancestral history, but also metaphorically its covenantal history with God. And it is literally handed down from generation to generation.

The ten plagues are represented by five of them, enough to alert us to the rest. In the novel’s chronology  they are: 1) Pestilence, which appears in the novel’s epigraph, a warning to readers to look into their souls, as “o’er the fairest troop of captured joys/Breathes pallid pestilence”; 2) Blood, when Gwendolen’s mother says of Daniel, “One would guess, without being told, that there was foreign blood in his veins” (Chapter 29); and when we are told that “pure English blood did not declare itself predominantly in the party at present assembled” (Chapter 42), describing  members of “The Philosophers”;  3) The Cattle Plague of 1865 is mentioned in a letter from Daniel’s friend Hans Meyrick, referencing the English plague that was caused by cattle imported from Russia (Chapter 52); 4) Hail appears metaphorically, describing Mirah’s scoundrel of a father “as a man finding shelter from hail in an open cathedral might take a little religious howling that happened to be going on there” (Chapter 66); and 5) Darkness.^[3]

When, bereft of everything, Gwendolyn settles into her new home, the narrator asks, “Does one who has been all but lost in a pit of darkness complain of the sweet air and the daylight? There is a way of looking at our life daily as an escape, and taking the quiet return of morn and evening—still more the star-like out-glowing of some pure fellow-feeling, some generous impulse breaking our inward darkness—as a salvation that reconciles us to hardship” (Chapter 69).

Of the twenty-five occurrences of the word ‘darkness,’ many of which apply to death, these two combine the hopelessness of a pit of darkness with fellowship’s ability to light an inward darkness, enabling us to cope with adversity. Egypt’s plague of darkness removed people’s ability to see; Eliot’s darkness removes her people’s ability to see within. It is also worth noting that these plague allusions apply in Christian contexts or to English Christians, Eliot’s latter-day Egyptians. The presence of half of Egypt’s plagues is perhaps the most recognizable Exodus element in the novel, alluding to the degree to which Eliot believed England’s lingering, even casual, anti-Semitism corrupted her countrymen.

Continuing her Exodus allegory, Eliot deliberately describes challah as “a memorial of the manna that fed the wandering forefather” (Chapter 34), and then turns her attention to Mount Nebo, the golden calf, and shattered tablets. These references place the novel historically in Jewish time, as does her poem written “in the style of Yehuda Ha Levi” (Chapter 38) to voice Mordecai’s cry of frustration at his inability to see his dream to fruition:

“Away from me the garment of forgetfulness. Withering the heart;
The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim, Poisoned with scorn.
Solitude is on the sides of Mount Nebo,
In its heart a tomb:

There the buried ark and golden cherubim Make hidden light:
There the solemn gaze unchanged, The wings are spread unbroken: Shut beneath in silent awful speech The Law lies graven.
Solitude and darkness are my covering,

And my heart a tomb;
Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel!

Shatter it as the clay of the founder
Around the golden image.” (Chapter 38) (Emphasis added)

Along with the manna reference, this poem places us squarely at Mt. Sinai as Moses descends with the tablets, only to see the people’s “golden image” and shatter them. (See Exodus 32:19) These shattered tablets also appear in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1854 poem “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.” There, the poet compares them to broken tombstones, preceded by a reference to the “Exodus of Death:”

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
      That pave with level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down
      And broken by Moses at the mountain’s base.

Longfellow then presents a compassionate recitation of biblical and European persecution of Jews, asking:

 …What burst of Christian hate,
      What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o’er the sea — that desert desolate —
      These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

[who lived in] “Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire” and
“At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.”

Longfellow, Eliot’s fellow Englishman, distilled in poetic form Eliot’s philo-Semitism and disgust for history’s anti-Semitism. But where the poem ends with “And the dead nations never rise again,” Eliot’s novel ends with their resurrection in the Promised Land. In this context, the second set of tablets might be a fitting symbol of a restored Land of Israel.

Returning to Eliot’s poem, “The clay of the founder,” might also refer to God. However,  Eliot extends the shattering of the Law to Leonora. (For Eliot’s Jewish sources for this poem, see William Baker, “George Eliot’s verse in Chapter 38 of Daniel Deronda”) . She is described as ‘shattered’ four times within two chapters during her confrontation with Daniel, whom she hadn’t seen since he was two years old. She confesses to him, “I [did not mean] to be the shattered woman that I am now; that her second husband, Charisi, found her “weak and shattered;” that “Your mother is a shattered woman” (Chapter 51); and when mother and son next meet, she “look[s] less shattered than when he had left her” (Chapter 52).

Casting Leonora as a shattered vessel links her to the shattered clay tablets of Mordecai’s poem, which were, of course, replaced by a second set. In Eliot’s allegory, Daniel becomes those replacement tablets. For Mordecai tells him:

“You will be my life: it will be planted afresh; it will grow. You shall take the inheritance; it has been gathering for ages. The generations are crowding on my narrow life as a bridge… and the bridge is breaking. But I have found you. You have come in time. You will take the inheritance which the base son refuses because of the tombs which the plow and harrow may not pass over or the gold-seeker disturb: you will take the sacred inheritance of the Jew” (Chapter 40). The words ‘pass over’ alert us to the Mordecai-Moses connection, and ‘gold seeker’ evokes the golden calf. But Mordecai’s intent here is to anoint Daniel as the next Moses, who will re-establish the Jewish nation in the Promised Land.

In fact, this association is further validated by Moses’ upbringing as an Egyptian and Daniel’s as a Christian English gentleman. In his book, Founding God’s Nation (2021), Leon Kass explains that, because in Egyptian Moses means simply ‘son,’ “[Moses] will have to earn the meaning of his name. He will have to gain his identity” (Kass 44). Compare this to Daniel’s telling his mother, “I consider it my duty – it is the impulse of my feeling – to identify myself, as far as possible, with my hereditary people” (Chapter 53). Here, both characters must create their own identities. Kass also points out that “Moses can become [Israel’s] champion and God’s on, through, out of, and against his rearing as a prince of Egypt” (Kass 46). Compare that to Daniel’s answer to his mother’s scornful question, “What shall you do?… Make yourself just like your grandfather…  turn yourself into a Jew like him?” Her son replies: “That is impossible. The effect of my education can never be done away with. The Christian sympathies in which my mind was reared can never die out of me” (Chapter 53).

Like Moses, Daniel must also forge his Jewish identity through his upbringing, including exposure to and absorption of England’s pervasive anti-Semitism. For instance, we are startled to read: “Deronda could not escape (who can?) knowing ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations; and though one of his favorite protests was against the severance of past and present history, he was like others who shared his protest, in never having cared to reach any more special conclusions about actual Jews than that they retained the virtues and vices of a long-oppressed race” (Chapter 19). These parallels are just a few examples of how Eliot’s frighteningly perceptive understanding of Moses and Exodus informs Daniel Deronda — the character and the novel.

For Eliot, the stakes could not be higher. She wanted Daniel Deronda to “rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow men who most differ from them in customs and belief” (Letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe, quoted in Woo). To do so meant disrupting English fiction’s myth of the Jew, to paraphrase Lionel Trilling. From Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” to Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the image of the Jew has taken the form of usurer, Machiavel, or Judas. Trilling attributes the change to Eliot’s realistic portrayal of Jews, who, “for the first time in English literature… are visualized not merely in the aspects in which they come in contact with Gentiles and the Gentile world, but in terms of their own life and their own problems” (“The Changing Myth of the Jew,” Commentary, August 1978)). Trilling further asserts that Eliot “is the first to deal with the problem of assimilation.” That is, she tackles the question of where in British society Jews actually stand. 

Eliot’s text is also faithful to the dominant images of Exodus’s conclusion: the tabernacle and God’s presence in a cloud. The tabernacle occupies chapters 25-40, and God’s presence in the form of a cloud runs from Exodus 13:21 to 40:38. Building the tabernacle occupies nearly one-third of the book. Building God’s House, as Leon Kass observes, serves to unite the rabble of newly freed slaves by forcing them to be organized and work together for a common purpose (Kass, 457). In Eliot’s view, Mordecai is “the tabernacle of flesh” (Eliot Chapter 42), and, nearly quoting Exodus, he says of visiting a Jewish family, “I dwell in their tent as in a sanctuary” (Chapter 40). Merging Exodus’s Tent of Meeting and tabernacle casts Mordecai as both tabernacle and God, for he is the divine spirit that inhabits Daniel and leads him to the Promised Land.

The novel’s cloud imagery is no less resonant with Exodus, in which God appears via a cloud. Near the biblical book’s very end, for example, we are told that “The cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the Presence of YHVH filled the Tabernacle” (Exodus 40:34). Compare that with Mordecai’s association of God with clouds, when he tells Daniel, “men have helped to prepare you, as Moses was prepared, to serve your people the better… and beneath all the clouds with which our thought encompasses the Eternal, this is clear…”(Chapter 63) (Emphasis added). Here, Mordecai seems to identify God’s presence in clouds with the mind’s ability to grasp the divine, suggesting that he understands the Children of Israel’s experiencing God in the form of clouds. As such, Mordecai is Eliot’s voice of God-as-cloud in a tabernacle of flesh. Thus, as God’s cloud-like presence in the Tent of Meeting marks the re-establishment of the covenant in Exodus, so Daniel’s embrace of Judaism and acceptance of his grandfather’s chest/ark also re-establish the covenant. And near the very end of Mordecai’s life (and the end of the novel), he pronounces, “Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together” (Chapter 70). This final biblical echo, this time of Ruth 1:16, links the novel’s end to the Children of Israel’s future, and the future King David, Ruth’s great-grandson, from whom a Redeemer is promised to descend. Eliot obviously had faith in Israel’s spiritual and political future.

Conclusion

Yet her faith in Britain’s spiritual future depended on its acceptance of Jews as deserving the same respect and opportunities that Christians enjoy. That is, Eliot sought in writing Daniel Deronda an exodus not just to a Jewish homeland, but for Britain itself: an escape from its centuries-long anti-Semitism, which she saw as corrupting the British soul. I hope this study has revealed the ways in which Eliot’s Zionist novel echoes the original story in the Book of Exodus: Daniel Deronda’s use of biblical names, evocations of enslavement by Pharaoh in Egypt, the rescue and raising of baby Moses, the burning bush, the plagues, Pharaoh’s drowned army, manna in the wilderness, the giving and shattering of the ten commandments and their replacement, God’s cloud-like presence in the tabernacle, and finally, the journey toward establishing a Jewish nation in the Promised Land.

While she used the Book of Exodus as a template, if you will, for her novel, my sense is that Eliot did not want England’s Jews to flee. If they did so, the British would have no opportunity to cure their own “spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness” that Eliot termed “a national disgrace.” Paradoxically, she believed that her country needed its Jews and ‘others’ to teach her countrymen civil morality. Indeed, this essay’s opening quote, in which Daniel wishes to restore a political existence to his people, continues: “At the least, I may awaken a movement in other minds, such as has been awakened in my own.” This sounds as much like Eliot’s wish for her people as it does for Daniel’s.

^[1] In her third lecture on Daniel Deronda, Ruth Wisse states, “How Gwendolyn will react to being rejected by Daniel [will tell us whether] England can ever accept the distinctiveness of the Jews.” (Quoted in Allan Arkush, Mosaic, March 15, 2017. For George Eliot, to Appreciate the Jews Was to Save England » Mosaic)

^[2] The George Eliot Letters: Vol. 6, 1874-1877, quoted in Chimi Woo, “Victorian Others and Genre in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Issue 20.2, Summer 2024. https://ncgsjournal.com/issue202/woo.html

^[3] One of the most significant interpretations of the order of the plagues involves 3 groupings of 3, explained by the Talmudic Sage Rabbi Yehuda, “whose mnemonic acrostic of the plagues, “d’tz’ch, a’d’sh, b’a’ch’v”, divides the plagues into three groups” (See Introduction to the Ten Plagues). They are: 1. Blood, frogs, lice;

2. Wild animals, pestilence, boils; 3. Hail, locusts, darkness; …And finally the Death of the Firstborn.

The first group is introduced with G-d saying, “so that they know who I am.”

The second group is introduced with “so that they know I am in the midst of the land.”

The third group is introduced with “so they know there is none like me.”

Eliot includes at least one plague from each group in the corresponding order, faithfully representing God’s intentions.