Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/104

 she should descend to the Jews? George Eliot has experienced personally what the world's hatred of that race amounts to, and that she has done so affords the strongest proof of the moral tendency which lies in her inimitable performance. It is not only the Jew of flesh and blood whom men encounter every day upon the streets that they hate, but the Jew under whatever shape he may appear; and even the airy productions of the poet's fancy are denounced when they venture to take that people as their subject. The majority of readers regard the world to which they are introduced in 'Daniel Deronda' as one foreign, strange, and repulsive. Our authoress—whom it has hitherto been the custom to extol to the skies, and to whom the critics have, up to this time, been related more as partisans than as judges—has been abandoned on this occasion by almost the entire body, not