This page has been validated.
George Eliot and Judaism.
23

much in England's honour; but even in her literature there are not wanting voices to calumniate the Jews and Judaism; for it is exactly because in her midst the Jewish people have public justice accorded them in their quality of Jews that the Jew passes all the more for an alien, and must, in consequence, bear the weight of prejudice, like everything unknown. Thus, all instances taken together of just and magnanimous treatment received by the Jews in England up to this time, can detract but little from the importance of the fact that the most celebrated authoress of the day, and the pride of English letters—George Eliot—has chosen Judaism! and its future as the theme of her latest imaginative creation, with a depth of comprehension hitherto unreached, and with unexampled grandeur and independence; of judgment In the Valhalla of the Jewish people, among the tokens of homage