Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/75

with which he has hitherto treated the Jews—gone now his polite indifference to that lowly race—for the first man whom he has found worthy of loving reverence and admiration is a poor, consumptive Jewish watchmaker. And this Jew becomes his fast friend, and furnishes him with ideas which impress him for the first time with a sense of the depth and breadth of life. He longs that he were a Jew himself, in order that he might consecrate his days to the accomplishment of tasks which he now recognises as noble. He is a Jew. His mother reveals to him, at Genoa, how, in order to save him from the disgrace attaching to his birth, she confided him in infancy to the care of her admirer Sir Hugo Mallinger, upon condition of his being kept in complete ignorance of his origin. He feels the blood of his forefathers surging within him,—of his grandfather, a Jewish physician in Genoa; and