Our last blog post! Please respond in the comments.
Having read Deronda, this section from Eliot's last published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) should have a lot of resonance for our previous conversations about race, nationality, and the body. While it's tempting to read this text as 'what Eliot really thought about Jewishness' it's important to remember that it is written in the often cranky and satirical voice of a persona or character. So, think of it alongside Deronda, not as the explanation for it.
Here are some issues and questions I want to discuss on Monday:
1) Nationality: How does the speaker define nationality? What is the function of nationality?
2) Race and Bodily Difference: The speaker uses "race" a number of times. What does the speaker mean by this? How is it related to nationality? When we talk about 'race' here are we talking about visible difference?
3) Sameness and Difference: There is a lot of discussion of assimilation, separateness, cosmopolitanism, and nationality. Certainly, the speaker often treats separateness positively and assimilation negatively (though it gets complicated).
--What I'm interested in here is the relationhship between what the speaker calls Jewish "peculiarity" and the kind of "resemblance" the speaker wants us to see between "us" and "them."
Consider the following quote in perparation for this discussion: “the necessary ground of such distinction is a deeper likeness. The superlative peculiarity in the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is only the more apparent when the elements of their peculiarity are discerned” (174).
4) The Jews and other Others: How do the Jews fit in with other racial groups in this essay? The speaker brings up the Irish a number of times, as well as a panoply of nationalities and races. Are the Jews "exceptional" for the speaker as well as the people he critiques? Remember that the tone can often be ironic and slippery, even and especially when the speaker is discussing or ventriloquising reprehensible views.
There's a lot to talk about. So let's get ready for our last class session
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5 comments:
Within Eliot’s novel and her essay, “The Modern Hep Hep Hep”, I find myself getting confused with the notion of race and nation. In the novel I view being Jewish as a race and I find that Eliot also draws this same thought in her essay because she says the Jews learn their history which makes them a race. “But all that need be noticed here is the continuity of that national education (by outward and inward circumstances) which created in the Jews a feeling of race, a sense of corporate existence, unique in its intensity” (176). This correlates with the history and heritage of the Jewish people that Mordecai was trying to pass on to Deronda so he could carry the Jewish race into the future. I also found that a nation is defined as a people having a common origin, language and tradition. But in Eliot’s essay I feel nation is more centered on the religious aspect of Jewish tradition. Eliot describes the Jews as “a people taught by many concurrent influences to identify faithfulness to its national traditions with the highest social and religious blessings” (175). I am wondering if Deronda left England for East in order to attain the true religious nationhood of the Jewish community because he was unable to capture it in the West.
I believe Eliot is applauding separateness in her essay and novel. I believe she establishes that fact with the opening line of her essay, “To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, doesn’t not require so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general sameness”. In her essay she believes the Jews are an exceptional race because they refuse to assimilate into the mainstream culture. Thus Deronda is the character who comes out of the novel with a sense of self and on top because he chose to be a Jew over a Gentleman. Eliot’s satirical tone with in her essay also suggest that she finds the treatment and myths about the Jews to be a misunderstanding of the Jewish history and culture on the European’s side. Also the title of the essay the “Modern Hep Hep Hep “, which represents the cry the Crusaders and anti-Jewish rioters in Germany in 1918 used when they killed Jewish people, is a sign of Eliot’s contempt towards the European people for their treatment of the Jewish population. She is sending out a modern day wake up call.
Nationality here seems to be defined as a kind of shared resistance and an allegiance to certain ideas of ancestry and memory of a certain greatness. The function of feeling a kind of nationality might be interpreted as finding oneself an individual: "An individual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order." (172.)
However, going off of that, nationality also might be seen as a kind of unifying "racial" force, as it seems to be what the speaker uses to define the Jews as a race- "But all that need be noticed here is the continuity of that national education which created in the Jews a feeling of race, a sense of corporate existence, unique in its intensity." (176). In this interpretation, race is not so much something visible as "embodied" via a sense of nationality (a nationality that the speaker considers to stem out of strong religious feelings).
I think that the "peculiarity" that the speaker is referencing is the same peculiarity of any nation; it is the peculiarity of being a part of a nation. The resemblance between the Jewish and the British (as well as any other) is that all notions of nationality are informed by the same means. The speaker outlines the creation of Britain, Italy and Greece, focusing on a particular disregard for their past sins- while pointing out that the sins the Jews are condemned for in modern society are usually ones inflicted by the aforementioned nations and peoples. The Jews are Othered out of a sense of hypocrisy and, possibly, jealousy, but the speaker wants to draw parallels between the nations by pointing out that the very things that are condemned in the Jewish people are held up as attributes by/fr other nations.
(apologies for lateness!)
I find Eliot's ideas on likeness are the really interesting. She seems to have a great distaste for minds that clump people together in groups because of general likeness despite diversity, and how groups are upheld and degraded because of similarities, "The same motives, the same ideas, the same practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and and denounced, according to their associations with superficial differences, historical or actual social: even learned writers treating of great subjects often show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that of the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of the her maid."(Eliot 168). It is as if with different nationality or racial groups, the things that are applauded in some are feared and threatening in others and even educated minds cannot get over stereotypes and ignorance. I feel like Eliot is beyond her time, and is trying to hold up a mirror to so-called intellectuals who's writing and thinking is furthering notions of negative racial grouping. Eliot also brings up the associated "sins of the Father" notion that Jews carry. Every nation is built on ancestry, but nations like Italy and Greece are upheld as glorious despite their bloodied histories. However, the Jews carry sorrows of their ancestors. It really makes me think about why Jews are treated differently? Why are their traditions not seen as glorious practices of a nation? Eliot is trying to push forward with the construction of human beings, and her writings make a lot of sense to my modern mind, but I wonder how it was received with her contemporaries.
It is easy to see that Eliot’s essay identifies sameness amongst societies in addition to the shallow or altered necessity of nationalism within such cultures. She links nationality to memories and bases national feeling on history rather than race or physical description, which we’ve encountered often in this semester. More importantly, she critiques the hypocrisy of the English in their “greatness” or purity that they stole from foreign ancient cultures. Eliot pokes holes in the “valorous…memorial standards” of the Greeks and Italians that the English pride themselves for. She claims that the “divine gift of memory” or the subjectivity of man’s imagination is accountable for the skewed sense of nationalism ingrained in the British culture (170). It is merely “the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul” (172) that constructs a sense of nationalism in a people. It is more the knowledge of nationalism rather than what nationalism truly is that is important to a society. She also identifies that in order for a man to be great, he must be part of a great nation; this oddly supports the concept of assimilation within a culture—that a man can only achieve/be recognized for his greatness as part of a nation not as an individual.
We recognize the artificial construct of nationality as Eliot’s argument exposes the uniformity or sameness amongst the English and others. The people of a specific society are united by “the bringing things together because of their likeness” (168). It is ingrained in us by historians “to cherish our sense of a common descent as a bond of obligation” (172). We are obligated to all others including Others and share a bond of sameness in our ancestry. It is the “deeper likeness” that connects peoples rather than ostracizes groups from one another: “The distinctive note of each bird-species is…exceptional, but the necessary ground of such distinction is a deeper likeness” (174). We see a definite belief in the sameness of nationalities/groups/peoples rather than differences in this essay.
When reviewing Eliot's section on the contributions of the Jewish religion to the world as a whole, I found a separation between religion and race. This separation is interesting because she does not include much spirituality in her work Daniel Deronda. However, was her use of religious quotes, Jewish prayers, and references to the Old Testament in Daniel Deronda revolutionary considering traditional social-realism books of her time?
To specifically focus on the quotation “the necessary ground of such distinction is a deeper likeness. The superlative peculiarity in the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is only the more apparent when the elements of their peculiarity are discerned” (174), her description of this on the greater level is that the Jews contributed the base principles for religions that developed in Rome. This is significant because the Jewish religion contributed to the upper echelons of general European life. Finally, it is interesting that Eliot would frame the Jewish people as “superlative” which is quite contrary to the typical representation of the Jewish.
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