tion Association to carry on settlements on the lines of the German Templar Colony, near Jaffa, but the Jewish community was silent as a whole. Nothing perplexed it more than this Jewish doctrine preached by a non-Jewess and the length to which it was prepared to go and went was the utilisation of a Moses Montefiore Testimonial Fund for the building of houses in Jerusalem for the poor. Here and there the coincidence of the Vienna conference, the wrongs of the Roumanian Jews, the Premiership of d'Israeli, raised a flutter of imagination in the Jewish camp; it was even rumoured that Mr. Guedella had bought Jerusalem for £8,000,000 sterling. But the book had caught on in the wrong sense in England. It was accepted as the rehabilitment of the Jew in English fiction, not as an idea for future life, a call to action. The Jewish critics saw nothing else and Mr. Picciotto went the length of writing of the ideals "Not only are there no signs of their speedy realization but it is not all sure that such a consummation was desired by the bulk of the Hebrew nation." During the holding of the Vienna conference (1878), Dr. Benisch, who played a great part in organizing the Jewish deputation for rights, seeing perhaps the hopelessness of the situation, turned back to "Daniel Deronda" for the solution of Jewish difficulties and penned in the "Jewish Chronicle" two articles, veritable balloons d'essai, critical, raising objections, urging discussions and wthal moved with the old religious spirit rather than by the new national doctrine.
Mr. Jacobs, who protested so against the critics, admittedly realized George Eliot's doctrine for Israel; he defended and agreed with it:
“The new birth of Judaism and its revelation to the world are, in Mordecai's opinion,indissolubly connected with the new birth ofthe Jewish race as a nation. ‘The effect ofour separateness,’ he says, ‘will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character ofa nationality.’ And here again Judaism confirms his views. For the life of Judaism hasbeen connected with the history of Jews in away such as has been the fate of no otherreligion. The very name of the religion displays this intimate connection; of all religions
Judaism alone has been named after the race of its believers. And it is to this we may perhaps attribute the peculiar interest that George Eliot has felt for the Jews, which we can trace at least as far back as 1864, when the first draft of 'The Spanish Gypsy' was written. . . . And Mordecai's views of the resumption of the soil of the Holy land by the holy people are the only logical position of a Jew who desires that the long travail of the ages shall not end in the total disappearance of the race. For from the times of the Judges' periods, periods of prosperity, such as the one upon which the present generation has entered, have been the most perilous of our national life; it is the struggle for national existence we are vain enough to think, in the survival of the fittest missionaries of the true religion."
The man of repute in Israel who caught the true inwards of the message was Prof. Kaufmann, who boldly said in an attempt to appreciate Daniel Deronda (1877):
"It is more by the question of the futureof the Jews than by the enigma of their marvellous preservation that public reflection isdemanded. Is the end and result of theirglorious history to be their fusion and disappearance among the nations of the earth?Why then all this loving care? Why thesegrievous chains? Why these streams of bloodand tears? Is this despised minority fromwhose womb have sprung the religions whichrule mankind, still to be called upon at thegrave of her daughters to comfort and liftup a despairing world? Or will the semblanceof unity which even now, if invisible, bindstogether her dismembered limbs, grow palerand paler in the light of progress? Will thehopes with which the thirsty have for centuries allayed their pangs, keep ever runningdrier and drier and finally shrink to the miserable remnant to which they are compared byshallow merriment? Are the Jews still a people, a sickly body indeed, but one to whichyouth and health may return, or a bleachedand scattered heap of bones? Are these bonesdestined ever again to live and move?
“What are the opinions of the Jews themselves on this point? It is the sign of a sound organism that its members perform their functions unconscious of activity. No