"The life of Israel is in your veins": empire, nationhood, and Jewish passing in Daniel Deronda and The Prime Minister

Abstract

In 1876, at the height of Britain's imperialism, two of Britain’s most influential novelists published novels centered around passing Jewish characters. In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Deronda is a man who discovers his Jewish heritage and becomes a Messianic figure searching for a new Jewish homeland, while in Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister, the supposedly foreign Ferdinand Lopez is defined by his inability to integrate into polite British society. But despite their myriad differences, both novels anticipate later discussions about race, nationalism, and colonialism both inside and outside the British Empire by highlighting the question of assimilation, or in other words, whether or not a Jewish person can ever truly be considered “English.” Furthermore, when placed in conversation with each other these texts have similarly troubling relationships with Victorian British fears around racial purity and nationality that set the stage for the rise of Zionist thought in the 20th century.