Abstract
The extent to which Eliot employed ideas from Jewish mysticism in her fiction cannot be determined without a brief examination of these ideas. As stated earlier, Jewish mystical tradition originated in Iraq. This origin accounts for Jewish beliefs regarding a Messiah and duality of the human soul since both ideas can be attributed to the lasting influence of Persian Zoroastrianism on Hebrew religion. As Trevor Ling states, ‘in the Persian period of Jewish history a tendency began to show itself towards a modification of Hebrew monotheism in terms of Persian dualism’.1 This affected Jewish thinking about the ontology of good and evil. The story of Job — which, according to E. M. Butler, was the precursor of all Faust stories — addresses this issue as, indeed, does Goethe’s Faust, and divine monopoly of moral righteousness is called into question. In these stories, the solution lies wholly in faith in the goodness of God; but a different solution lay in the acceptance of a dualistic philosophy.
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Notes
Josephus, Jewish Antiquaries, I–IV, trans. A. St J. Thackeray (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 19.
Rabbi Moses C. Luzzatto, General Principles of the Kabbalah, trans. The Research Centre of Kabbalah (New York, 1970), p. xxv.
George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New (Edinburgh and London, n.d.), p. 169. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation SG and page number.
George Eliot, Silas Marner, ed. Terence Cave (Oxford, 1996), p. 30. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation SM and page number.
Andrew Lang, Magic and Religion (New York, 1969), p. 94.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (London, 1840), p. 162.
E. S. Shaffer writes: The mystical basis of the I—thou unity is the gnostic-cabbalistic notion of Adam as the soul that contained all souls … The moral task of man in the Jewish cabbala is to restore his primordial spiritual structure, and so contribute to the restoration of the spiritual structure of mankind … In Daniel Deronda, the mystical substratum is expressed directly through the fraternal relation of the master and his disciple. (See ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: the Mythological School in Biblical Criticism. and Secular Literature 1770— 1880 [Cambridge, 1975], p. 255.)
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© 2002 Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton
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Nurbhai, S., Newton, K.M. (2002). Kabbalistic Philosophy and the Novels. In: George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288539_3
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