NORMAN LEBRECHT
AT THE height of her fame, while every respectable Victorian household had a copy of The Mill on the Floss in the bookcase, George Eliot became a social outcast. The novelist, born 200 years ago this month, moved into a house near Regent’s Park in 1854 with George Henry Lewes, a married journalist whose wife, Agnes, was living with the founding editor of the Daily Telegraph, Thornton Hunt, and bearing his children. This open marriage was so offensive to public morals that George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, was forced to form her own discreet circle, seeking friends among fringe people — artists, crackpots, penniless intellectuals.
Among those who entered her life at this time was a low-paid curator at the British Museum, a polyglot bachelor from Berlin who had just written the first study in English of the Babylonian Talmud. George Eliot, enraptured by his 60-page monograph, hired Emanuel Oscar Menahem Deutsch to teach her Hebrew once a week. Before long, she fell in love with Deutsch’s lively mind and took to calling him “rabbi” — Hebrew for ‘my teacher’. He addressed her as ‘Mrs Lewes’.
Between the dusty archivist and the wealthiest self-made woman in England flashed a spark that would change the world and transform the godless Eliot into a Messiah of the Jews. On her bicentenary, it seems to me odd that her political impact should have been almost totally forgotten.
In my new book Genius and Anxiety, I describe Deutsch, on an 1869 trip to the Holy Land, sobbing against the cold remaining stones of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. On his return he told Eliot, “All my wild yearnings are fulfilled at last.” From this day on he set about convincing his student that the Jews needed to return to the land of their fathers.
They did not have much time left for discussion. Deutsch was suffering from a stomach ache which, under surgery, was found to be caused by a cancerous tumour. Eliot, while writing Middlemarch, visited him at the home of a Marylebone vicar who had taken him in as an act of Christian charity. Eliot begged Deutsch not to end his life prematurely