Here was a surprise – the entrance of a new character, one who changed the entire tone of the story. Here was a revolutionary, a dreamer, a man whose soul was too big for his body. A man called mad; yet proven correct nearly three quarters of a century after Deronda was published.
Mordecai.
He had no bitterness to his zeal, no danger, no resentment. He merely believed and looked for others who would share his belief. He was not mocked so much as pitied – a much worse judgment on the proud. But he could endure the sad looks and the shaking of heads, because his pride was not for himself; it was for something to which he belonged: a heritage. A glorious past, and the promise of a still more glorious future.
When Eliot wrote Deronda, anti-Semitism was the cultural norm. Victorian literature is littered with cultural stereotypes of 19th century Jews, and none of them flattering. The Roman dispersion of the Jews had taken place over 1700 years earlier. For seventeen centuries the Jewish nation had known no home. They lived amongst strangers for the better part of two millennia and yet never lost their identity.
This is the source of Mordecai’s pride.
But when a promise is long in being fulfilled, it’s easy to write it off. It’s safer to assume it was a fluke, a figment of an errant imagination, than to place one’s hope and desire in it. So it was that many of Mordecai’s most prominent scorners were those of his own nationality.
“Almost everything seemed against him: his countrymen were ignorant or indifferent, governments hostile, Europe incredulous. Of course the scorners often seemed wise.” (DD, Book VI, Chpt. XLII)
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