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George Eliot's Rabbi
- Abstract
In 1848 a twenty-nine-year-old English-woman named Mary Ann Evans, infuriated by the idea of “race fellowship” among Jews, which she thought she detected in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Coningsby, told a friend that she was
almost ready to echo Voltaire’s vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history, is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy, and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism. . . . Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.
This being so, Mary Ann Evans could even ruminate about how “Extermination . . . seems to be the law for inferior races,” including “even the Hebrew caucasian.”
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