'The Age-Old Jewish Question'

“If the modern novel was, in this sense, free, unconstrained by reality, so was the modern author. The ‘human character’ that changed in December 1910 [according to Virgina Woolf] was the character of the artist, not of the common man. Ordinary people were bound, as they had always been, by the habits and customs devised for ‘timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.’ But writers and artists could no longer be so circumscribed; they had to be free to follow the ‘vast variety and turmoil of human impulses.’”

Occasionally we read something that helps answer a question we weren’t even aware of asking. I had always been repelled by the odious “Bloomsberries” – Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and the rest. They created little of worth and lived as proudly defiant narcissists. Why so much interest in these snobbish creeps? In the February 1985 issue of Commentary, Gertrude Himmelfarb published “From Clapham to Bloomsbury: A Genealogy of Morals” (collected in Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians, 1986), linking moral and aesthetic decline, and helped me understand the repugnance I felt. The steep cultural drop from the Clapham Sect in the early nineteenth century to Bloomsbury is a prescient echo of our own situation:

“In invoking poetry as a source of morality, Virginia was claiming for aesthetics that absolute, peremptory quality her father had assigned to ethics. And in making the novel a species of poetry, as she tried to do, she was removing it from the domain of social reality where it might have intimations of social morality. The true novel, Virginia Woolf maintained, was held together not by a story or plot but by the emotions of the author.”

There, in a nutshell, is the appeal of Bloomsbury to many contemporaries. Himmelfarb, the cultural and intellectual historian of Victorian England, died on Dec. 30 at the age of ninety-six. Most of her books are essential but my favorite among them is The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (Encounter Books, 2009). In it, she puts Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s final novel and the finest English novel of the nineteenth century, into the context of the author’s life, Judaism, Jewishness and Zionism:

“Daniel Deronda is an enduring presence in the ​‘Great Tradition’ of the novel--and an enduring contribution as well to the age-old Jewish question. Many novels of ideas die as the ideas themselves wither away, becoming the transient fancies of earlier times and lesser minds. Eliot’s vision of Judaism is as compelling today as it was more than a century ago, very much part of the perennial dialogue about Jewish identity and the Jewish question.”

As a way to put into perspective recent events in England, I also recommend Himmelfarb’s The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, From Cromwell to Churchill (Encounter Books, 2011).