LORD MACAULAY, 1833.
IGNORANCE OF JUDAISM
HE had been roused to the consciousness of knowing hardly anything about modern Judaism or the inner Jewish history. The Chosen People have been commonly treated as a people chosen for the sake of somebody else, and their thinking as something (no matter exactly what) that ought to have been entirely otherwise; and Deronda, like his neighbours, had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form which an accomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to specialists. But there had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world.
GEORGE ELIOT, 1876,
in ‘Daniel Deronda’.
MOCK on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau!
Mock on, mock on! ’tis all in vain:
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.