Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/55

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George Eliot and Judaism.
43

a corrupt speech, or that their lives are spent in usury and sordid avarice, cannot escape the reproach of the baldest crudeness by any degree of poetical varnish. In a country which can lay claim to the honour of havinq: brouqht its hatred of the Jews to the position of a true science, and in whose earlier literature, as has been shown by Zunz from Grimm's 'Wörterbuch'[1] "the quotations vouching for antiquated and obsolete words, when they relate to Jews, invariably express ridicule and contempt,"—in such a country it could not fail that examples should be found, even among her modem imaginative writers, of that degradation of Art which aims at stirring up rancour and ill-will against the Jews. Does not 'Veitel Itzig' still cling, like a mark of infamy, to the memory of even Gustav Freytag? But unjustifiable and blameworthy as is

  1. Gesammelte Schriften, iii. 286.