Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/92

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George Eliot and Judaism.

her life. But the ghost of her father arises in her soul and calls upon her to restore the child to the race from whom he has been taken: and she has to confess to that child, in after-years, the evil deed she did him. Her life as we see it is a broken existence—a picture of apostasy punished, and of treachery betrayed. If anv further evidence were wanting to clear the authoress from the imputation of a blind partiality for the Jews, we should find it in her sketch of old Lapidoth, who is a rascal fit to grace any museum of human depravity, and who is drawn with such truth and reality that we forget in looking at him that he is a mere creation of the fancy. But no Jew will find it unnatural that this wretched creature can call Mordecai and Mirah his children, for it is notorious that in Jewish families it is generally owing to the mother that children are prevented from following in the footsteps of their