ZIONISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ITS VICTIMS hi mind still committed to hopes for a secular religious com m u­ nity. In her earlier books, Eliot had studied a variety of enthusiasms, all o f them replacements for organized religion, all o f them attractive to persons who would have been Saint Teresa had they lived during a period of coherent faith. The reference to Saint Teresa was originally made by Eliot in Middiemarch, an earlier novel o f hers; in using it to describe the novel's heroine. Dorothea B roo ke. Eliot had intended to compliment her own visionary and moral energy, sustained despite the absence in the modern world o f certain assurances for faith and knowledge. D orothea em erges at the end of Middiemarch as a chastened wom an, forced to concede her grand visions o f a "fulfilled" life in return for a relatively modest domestic success as a wife and mother. It is this considerably diminished view o f things that Daniel Deronda, and Zionism in particular, revise upward: toward a genuinely hopeful socioreligious project in which individual energies can be merged and identified with a collective national vision, the whole em anating out of Judaism, The novel's plot alternates between the presentation of a bitter comedy o f manners involving a surprisingly rootless segment o f the British upper bourgeoisie, and the gradual revelation to Daniel Deronda— an exotic young man whose parentage is unknown but who is the ward o f Sir Hugo M allinger, a British aristocrat— o f his Jewish identity and. when he becomes the spiritual disciple o f M ordccai Ezra C ohen, his Jewish destiny. A t the end o f the novel, Daniel marries Mirah, M ordecai's sister, and commits himself to fulfilling M ordecai’s hopes for the future o f the Jews. Mordecai dies as the young pair get married, although it is clear weli before his death that his Zionist ideas have been passed on to Daniel, so much so that among the newlyweds' "splendid wedding-gifts" is "a complete equipment for travel" provided by Sir Hugo and Lady M allinger. For Daniel and his wife will be traveling to Palestine, presumably to set the great Zionist plan in motion. The crucial thing about the way Zionism is presented in the novel is that its backdrop is a generalized condition of