M. i h k yt k s t i o \ <>f !■a i .k s t i n k fact is thiii nineteenth-century European culture was racist with a greater or lesser degree o f virulence depending on the individual: The Frcnch writer Ernest Renan, for instance, was an outright anti-Semite; Eliot was indifferent to races who could not be assimilated to European ideas. Here we come to the second point, Eliot's account of Zionism in Daniel Deronda was intended as a sort o f assenting G entile response to prevalent Jewish-Zionist currents; the novel therefore serves as an indication of how much in Zionism was legitimated and indeed valorized by G entile European thought. On one important issue there was com plete agree­ ment between the Gentile and Jewish versions o f Zionism: their view o f the Holy Land as essentially em pty o f inhabitants, not because there were no inhabitants— there w ere, and they were frequently described in numerous travel accounts, in novels like Benjamin Disraeli's Tancred, even in the various nineteenth-century Baedekers— but because their status as sovereign and human inhabitants was systematically denied. While it may be possible to differentiate between Jewish and Gentile Zionists on this point (they ignored the A rab inhabi­ tants for different reasons), the Palestinian A rab was ignored nonetheless. That is what needs emphasis: the extent to which the roots o f Jewish and G entile Zionism are in the culture of high liberal-capitalism. and how the work o f its vanguard liberals like G eorge Eliot reinforced, perhaps also com pleted, that culture's less attractive tendencies. None o f what I have so far said applies adequately to what Zionism meant for Jews or what it represented as an advanced idea for enthusiastic non-Jews; it applies exclusively to those less fortunate beings who happened to be living on the land, people o f whom no notice was taken. What has too long been forgotten is that while important European thinkers consid­ ered the desirable and later the probable fate o f Palestine, the land was being tilled, villages and towns built and lived in by thousands o f natives who believed that it was their homeland. In the meantime their actual physical being was ignored; later it became a troublesom e detail. Strikingly, therefore, Eliot sounds very much like Moses Hess, an early Zionist idealist | 1