Kabbalistic philosophy and the novels

pp. 35-53

in: Saleel Nurbhai, K. M. Newton, George Eliot, judaism and the novels, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Abstract

The extent to which Eliot employed ideas from Jewish mysticism in her fiction cannot be determined without a brief examination of these ideas. As stated earlier, Jewish mystical tradition originated in Iraq. This origin accounts for Jewish beliefs regarding a Messiah and duality of the human soul since both ideas can be attributed to the lasting influence of Persian Zoroastrianism on Hebrew religion. As Trevor Ling states, "in the Persian period of Jewish history a tendency began to show itself towards a modification of Hebrew monotheism in terms of Persian dualism".¹ This affected Jewish thinking about the ontology of good and evil. The story of Job — which, according to E. M. Butler, was the precursor of all Faust stories — addresses this issue as, indeed, does Goethe's Faust, and divine monopoly of moral righteousness is called into question. In these stories, the solution lies wholly in faith in the goodness of God; but a different solution lay in the acceptance of a dualistic philosophy.