Was Silas A Jew?
Eliot’s most famous work is a novel called Silas Marner (1861), which does not have the word “Jew” in it even once. However, it contains one of the most poignant and detailed portraits of an outsider and his plight. Silas, the hero of the book, is falsely accused of a crime–stealing from his local church–and he is forced to leave his hometown for the village of Raveloe. He immediately feels distrustful of his new town and so he hoards his money, making himself the object of distrust and resentment among his new neighbors. Silas’s inability to fit in at Raveloe is so extreme that he even refuses to attend church on Christmas Day. Despite the fact that he’s not explicity Jewish, it’s hardly a great leap of logic to view Silas as the classic “wandering Jew.” Sympathy for the outsider is one of the major themes in many of Eliot’s works, but it was not joined with a specific affection for Judaism until the 1876 publication of Daniel Deronda.
