The wonderful completeness and accuracy with which George Eliot represented the Jewish character is particularly remarkable. The sketches of Klesmer and Alcharisi are triumphs of artistic skill. Ezra Cohen is the embodiment of the successful commercial faculty. The influence of the mother and the home on the inner life of the Jew, as described in the novel, must impress every reader. Pusti, the “Jew who is no Jew,” typifies excellently the despised class of which he is a specimen. The more temperate Gideon represents a large section of the Jews who are neither ashamed of their race nor proud of it, but are prepared to let the racial and religious distinctions for which the Jewish nation has fought so valiantly perish unexpressed. But the great character of the book is Mordecai Cohen. Mordecai Cohen is a lineal descendant of three great spiritual houses which, in past ages, have waged a moral warfare in defiance of the whole world against terrible odds; and the fact that those noble souls are descendants of the Jewish race affords ample proof of the physical, intellectual, and moral stamina which Judaism has always preserved. Mordecai is the leader of a party which refuses to believe that Israel’s part in history is accomplished, and maintains that Israel’s future policy should be to join the nations as soon as possible. George Eliot explains the traditions, habits and characteristics of the Jews with the affectionate accuracy of a delighted scientific observer and with the fine enthusiasm of a humanitarian spirit. The abundance of detail and the sensitiveness of the fine shades are marvellous. With subtlety, restraint and delicacy, without the excitements of sensationalism, she succeeds in throwing into relief the real Jewish problem. Something is passing away that once possessed a life and value of its own. The labour of thousands of years is lost; a flame has burnt in vain, a fire is extinguished without having fostered life. There is a terrible sadness in it. The human soul turns to what has been the highest aspiration of its life. Mordecai has a profound contempt for the arts of emulation; he wants creative originality. His idea is to be wholly what he is partly, his own self, his own self restored. He wants to live entirety at home, to live by the work of his hands, to bring to maturity the ideas which he feels developing in his mind. Where would this be possible? Only within an organization of his own people in their ancient home, in the mother-country of his own kin and ancestry, in a commonwealth which should focus and embody the whole of Jewish life as it should be, not ossified, dried, cut up, preserved in the form of saintly relics and adapted by interpretations and compromises to different zones, cultures and customs. He has, it is true, a great reverence for these saintly relics, and――_faute de mieux_――in the Diaspora he feels it a sacred duty to preserve them. But he feels that this is not the ideal,