The latest echo from the critical chorus which has greeted _Daniel Deronda_ comes to us from Germany, in the form of a small book by Dr. Kaufmann, professor in the recently instituted Jewish Theological Seminary at Buda-Pesth. A certain prominence, which its very excellent translation into English confers upon this work, seems to be due less to any special or novel feature in its criticism than to the larger purpose shadowed forth in the title, ‘George Eliot and Judaism.’ It is advowedly ‘an attempt to appreciate _Daniel Deronda_,’ and is valuable and interesting to English society not as a critique on the plot or the characters of the book--on which points it strikes us, in more than one instance, as somewhat weak and one-sided--but as indicating from a Jewish standpoint in how far and how truly modern Judaism is therein represented. Unappreciative as the great mass of the reading public have shown themselves to the latest of George Eliot’s novels, the work has excited a considerable amount of curiosity and admiration on the ground of the intimate knowledge its author has evinced of the inner lives and of the little-read literature of the ‘Great Unknown of humanity.’ We think Dr. Kaufmann goes too far when he says, ‘The majority of readers view the world to which they are introduced in _Daniel Deronda_ as one foreign, strange, and repulsive.... It is not only the Jew of flesh and blood whom men encounter every day upon the streets that they hate, but the Jew under whatever shape he may appear, and even the airy productions of the poet’s fancy are denounced when they venture to take that people as their subject’ (p. 92). We think this view concedes very much too much to prejudice; but it is undoubtedly a fact that the first serious attempt by a great writer to make Jews and Judaism the central interest of a great work, has produced a certain sense of discord on the public ear, and that criticism has for the most part run in the minor key. Mr. Swinburne, perhaps, strikes the most distinctly jarring chord, when, in his lately published ‘Note on Charlotte Brontë,’ he owns to possessing ‘no ear for the melodies of a Jew’s harp,’ and, disclaiming ‘a taste for the dissection of dolls,’ ‘leaves Daniel Deronda to his natural place over the rag-shop door’ (pp. 21, 22). Even an ear so politely and elegantly owned defective might be able, it could be imagined, to catch an echo from the ‘choir invisible’; and poetic insight, one might almost venture to think, should be able to discern in poetic aspirations, however unfamiliar and even alien to itself, something different from bran. This arrow is too heavily tipped to fly straight to the goal. There are numbers, however, of the like school who, with more excuse than Mr. Algernon Swinburne, fail to ‘see anything’ in _Daniel Deronda_, and a criticism we once overheard in the Louvre occurs to us as pertinent to this point. The picture was Correggio’s ‘Marriage of St. Katharine,’ and to an Englishman standing