Our multicultural hero

In 1876 George Eliot, the foremost woman novelist of her day, surprised her adoring public with what was to be her last and most controversial work. Paradoxically, although it was the first of her novels to have a contemporary setting, its hero and many of its characters came from one of the oldest cultures in the world - Judaism. Even as she was writing, Eliot anticipated a prejudiced response. She had false information fed to the press, making it appear that her novel, Daniel Deronda, would be "perfectly charming" and exclusively about upper-class English ladies and gentlemen.

Its appearance in eight monthly instalments between February and September 1876 was carefully orchestrated to begin with Gwendolen Harleth, the beautiful gentile heroine, and her love problems. It was not until the 17th chapter that Eliot took up the Jewish theme, and by then her readers were well and truly hooked. In the words of her publisher, John Blackwood, "the anti-Jews grumbled, and went on".

Jews were very much in the news, a year after the re-election of Benjamin Disraeli, the first British Prime Minister of Jewish descent. The Victorian reader had previously encountered Jewish characters in fiction - but only as noble victims like Walter Scott's Rebecca in Ivanhoe or as villains like Fagin in Oliver Twist.

Fresh in the memory was Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, with its stereotypically shady Jewish financier Melmotte, which had appeared the year before Daniel Deronda (its TV serialisation last autumn gives modern viewers a parallel opportunity to contrast the two representations of Jewish subjects).

Compared to Melmotte, Eliot's hero struck a wholly new note. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, brought up as a Christian gentleman in an upper-class English world, Daniel Deronda is depicted as gradually discovering his Jewish roots.

He marries not the statuesque Gwendolen, but the petite Jewish Mirah and, inspired by Mordecai her brother, starts for the Middle East at the end of the novel to pursue a pre-Zionist visionary quest for a Jewish homeland.

The depiction of a typical English hero embracing a religion which most Victorians saw (as Daniel Deronda himself first did) as a fossilised relic was truly shocking. The Anglo-Jewish world had never been represented in quite this way before. The variety of Jewish characters in the book, ranging from the visionary Mordecai to the lively child Jacob Cohen, counteracted the melodramatic way in which Jews were usually depicted, either as angels or predators.

Judaism was represented for the first time as a living faith, with a present and a future as well as a past, by a novelist whose notebooks reveal the exhaustive research she undertook to ensure an accurate and unprejudiced depiction of Jewish life and beliefs. Eliot's research went far beyond professional curiosity. Although she had lost her Christian beliefs and described herself as a humanist, she had been deeply fascinated by the history of religions for many years, especially Judaism.

Through her friendship with a Jewish scholar, Emanuel Deutsch, a book-cataloguer at the British Museum who taught her Hebrew, she had unrivalled access to an alien culture; the character of Mordecai is based on Deutsch, who died on his way to Palestine. Eliot and her partner George Henry Lewes contemplateda journey to the Middle East but were deterred by ill-health.

Jewish readers, seeing themselves favourably represented for the first time, relished the way Eliot seemed to have inwardly absorbed the details of their rituals and beliefs. Sigmund Freud was amazed that she seemed to know of things that Jews spoke of only among themselves. The extent of her knowledge gave rise to inevitable rumours that she and Lewes were themselves of Jewish descent.