Cohen, Ezra Mordecai

Mirah's brother and Daniel Deronda's friend and mentor, a consumptive idealistic Hebrew who dreams of a renewed national existence for his race. "A man in threadbare clothing, whose age was difficult to guess--from the dead yellowish flatness of the flesh, something like an old ivory carving... precisely such a physiognomy as that might possibly have been seen in a prophet of the Exile, or in some New Hebrew poet of the medieval time. It was a finely typical Jewish face, wrought into intensity of expression apparently by a strenuous eager experience in which all the satisfaction had been indirect and far off, and perhaps by some bodily suffering also, which involved that absence of ease in the present. The feature were clear-cut, not large; the brow not high, but broad, and fully defined by the crisp black hair. It might never have been a particularly handsome face, but it must always have been forcible." "A man steeped in poverty and obscurity, weakened by disease, consciously within the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense life in an invisible past and future, careless of his personal lot, except for its possibly making some obstruction to a conceived good which he would never share except as a brief inward vision--a day afar off, whose sun would never warm him, but into which he threw his sou's desire, with a passion often wanting to the personal motives of healthy youth." His whole life is wrapped up in his belief in the regeneration of a great Jewish nationality in Palestine if only the right leader of the race can be found. As a young man he had started east to work in Palestine, when he was recalled because his mother needed his help after her husband had deserted her. The need of caring for his mother and the consumption which he develops from exposure make him give up the idea of his own leadership, and when Daniel Deronda meets him he is living in semi-poverty as a watch mender in the Cohen pawnshop and an off-hour attendant in Mr. Ram's book shop, constantly hoping to find the leader on whom his mantle can descend. He sees in Deronda this destined leader, introduces Deronda to the Philosphers' Club at the "Hand and Banner", and rouses his keen interest both in the Jewish race and in the thought that he may be a Jew himself. Throught Deronda's instrumentality, his relationship to Mirah is discovered, and after Deronda and Mirah are married he dies happy in the belief that they will realize his dream. The original of Mordecai was a Jewish journeyman watchmaker, name Cohn, or Kohn, who was president of a philosophical club in Red Lion Square, which G. H. Lewes frequented in his youth, and which he describes in the Fortnightly Review, vol. 4, p. 386. To the personal characteristics of this Cohn, as Lewes described him, George Eliot added the belief in a renewed Jewish nationality, which she is said to have taken from a Moldavian Jew possessed of the same idea whom she met in Munich. (See Dictionary of National Biography, article Lewes; Acton, Historical Essays, p. 300.)

<em>Daniel Deronda</em>

Text