In order to give the most adequate expression to her ideas, and to show forth the power of the spiritual life as she conceived it, George Eliot made use of that race and religion which presents so remarkable an illustration of the influence of tradition and heredity.  She saw in Judaism a striking confirmation of her theories, and a proof of what ideal interests can do to preserve a nation.  To vindicate that race in the eyes of the world, to show what capacity there is in its national traditions, was also a part of her purpose.  That this was her aim may be seen in what she said to a young Jew in whom she was much interested.

    I wrote about the Jews because I consider them a fine old race who have
    done great things for humanity.  I feel the same admiration for them as
    I do for the Florentines.

The same idea is to be seen very clearly in the last essay in the Impressions of Theophrastus Such.  She regarded the great memories and traditions of this people as a priceless legacy which may and ought to draw all the scattered Israelites together and unite them again in a common national life.

A people having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children’s children; when an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its institutions.  It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness.  Nations so moved will resist conquest with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity, will produce poets to sing “some great story of a man,” and thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action.  An individual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in actual existence, yet existing in the past, in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored.  A common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man.  The time is not come for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to suffice for social energy.

This was one of the favorite ideas of George Eliot, which she has again and again expressed.  She was impressed with the conviction that such a national life is necessary to the world’s growth and welfare, that the era of a common brotherhood, dissociated from national traditions and hopes, has not yet come.  Hence her belief that Judaism ought to speak the voice of a united race, occupying the old home of this people, and sending forth its ideas as a national inheritance and inspiration.  This belief inspires the concluding words of her essay, as well as the last chapters of the novel.