Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), still the first and only British prime minister of Jewish ancestry, was not only a canny politician but a recognized man of letters whose novels were all the rage in his day.
Adam Kirsh
Adam Kirsch’s relatively concise but penetrating biography, Benjamin Disraeli (Random House), examines both facets of his extraordinary life.
Described by his rival, William Gladstone, as “diabolically clever,” Disraeli achieved fame at the age of 21 with his first novel, Vivian Grey, whose theme of boundless ambition would haunt him.
Disraeli wrote 17 more novels. Coningsby and Sybil were bestsellers, while Alroy and Tancred promoted proto-Zionism in the mould of George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda.
Yet accomplished as he was in literature, Disraeli left his greatest impression on politics. He sat in Parliament as a member of Parliament for some 30 years and led the Conservative party to power.
Opposed initially to universal suffrage, he won plaudits for the passage of the second Reform bill, which granted most male heads of households the right to vote.
But in his greatest achievement, forged in 1868, he rose to the position of prime minister. It was an office he would hold yet again from 1874 to 1880.
During this phase of his glittering career, he dazzled friends and disheartened foes by audaciously buying 44 per cent of the shares of the Suez Canal after securing a loan from the Rothschilds.
He accomplished this feat despite the objections of his own cabinet and without the consent of Parliament.
Basking in a glow of contentment, he told Queen Victoria, “It is just settled. You have it, madam.”
Kirsch rates Disraeli’s purchase of Suez Canal shares, a triumph of British colonialism in the Middle East, as possibly the most celebrated episode in his illustrious career.
He adds that most of the shares, nonetheless, remained in the hands of France, Britain’s competitor in the scramble for imperial influence in the Middle East.
For Disraeli, as Kirsch succinctly observes, his Jewishness was both “the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine.”
Though his father, a historian, literary critic and descendant of Spanish Jews, had him baptized as a teenager, Disraeli was generally regarded as a Jew and thus an outsider in British society.
“And that meant that he had to turn his Jewishness from a handicap into a mystique,” writes Kirsch, an American book critic.
“He had to convince the world, and himself, that Jews were a noble race with a glorious past and a great future. He had to turn anti-Semitic myths to his own account.”
Equal to the task, Disraeli reinvented himself as one of the 19th century’s “chief points of reference for thinking about Jews and Judaism.”
When Disraeli was born, Britain was inhabited by 15,000 Jews. Having been expelled from Britain in the 13th century, Jews were permitted to return in the mid-17th century by Oliver Cromwell. Yet few British Christians had ever laid eyes on Jews.
Given their alien image, and plagued by the anti-Semitic notions of such renowned British authors as Chaucer, Marlowe and Shakespeare, Britons were supremely receptive to myths and stereotypes about Jews.
Disraeli’s father, Isaac, was affected by this state of mind. Kirsch contends that Isaac – whose family settled in Britain in 1748 – was painfully ambivalent toward Judaism, while his mother, Sarah, was downright hostile to Jews.
Their son, Benjamin, could have shunned his Jewish background. Instead, he cleverly gloried in it. Disraeli remained a member of the Church of England, while maintaining that Judaism and Christianity were essentially one faith.
Realizing that he could never “pass” an an ordinary Christian, Disraeli developed a public persona that allowed him to be a Jew while enjoying the civic rights of a Christian.
An aristocrat at heart, he concocted an idealized and self-aggrandizing portrait of Jews, both in his novels and in his speeches.
“Disraeli’s understanding of Jewishness was deeply distorted by his disconnection from the collective Jewish life of his time,” Kirsch writes.
He adds, “But Disraeli’s imagination of Jewishness did what he needed it to do. It gave him the confidence to compete with the best-born men of England. It gave him the dignity he sustained through the most wounding attacks.”
Through a devious character named Sidonia, who appears in several of his novels, Disraeli created an image of the Jew that, while designed to uplift and dignify Jews, played into the hands of anti-Semites.
The archetypal wandering Jew, Sidonia was a figure of immense power who controlled and manipulated governments from behind the scenes.
“With a few slight changes, you could easily turn the Sidonia scenes in Conigsby and Tancred into an anti-Semitic tract to rival The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Kirsch writes. “And, as a matter of fact, the most vicious anti-Semites… all reprised Disraeli’s ideas, sometimes giving him explicit credit.”
Karl Eugen Duehring, a major anti-Jewish theorist in Germany, subscribed to Sidonia’s racial doctrine: “The Jews are to be defined solely on the basis of race, and not on the basis of religion.”
Wilhelm Marr, who coined the enduring phrase anti-Semitism, gladly embraced Disraeli’s suggestion that Jews secretly pulled the strings.
The British writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a hero in Nazi eyes, subscribed to Sidonia’s belief that racial excellence is “a positive fact.”
Adolf Hitler, well aware of their corrosive rantings, expropriated them into his racist canon.
Reflecting on Disraeli’s unintended legacy, Kirsch writes: “By the end of [his] life, anti-Semitism had mutated into something much more virulent, based no longer on contempt but on fear and hatred. The myth of Jewish superiority, which Disraeli had advanced to counter the fact of social inferiority, now interacted with the paranoid suspicions of anti-Semites to disastrous effect.”
More than a century after his death, one wonders what Disraeli would have said had he known that his ideas were cynically used to defame, marginalize and murder Jews, particularly during the Holocaust.
