DOES BENJAMIN DISRAELI deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives? It would certainly be possible to construct one narrative of his life that piled up evidence of his attachment to the people from whom he sprang. Although his story was so extraordinary—so like the plot of one of his own novels as to be sui generis—many Jewish writers did just this after his death and celebrated him as a representative Jew. Many anti-Semites did the same, though of course for different reasons.
This version stresses the fact that he was born a Jew and raised as one until he was thirteen years old, when he was baptised on the instructions of his father. Although he thereafter identified himself religiously as a member of the Church of England, he never denied his origins and never changed his name, which advertised his ties to both his family and his people. Moreover, he made a perilous trip to Jerusalem in his youth and expressed pride not only in his roots but also in the achievements of the Jewish people. In one book after another he asserted that Christianity and European civilization owed everything to the Jews. This Disraeli became a friend of the English Rothschilds and when he was an MP spoke up for the right of Jews to enter parliament, a cause that was anathema to members of the Tory Party to which he belonged and which he aspired to lead. Despite this barrier and despite a storm of prejudice against him, he eventually did achieve that commanding position. While in government he played a key part in the final achievement of Jewish civic equality and, as prime minister, took momentous decisions that would shape the destiny of England and the Jews. He initiated the coup that led to Britain purchasing a major shareholding in the Suez Canal Company and, later, the addition of Cyprus to the British Empire. Both steps drew Britain deeper into the eastern Mediterranean and, some argue, paved the way for the British occupation of Palestine during the Great War, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and, ultimately, the creation of Israel. Finally, he played a part in the Congress of Berlin (1878), which stipulated that states coming into existence in the Balkans should guarantee full citizenship to their Jewish inhabitants. On this basis in the decades after his death his reputation as a Jewish figure grew—partly thanks to a number of biographies that depicted him as one.1
Initially, Conservative writers like T. E. Kebbel, who had been employed as a journalist by Disraeli, played down his Jewishness and played up his patriotism. Those less kindly inclined, like J. A. Froude, characterised him as an Oriental and an alien. This was held to explain his florid rhetoric, flights of fancy, and reprehensible conduct. The first two volumes of the official biography, by William Monypenny, were published in 1910 and made use of pioneering research by the Anglo-Jewish historian Lucien Wolf that exposed the myth Disraeli constructed around his origins. Monypenny depicted him as a brilliant outsider with a foreign temperament, who was drawn to his Jewish roots although he quickly abandoned such limited allegiances for the bigger prize of a political career. The biography was completed in 1920 by George Buckle, who concluded, “The fundamental fact about Disraeli was that he was a Jew.” Monypenny and Buckle saw this as the source of his drive and genius; but others, such as Lord Cromer, saw his dual identity as bizarre, causing an inability to be sincere—the source of opportunism injected into the Tory Party.2
But it is also possible to tell the story of Disraeli’s life discounting every element in the former version. For a long time that is what most British academic historians chose to do. At best they treated his Jewish origins as an obstacle to his political career that had to be overcome and the font of an outsider mentality that gave him a highly original way of seeing things. At worst, the specifically Jewish aspects were deemed irrelevant.3
After all, Disraeli did manage to make his way in society and enter politics despite the handicap of his birth. B. R. Jerman, using previously suppressed documents, showed that his scandalous youth and political inconsistency when he was starting out were perhaps more of a hindrance. His early novels undoubtedly made grandiose claims for Judaism, but his inactivity on any practical issue concerning Jews told another story. Robert Blake, his first modern biographer, treated the novels with their fantastic Jewish heroes as wish fulfilment, a way of letting off steam. The myth he constructed about his Jewish lineage, tracing his line back to wealthy and noble Sephardi Jews, was just a device to put him on a par with the English aristocrats with whom he had to deal. To the consternation of Jewish campaigners and their allies, not to mention the irritation of those who sought to preserve the Christian character of the nation’s legislature, when he raised his voice in favour of Jewish emancipation he spoke as a Christian and asserted that he did so for the sake of Christianity. He declared that Christianity was a completed version of Judaism: a position that in modern terms would align with the Jews for Jesus. Even so, his exertions were as inconsistent as they were equivocal. If he grew close to the Rothschild family around this time, they viewed him as a fickle friend, while the Jewish community kept its distance. As for his foreign policy triumphs, they could be explained in terms of traditional British foreign policy. Disraeli was more a disciple of Lord Palmerston than a follower of Moses. He actually knew very little about the situation of Jews in other parts of the world and, unlike the Jewish MPs who entered parliament in the wake of Lionel de Rothschild, never lifted a finger to assist them. His role at the Congress of Berlin was misunderstood.4
More recently, scholars have revisited his career, his writing, and his politics to tease out the influence of the Jewish milieu from which he emerged and the impact of the hostility he faced because of it. They have revisioned Disraeli as a Jewish figure and located him in the sweep of European Jewish history, depicting him as more typical than unusual. To some extent this reevaluation was preceded by the insights of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin. To Arendt, Disraeli was a classic Jewish parvenu from the transitional era between the ghetto and full equality who used his Jewishness in his relations with the English elite to give him a feeling of superiority over those who despised him. But his boastfulness and use of racial ideas in his image making gave birth to a host of fallacious claims about the wealth, power, and influence of Jews that would fructify modern anti-Semitism. Berlin saw Disraeli as representative of a generation of European Jews who could enter society and succeed only on the terms set by Gentiles, a humiliating situation that could be met by either transforming themselves or transforming society. Disraeli compensated for the contempt in which his people were held by turning them into paragons of virtue, a noble race superior to the Anglo-Saxons. This Jewish myth, combined with his romantic individualism, his belief in his own genius, and his antipathy to materialism, developed into an obsession with his race and hence the idea of race in general. It elevated his status and explained everything else.5
Since the early 1980s a succession of revisionist biographies have placed Disraeli’s Jewishness at the heart of his private life, his fictional writing, his political thought, and his career as a politician. However, in these studies there is a marked tendency to read his novels in the light of his entire life story and vice versa. For anyone seeking proof of a preoccupation with Jews, Judaism, and race, they are packed with quotable evidence. Unfortunately, the novels are neither autobiography nor blueprints for a life yet to be lived. As this book will show, when they are taken in their temporal context and set against the available documentation attesting to Disraeli’s private preoccupations at the time, they take on a different hue.6