Part One

Becoming Disraeli, 1804–1837

I

Benjamin Disraeli was born on 21 December 1804 in his father’s house at 6 King’s Road, Bedford Row (now 22 Theobald’s Road), a respectable district of early nineteenth-century London situated between Greys Inn and Bloomsbury. In accordance with Jewish law and the custom of the community into which he was delivered, he was circumcised eight days later. The mohel who performed the rite was David Abarbanel Lindo, an uncle on his mother’s side and a stalwart of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation at Bevis Marks Synagogue, of which Benjamin’s father was a lifelong member.1

These details are not only useful as the obvious place to begin a biography of Disraeli. They are significant because when he wrote or spoke about his life he either never mentioned them or got them wrong. As an adult Benjamin Disraeli fabricated the story of his origins; what he included, obscured, left out, or invented tells us a great deal about the man, how he understood himself, and how he wished to be perceived.

In fact, Disraeli’s origins and early life were typical of the Jewish community at that time, or rather of the Italian-Jewish section of London’s Sephardi Jewish population. The Jews of London numbered around twenty thousand at the end of the eighteenth century and comprised four-fifths of the entire Jewish population of Britain. The community was relatively new. Jews had arrived in the British Isles during Roman times but were expelled in 1290. There was no organised Jewish presence from then until 1656, when Oliver Cromwell permitted Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who had entered the country as Christian merchants, to openly practice Judaism. These merchants and their families were originally secret Jews, insultingly called marranos (pigs) in Spain, who were the descendents of those who had opted for superficial conversion to Christianity rather than go into exile in the great exodus of 1492. A mass conversion followed five years later in Portugal, too. Some of these forced converts and their children covertly adhered to Judaism, albeit progressively diluted over the generations, at the risk of discovery and persecution by the Inquisition. Often they found the danger intolerable and eventually chose emigration, forming the nuclei of communities in Bordeaux, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and that permitted by Cromwell in London. Over the following half century the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of London were augmented by fresh arrivals from Amsterdam, Gibraltar, and North Africa, most of whom were also Sephardi. In 1701 the community, now numbering several dozen families, opened the first purpose-built synagogue in London, at Bevis Marks, in Houndsditch.2

During the eighteenth century there was a small but steady influx of Jews from northern and central Europe. These Ashkenazi Jews were of a different stripe. They were Yiddish-speaking artisans, old-clothes dealers, and peddlers; most were poor. In 1750 six thousand Jews in the capital were in receipt of alms of one kind or another. This represented about half of the total Ashkenazi population. Yet they established three synagogues of their own and flourished. The Sephardi Jews, by contrast, stagnated demographically and never exceeded about two thousand souls. Still, they dominated the main communal institutions that rested on voluntary membership and rather less voluntary financial support. Most Sephardim were well-to-do retailers or merchants who made their living from the import-export trade, exploiting their knowledge of the Spanish Empire and building on family ties that stretched across the Sephardi-Jewish diaspora. The community was financially dependant on a small, wealthy elite that was engaged in banking, bullion dealing, and the stock exchange.3

Although they enjoyed an unusual degree of freedom compared to Jews in other European countries the Jews in England still faced many restrictions, both because they were aliens and because they were non-Christian. The number of Jews licensed as brokers on the Royal Exchange was limited to twelve. Jews were not permitted to trade in the City of London. They were excluded from the great mercantile associations such as the East India Company. Foreign-born Jews could not own land, and there was some legal doubt over whether British-born Jews could inherit property. In 1753 a government-sponsored bill to enable the naturalization of foreign-born Jews, and so resolve these dilemmas, met such a storm of extra-parliamentary opposition that it was rescinded the following year.⁴

Disraeli himself speculated that the trauma of the “Jew Bill” might have encouraged his grandfather, Benjamin D’Israeli, who had been in England for only a few years, to distance himself from the Jewish community. He ventured that his grandfather’s second wife, who had little desire to associate with Jews, abetted him in this. Ironically, though, the pattern of their behaviour places them squarely within the mainstream of Jewish life in Georgian England. Disraeli may have been seeking to antedate and explain his own disengagement from the Jewish community and Judaism, but in so doing he actually emphasised just how representative he was of a certain strand of Jewish life at that time.5

Benjamin D’Israeli had arrived in England in 1748 at the age of eighteen. He was born in the small north Italian town of Cento, near Ferrara, within the Papal States. The Jews of Ferrara lived in a ghetto (which was still there when Benjamin’s grandson and namesake visited the city nearly eighty years later), and the horizon of Jews living under papal rule was strictly limited. Benjamin senior almost certainly emigrated in search of greater freedom and commercial opportunity. He followed the route of Anglo-Italian trade already taken by dozens of other Italian-Jewish émigrés and found employment with an Italian import house based in Fenchurch Street. In 1756 he married Rebecca Mendes Furtado, whose parents were secret Jews who had fled to England from Portugal some three decades before.⁶

Within a short time Benjamin dived into the flourishing trade between England and northern Italy and established his own emporium in New Bond Street handling imported Italian products such as marble and straw hats. Like many merchants he began trading shares and purchased a coffeehouse in Duke’s Place where business could be transacted. And, like many novices dabbling in the stock market, he took a hammering. In 1764 he suffered another blow when Rebecca died, leaving one daughter, Rachel. She subsequently married a cousin, Aron Lara, and eventually settled in Leghorn (Livorno) with her second husband.⁷

It did not take Benjamin long to find a new wife. As a well-to-do merchant he was presumably considered a good match within the close-knit Italian-Jewish Sephardi community. His second wife was Sarah Shiprut de Gabay Villareal, the daughter of Isaac Shiprut de Gabay, an Italian-Jewish jeweller with roots in Livorno. Isaac also dabbled in the diamond trade with India. In 1756 he bought uncut diamonds on credit obtained from the major Jewish merchant house of Abraham and Josef Franco but was arrested for attempting to sell the stones in Amsterdam before he had repaid his financial backers. Despite this hiccup he continued to import Indian diamonds, a business that may have brought him into contact with his future son-in-law. For Benjamin had meanwhile ventured into the trade in coral, another high-value item largely imported from India by Jews. In 1769 he was one of eight Jewish merchants who joined with eight non-Jewish coral traders in a protest against the monopoly exerted by the East India Company.8

Unlike his father-in-law, Benjamin D’Israeli avoided running afoul of the law and preserved a good reputation. By 1776 he was set up as an unlicensed stockbroker with an office at Cornhill, and at the zenith of his career, in 1801, he achieved the honour of being invited to sit on the committee overseeing the construction of the new Royal Exchange building. He died in 1816 at the ripe age of eighty-six, leaving £35,000 to his son—roughly equivalent to £2 million today.⁹

Throughout his life Disraeli’s paternal grandfather was enmeshed in the Italian-Jewish diaspora and was a solid member of the Sephardi Jewish community in London. His two sisters, who had remained in Italy, ended their days in Venice, where they ran a Jewish school for denizens of the ghetto. He himself was a paid-up member of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation and took on a minor voluntary office as an overseer of the school for poor Jews in London. He did business with other Jews in areas of trade that were almost wholly in Jewish hands: the Anglo-Italian trade in straw hats, like the import of diamonds and the coral trade, was dominated by a number of Jewish families, mainly Sephardim of Spanish and Portuguese origin. Both of his wives came from Jewish families that had moved through the diaspora, following well-worn tracks leading to commercial opportunity and personal security. He was also typical in that once he had accumulated sufficient surplus capital he bought a fine house on the outskirts of London, in Enfield.10

This move symbolised more than just the acquisition of wealth and status: it signalled his relaxed relationship with the Jewish community and his desire to assimilate into English society. As the historian Todd Endelman observes, the Sephardi Jews of Georgian England “ceased to define themselves in exclusively Jewish terms and began to expand the parameters of their social and cultural world to include much that was not Jewish. Jewishness became only a part of their sense of self.” The willingness to adjust and their ability to assimilate came from their peculiar bifurcated background and the relative openness of the society to which they migrated, an almost unique combination in Europe during this era.¹¹

Benjamin D’Israeli had started life in one country, under an oppressive culture, and transplanted himself to another, freer place. His first wife had literally lived a double existence: her parents, from the Lara and Mendes Furtado families, had been secret Jews before they fled Spain. Hence Isaac Shiprut de Gabay and his wife were already used to living in more than one culture and having more than one identity. Livorno was famed for its cosmopolitan character. In the sixteenth century, under Medici rule, it had welcomed Jews fleeing persecution in the Iberian peninsula. For utilitarian reasons the Medici kept the Inquisition in Italy at bay and preserved religious toleration. As a result, the port’s Jewish population grew and prospered until it numbered over four thousand in the 1780s, making it more than 10 percent of the city’s inhabitants. They enjoyed extensive civil rights and participated in the city’s governance as well as its bustling commercial life. At the same time, though, they were allowed to regulate their own community according to Jewish law and custom.12

Such Jews were natural cosmopolitans, schooled to see religion and culture from more than one point of view. Accordingly, many were sceptical while others were just less firmly attached to traditional beliefs. They were experienced in observing and then imitating the mores of people around them. By the time they settled in London they were already adrift from the moorings of traditional Judaism, but they did not enter a Jewish community ruled by experienced, authoritative rabbinical figures. Instead, they found a synagogue that was dominated by the laity, people with backgrounds similar to their own, and a weak religious regimen. When they purchased grand houses beyond practical walking distance of Bevis Marks Synagogue, it betokened a lack of commitment to attending services, observing the Sabbath and festivals, maintaining the Jewish dietary laws, and raising their children as practicing Jews. The consequence was inexorable. According to Endelman, “Towards the end of the eighteenth century, with an increase in their social and cultural horizons, intermarriage and conversion became less unusual,” particularly in the third or fourth generations. He adds that “by the early nineteenth century they were so common that there was scarcely a well-to-do Sephardi family settled in England for more than two generations in which drift and defection had not made significant progress.”¹³

Isaac D’Israeli—the son of one Benjamin and the sire of another—fell neatly into this category. But there was another dimension to the progress of assimilation. For it to succeed, English society, or rather London society, had to accept newcomers like him. As a port city London shared many of the characteristics that made Livorno such a hospitable place for Jewish immigrants. Jews benefited from its pragmatic, commercially oriented ethos, even if some London merchants resented the competition they posed and periodically sought to expel or constrain them.14 More generally, while traditional, faith-based antipathies to Jews and Judaism persisted strongly at all levels of society, as demonstrated by the vicious reaction to the Jew Bill, there was also a potent strain of philo-Semitism, a preference for religious toleration, and a willingness to embrace anyone who increased prosperity without endangering the status quo. “Gentry and aristocratic circles,” Endelman writes, “were willing to tolerate the company of unbaptised Jews who were sufficiently wealthy and genteel.” A Sephardi Jew like Isaac fitted the bill perfectly—and he responded in kind.¹⁵

Isaac D’Israeli was born in London in 1766. The picture his son painted of him in the affectionate memoir that prefaces the edition of his collected works, published posthumously in 1849, is of a sweet-natured, unworldly man who pursued a life of private scholarship. This representation needs to be treated with caution. Benjamin Disraeli’s memoir of his father is as much about the son as the patriarch. The family history is spurious and the characterisation of Isaac deceptive. Disraeli hides everything important.¹⁶

According to him, Isaac’s father was born in the Venetian Republic. He was supposed to have come from a long line of wealthy Jewish merchants who had been forced to leave their property and wealth when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Having allegedly found refuge in Venice, the family flourished for two hundred years under the name D’Israeli. Isaac’s father then determined to set up a branch of the family in England, to exploit the country’s newfound political stability and commercial possibilities. This story was clearly an attempt to construct a family history modelled on that of the Rothschild dynasty, but genealogists and researchers have found no trace of the family in Venice apart from Benjamin senior’s rather humble sisters.¹⁷

Benjamin placed his father in a family that was of Sephardi origin but suggested that they had little interest in Jews or Judaism. His grandfather “appears never to have cordially or intimately mixed with his community. This tendency to alienation was no doubt subsequently encouraged by his marriage, which took place in 1765. My grandmother, the beautiful daughter of a family, who had suffered much from persecution, had imbibed that dislike for her race which the vain are too apt to adopt when they find that they are born to public contempt.” Yet whatever his second wife thought about other Jews, Benjamin D’Israeli senior twice married Jewish women and remained attached to the Jewish community. Much of his business was transacted within the Jewish world, too. And it was into this world that he intended to raise his son, Isaac.18

Disraeli has great fun depicting his father’s rebellion against his parents’ desire that he become a businessman. Isaac’s mother saw only ruin for the boy and the family if he was allowed to pursue his youthful dream of becoming a poet. Isaac’s father, though indulgent towards his only child, sent Isaac, first, to study commerce in Amsterdam with one of his business associates and then tried to attach him to a commercial house in Bordeaux. In both cases Isaac wriggled free. In Holland his tutor proved inept and allowed him to read whatever he fancied. When he returned home, at the age of eighteen, he was familiar with the most advanced continental thought and literature. Then, instead of going to Bordeaux, Isaac headed for Paris, where he enjoyed several years mixing in intellectual circles and reading works by the philosophes. He left just as the revolution was fermenting. Once back in London he published his first essay, “On the Abuse of Satire.” It won immediate notice, and Isaac was taken under the wing of figures in London literary life. They persuaded Benjamin senior and his appalled wife to let Isaac follow his true vocation and give up the futile effort of “converting a poet into a merchant.” Two years later Isaac published Curiosities of Literature, a miscellany of anecdotes about writers. Nothing like it had appeared before, and it was an instant success. Coincidentally, a handsome bequest from his maternal grandmother made him financially independent of his parents. At last he could become a man of letters.19

According to Disraeli, just at the moment when Isaac should have been able to relax he suffered a “mysterious illness” that led to a decade of “lassitude and despondency.” Benjamin ascribed this to his father’s “inability to direct to a satisfactory end the intellectual power which he was conscious of possessing.” Isaac had grown up admiring poets like Pope and the early Enlightenment thinkers. He fancied himself a poet and novelist. But his early efforts were critical and commercial flops, as his style and subject matter, notably his fascination with the Orient, did not fit the times. At the age of thirty-five he renounced literature in favour of “literary and political history,” at which he excelled. He then devoted himself to nearly a decade of research in the British Museum reading room, barely diverted by his marriage in 1802. Between 1812 and 1822 the results of his labour poured forth in a steady stream of books on literary figures, literary criticism, and political history. Especially in the latter he displayed a remarkable independence of mind, repeatedly challenging the received wisdom. He sought to overturn the negative view of James I and produced a trenchant defence of Charles I. His son noted coyly that despite Isaac’s early interest in radical French writers, he ended up “a votary of loyalty and reverence.” His reward, at the age of seventy, was an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, the home of royalism and Tory values.²⁰

Disraeli thus wants us to believe he was the scion of a modest, bookish man who avoided society and preferred pottering in a bookshop to visiting a club, who was more at home in the library than in the world of politics. He wrote that his father “had not a single passion or prejudice: all his convictions were the result of his own studies. . . . He not only never entered into the politics of his day, but he could never understand them. He never was connected with any particular body or set of men.”21 This could not be further from the truth. His father was intellectually combative and politically engaged. He had strong views about religion as well as politics, views that shaped the young Benjamin’s outlook. What makes the memoir of his father quite extraordinary is that Disraeli omitted to mention any of this or the most tempestuous religious events in his father’s life, the very ones that most profoundly affected his son’s future.

As we have seen, Isaac grew up in an Italian-Jewish Sephardi milieu. We do not know whether he went through the bar mitzvah ceremony at the Bevis Marks Synagogue, but it may be significant that his father waited until he was beyond confirmation age before sending him to Amsterdam for the next stage of his education. The destination was no random choice: the Jews of Amsterdam and London, especially the Sephardim, were almost umbilically connected. There was intense commercial as well as social traffic between them. His father presumably intended that his son learn commerce in one of the most important centres of the Sephardi-Jewish diaspora. In the event, Isaac’s commercial education was a complete failure. Despite frequent visits by Benjamin senior, presumably during business trips, Isaac returned knowing more about Voltaire than about commerce.²²

At home again, he wrote poetry and tried to enlist the interest of Dr Johnson. Sadly, Johnson was too infirm to take an interest in this tyro, but Isaac nevertheless managed to publish a short article in Wit’s Magazine in 1784 and another in Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786. This did nothing to reassure his parents about his prospects, and he was sent to France, ostensibly to train at a Bordeaux mercantile house. This choice of destination was no more capricious than Amsterdam. Bordeaux had a sizeable Sephardi-Jewish population that was heavily involved in transatlantic trading. One of the leading Jewish figures in the city was Abraham Mendes Furtado, who was related to Benjamin D’Israeli’s first wife, Rebecca Mendes Furtado. Isaac’s father was clearly exploiting family and trading connexions within the Sephardi-Jewish diaspora in his vain effort to keep his son on familiar tracks.23

However, Isaac barely paused in Bordeaux. Instead, he spent about two years in Paris, reading in libraries, meeting intellectuals, and drinking deeply from the font of the philosophes. In the memoir of his father Benjamin concealed just how much his father was enthralled by the revolutionary intellectual atmosphere. During the years in which he made his literary breakthrough with “On the Abuse of Satire” (1789), his first book, A Defence of Poetry (1790), and Curiosities of Literature he was mingling with writers who favoured the unfolding revolution in France. His early politics took him, if briefly, into radical republican and Jacobin circles.²⁴

In the mid-1790s the revolution turned nasty, and Isaac D’Israeli became disillusioned. His outlook turned conservative, and he gravitated towards anti-Jacobin intellectuals in England. He finally nailed his flag to the mast of reaction with his anti-Jacobin novel Vaurien, published in 1797. It contained a scathing depiction of the French revolutionaries and broached his obsession with the secret societies that he blamed for the overthrow of the ancien régime and the turmoil throughout Europe. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu remained his idols, but by the 1790s they could be interpreted as conservative thinkers by comparison with the wilder effusions of Robespierre and his followers.²⁵

Isaac’s political engagement was deepened through his association with the publisher John Murray. Murray’s father, also called John Murray, had brought out Curiosities of Literature. He died a couple of years later, but in the early 1800s his son took over the business and became Isaac’s friend. The association, which lasted a quarter of a century, rested on more than just shared cultural interests. Murray was associated with Tory politicians; he founded the Quarterly Review in 1807, partly with Isaac’s encouragement, in opposition to the Whig-oriented Edinburgh Quarterly. Hence, far from being a passive, apolitical man of letters, Isaac D’Israeli was a leading figure in the intellectual reaction to the French Revolution and a committed opponent of Whig politics.26

He also remained engaged in Jewish life, albeit with extreme ambivalence. Volume 1 of Curiosities of Literature contained several entries on Jewish subjects. In a short essay on the Talmud he attributed its composition to “certain Jewish doctors, who were solicited for this purpose by their nation, that they might have something to oppose to their Christian adversaries.” But the word of God was “lost amidst these heaps of human inventions.” Still more unfortunate, the “rigid Jews persuaded themselves that these traditional explications are of divine origin” and allowed the Talmud to rule their lives. This hostile commentary was followed by an entry called “Rabbinical Stories.” He declared them full of “gross obscenities and immoral decisions.” Nevertheless, amidst these “grotesque fables” he found such gems as the story of Solomon and Sheba. Volume 2 contained a moving account of the massacre and suicide of the Jews in Clifford’s Tower in York in 1190. To Isaac D’Israeli their self-immolation revealed a noble spirit in the midst of a “degenerate nation.”²⁷

In 1798 he published in the Monthly Magazine a sympathetic portrait of Moses Mendelssohn, the doyen of the Jewish Enlightenment. Isaac was attracted to this subject because Mendelssohn had emerged from the narrow world of central European Jewish life and achieved fame as a philosopher writing for a non-Jewish audience. Furthermore, in his theological tracts Mendelssohn built on the rationalist tradition in Jewish thought, stemming from Maimonides, and challenged religious coercion. Isaac’s admiration for “the Jewish Socrates” was quite compatible with contempt for traditional Judaism. He noted that Mendelssohn’s father taught in a Jewish school, an institution Isaac loathed with a force that suggests a degree of personal exposure. In such places, he wrote, could be found “the antipodes of the human understanding; youths, with the assiduity of students, exerting themselves in systematical barbarism. The summit of Hebrew studies closes with an introduction to that vast collection of puerile legends, and still more puerile superstitions, the Talmud.” Mendelssohn, he claimed, had broken free of such obscurantist dogma and issued a clarion call to reform Jewish education.28

Mendelssohn’s programme of institutional reform was more important to Isaac D’Israeli than his reformulation of Judaism in a modern philosophical idiom. Although he mentions Mendelssohn’s great work Jerusalem, published in 1787, he says little about the main theme justifying Judaism as a religion of reason and defending the revelation to the Jews at Mount Sinai as the basis for their singularity. Rather, D’Israeli is excited by Mendelssohn’s “attack on the powers of the hierarchy.” Mendelssohn’s argument that Judaism was a voluntary creed and not one that could or should be imposed by a clerical elite obviously appealed to him.²⁹

His enthusiasm for the internal reform of Jewish life was reiterated in two reports on the Paris Sanhedrin that he contributed to the Monthly Magazine in 1807. The Sanhedrin was an assembly of rabbis and Jewish lay leaders from the areas under French influence, summoned by Napoleon to endorse his policy for the acculturation and integration of the Jewish people throughout his domains. During February and March 1807 the gathered notables rubber-stamped answers to a series of loaded questions posed by Napoleon’s ministers. In them they declared that civil law prevailed over Jewish law; that Jews should be loyal citizens and serve their nation in peace and war; that Jews were able and willing to perform manual and agricultural labour; that usury was forbidden.30

It is clear why Isaac was attracted to this grandiose project and thought it was something the English should know about. But Isaac had more than an intellectual interest in the proceedings. His relative Abraham Furtado was president of the Sanhedrin. Furtado had been elected to the French National Assembly in 1789 and played a leading role representing the Jews of France during the revolutionary era. He was subsequently a member of the Assembly of Notables, precursor to the Sanhedrin. Hence Isaac’s summary was part of a joint enterprise of European Jews linked by trade, kinship, and convictions. Napoleon’s aspirations matched his own desire to see Jews merge into the society around them and to remove the obstacles in Jewish law and rabbinical authority that prevented this. What repeatedly preoccupied Isaac about Judaism was, paradoxically, the possibility of weakening its hold over his coreligionists.³¹

Despite this ambivalence Isaac D’Israeli was still sufficiently attached to Judaism (or, perhaps, deferential to his father) to marry a Jewish woman in 1802, Maria Basevi, who came from an Italian-Jewish Sephardi background similar to that of the D’Israeli family. Her father, Naphtali Basevi, was born in Verona in 1738 and emigrated to England in 1762, where he established himself as a merchant. In 1767 he married Rebecca Rieti, whose parents were Italian Jews who had arrived in the early 1740s. They had two children, Joshua and Miriam, or Maria. Throughout his life Naphtali Basevi was a totally conventional Jew, serving as an official of the Bevis Marks Synagogue and, in 1801, as president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Joshua, however, who preferred to be known as George, drifted away from the community. He became an underwriter at Lloyd’s and subsequently retired to Brighton to lead the life of a gentleman. He was appointed a magistrate and eventually served as a deputy lieutenant for Sussex. Neither of his sons, Nathaniel and George, was associated with the Jewish community. Maria, as the equivocation over her name suggests, shared her brother’s less than enthusiastic attitude to Jewish identity and in this sense was a wholly appropriate partner for Isaac.32

After his marriage Isaac left the bachelor comforts of an apartment in the Adelphi building and moved to Bedford Row with Maria. It was here their children were born: Sarah in 1802, Benjamin in 1804, Raphael or Ralph in 1809, James in 1813. Another son, Naphtali, was born in 1807 but died in infancy. The first three children were given traditional Jewish names, and the boys were circumcised; they each had some sort of Jewish education. However, the distance between the house in Bloomsbury and Bevis Marks, in Houndsditch, was more than just geographical.

Although he paid his annual membership fee, the finta, to the synagogue on time and without complaint (it was initially assessed at £10 and rose to £22 13s 4d), Isaac rarely attended services. Notwithstanding his infrequent appearances, in early October 1813 the Mahamad, the synagogue’s governing body, chose him along with several others to serve for one year as a parnass, or warden. The position would have necessitated regular attendance and carried with it a considerable burden of duties. Isaac wrote back saying he was puzzled why he had been selected after such a long time and politely declined the honour. But he reaffirmed his willingness to contribute to synagogue charities and implied that he was happy to remain a loyal member. Such a demurral was hardly unprecedented, as in the same year three others refused the invitation. Isaac’s brother-in-law Joshua Basevi had done so two years before. But they were prepared to abide by the rules and accept the authority of the Mahamad, which entailed paying a penalty. For, according to the ascamot, the time-honoured regulations governing the congregation, a member who refused to take up office had to pay a fine. This charge was originally intended to discourage abstention, but it had turned into a useful source of revenue and now stood at £40 (about £1,800 at today’s values). Accordingly, the synagogue secretary, Joseph de Castro, sent Isaac a note informing him that he was fined.33

Isaac, as we have seen, was an enlightened man. He did not believe that religious authorities had the right to compel their adherents to believe or do anything; faith was an individual, voluntary affair. Unfortunately, the Mahamad was as principled and unbending as he was and three weeks later commanded Isaac’s presence at a meeting to explain himself. Isaac sent back the letter with a warning that they must have made a mistake. De Castro responded by sending a copy of the resolution of the Mahamad, in Portuguese, with a covering note explaining that his selection was entirely in accordance with the rules. There was no mistake.

This was too much for Isaac. He replied with a now-celebrated letter setting out his reasons for not wanting to serve as a parnass:

You are pleased to inform me that my election of Parnass is in strict conformity with your laws. Were I to agree to this it would not alter the utter impropriety of the choice. . . . A person who has always lived out of the sphere of your observation, of retired habits of life, who can never unite in your public worship, because as now conducted it disturbs instead of exciting religious emotions, a circumstance of general acknowledgement, who has only tolerated some part of your ritual, willing to concede all he can in those matters which he holds to be indifferent; such a man, with but a moderate portion of honour and understanding, never can accept the solemn functions of an elder of your congregation, and involve his life and distract his pursuits, not in temporary but in permanent duties always repulsive to his feelings.

Isaac lamented that he, like many other Sephardi Jews in London, was being driven away and compared their condition to that of half-baked cakes, “partly Jew, and partly gentile.” Their discontent was a symptom of ill-considered governance: “Even the government of a small sect can only be safely conducted by enlightened principles, and must accommodate itself with practical wisdom to existing circumstances, but above all with a tender regard to the injured feelings of its scattered members.” Many Jews were already at odds with the community, and yet this voluntary association was being subjected to arbitrary measures for the sake of “obsolete laws” that stemmed from another era. “Such gentlemen, is my case,” he concluded: “invincible obstacles exist against my becoming one of your elders, motives of honour and conscience! If you will not retain a zealous friend, and one who has long had you in his thoughts, my last resource is to desire my name to be withdrawn from your society.” He appealed to the Mahamad to revise its decision and act in accordance with the “general improvement of the age.”

Instead of heeding this eloquent statement, rich with allusions to Montesquieu and Mendelssohn, the Elders instructed the Mahamad to tell D’Israeli bluntly that he would not be granted an exemption. In March 1814 Isaac received his annual synagogue account, including the fine. Even so, he strained to reach a compromise, offering to pay the fee if the Mahamad would drop the fine. There was no response, and the matter appears to have lapsed. In March 1817, four months after his father’s death, the Mahamad snapped back into action, demanding his finta for the last four years plus the fine. It may well be that the interment of his father reminded the Bevis Marks officials that there was outstanding business with the D’Israeli family; but the circumstances could not have been less well chosen. While the death of Benjamin D’Israeli left Isaac a wealthy man, easily able to settle the fine and accumulated dues, it also relieved him of any sense of filial obligation. He now wrote to the synagogue telling the governing body that it was absurd to ask someone who was “not a fit member” of the community to serve in an official function. He was “aggrieved” and asked that his name be removed from the membership.34

Isaac went still further. Some five months after he had severed his ties with the organised Jewish community, he arranged through a Christian friend, Sharon Turner, for his children to be baptised. The thought process that led to this momentous step is opaque. According to Benjamin Disraeli, “It was Mr Sharon Turner who persuaded my father—after much trouble—to allow his children to be baptised. He, one day, half consented, upon which Mr Turner called the day following and took us off to St Andrew’s Holborn.” But this account, like so many of Disraeli’s personal reminiscences, is full of errors. In fact, an examination of the baptismal register shows that the children were baptised on different days, beginning with the youngest boys on 11 July, Benjamin on 31 July, and Sarah on 28 August.³⁵

In later life Disraeli rarely, if ever, adverted to this traumatic moment. In a brief biographical sketch from March 1860 he omitted it entirely. He did, though, refer to it jokingly and revealingly some years earlier in a letter to Philip Rose, his solicitor, in connection with a life insurance policy. Rose needed to know exactly when Disraeli had been born and wondered if the baptismal certificate could help pin down the date. It could not. As Disraeli explained, “On obtaining the document, I found it rather unsatisfactory, as my godfather, Mr Sharon Turner, looking to baptism merely as a means of salvation, & not at all as a mode of raising money, in short not at all a man of the world, not having the particulars of my birth at hand at the moment of entry, describes me as ‘about seven years of age.’ ”³⁶

From these tantalising references it appears the conversion was not a mere act of pique. Nor was Isaac, with the help of a disinterested colleague, merely clearing the way for his children’s unimpeded entrance into the gentile world: a ticket of entry, as Heinrich Heine famously described conversion. Turner was motivated by sincere Christian beliefs and became godfather to the children so that he might watch over their spiritual welfare. He may have had to persuade Isaac that it was advantageous for his offspring to be raised as Christians, but if there was a tussle it was not resolved solely on pragmatic grounds—as one might expect in a debate between a devout Christian and a follower of Voltaire. Turner made a theological case, and it was on this basis that Isaac’s children entered the Anglican Church.37

Turner’s intervention in the early life of Benjamin Disraeli did not end here. In biographies of Disraeli, Turner is usually referred to as a “historian of Anglo-Saxon England” or a “solicitor and antiquary.” But he was more than that. His History of the Anglo-Saxons, published between 1799 and 1805, was one of the earliest formulations of English history in racial terms. As the historian Hugh MacDougall writes, “In Turner’s History one can find all the ingredients necessary for an explicitly racist interpretation of English history: the common Germanic origin of the English people; the exceptional courage and manliness of the Saxons, their predilection for freedom and the inherent excellence of their language and social institutions; the special affinity of the transmitted Saxon genius for science and reason; the inevitability of the ultimate triumph of a people so superbly endowed and directed by a kindly providence.”³⁸

So Sharon Turner was not merely a zealous Christian. He was also an early apostle of racial thinking. In both respects he influenced Isaac D’Israeli and helped to shape the mentality of Benjamin. He was truly a godfather figure. In one crucial respect, however, they diverged. Turner saw English history as a triumphal progress towards parliamentary democracy, whereas Isaac had a peculiar admiration for the Stuart monarchs James I and Charles I and deplored the parliamentarians who opposed them. In two of his late works, An Inquiry into the Character of James I (1816) and Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I (1828–31), he contested the “Whig” version of history that consigned these figures to the dustbin of failed despots. Isaac’s belief in the benign intentions of the Stuarts and the malign conduct of their parliamentary antagonists was way out of kilter with the dominant understanding of English history. Yet as infuriating as they may have been to Whig politicians, his studies were based on careful research culled from ignored manuscript sources as well as official documents and could not be dismissed. Hence the gratitude shown by the high-Tory dons of Oxford University when they bestowed an honorary doctorate on Isaac.39

Benjamin, then, did not grow up in a household run by a vague, solitary but delightful patriarch whose main interest was abstruse literary matters. At the substantial house he moved to on Bloomsbury Square (thanks to the inheritance from his father) Isaac entertained distinguished writers of the period, such as Turner and Robert Southey, who held strong political views. Benjamin and Sarah often sat in on these lively evenings. Isaac also regularly attended dinners given by Murray at his offices at 50 Albemarle Street, sometimes accompanied by his eldest son. Here too the company was firmly aligned with a particular school of political thought. Thus from his youth Benjamin was informally schooled in an anti-Whig view of the world and a Tory understanding of history.⁴⁰

Isaac’s hostility to Judaism matched his antipathy to revolutionaries and secret societies. In 1833 he published The Genius of Judaism, a compendium of all the prejudices that marked the Enlightenment critique of Jewish tradition. While it was framed as an appeal for greater understanding between Jews and Christians, with an eye to abetting the efforts to obtain full civil rights for the Jews in England, it actually provided ammunition for anyone who wanted to denigrate Judaism.⁴¹

The traditional Jew, Isaac opined, “still cherishes the prejudices of barbarous eras.” Originally Jewish law had existed to train the ancient Hebrews to act morally; but it had ossified, and the Jews had become an “obdurate and anomalous people.” To compensate psychologically for the oppression they endured they convinced themselves that they were superior to other peoples and that their law was pristine. Obedience gave way to worship, culminating in the sacralization of the scroll of the law itself, the Sefer Torah, which D’Israeli condemned as a form of “rabbinical idolatory.” Over time the interpretation of the Talmud superseded the “Code of Revelation.” But the Talmud was “casuistical,” “scholastic,” “recondite,” characterised by “rambling dotage,” “puerile tales,” and “oriental fancies.”42

Jewish law set Jews apart from the rest of humanity. The dietary rules in particular constrained them from sharing hospitality with non-Jews, estranging them “from all the sympathies of fellowship.” Their insistence on a life apart and assertion of their superiority was behind “the universal hatred of the Jewish people.” While persecution and discrimination forced them to practice usury, “it was not only for their sordid acts and insulting behaviour that the Jews incurred the hatred of Christian nations during the Middle Ages.” The Jews “nourished an hereditary hatred against Christianity, and vomited forth libels against the Christian religion.”⁴³

All was not lost. Experience proved that Jews could “assimilate with the character, and are actuated by the feelings for the nation where they become natives.” To illustrate his thesis Isaac recounted the story of how Cromwell allowed the Jews to return to England and how they had responded: “The Hebrew identifies his interests with those of the country; their wealth is his wealth.” Once permitted to settle and treated decently, “the Hebrew adopts the hostilities and the alliances of the land where he was born.” Yet they could achieve this proximity only if they put aside the laws and customs that set them apart. Hence D’Israeli called for the “social reform of the English Jews” along the lines prescribed by Napoleon for the French Jews at the Sanhedrin in 1807. He did not underestimate the difficulties, for it was the genius of Judaism to remain adamantine. He implored his fellow Jews to give their young a secular education, to quit instilling in them the Talmud, and to reject the “antisocial principle” that underpinned key elements of Jewish law. Only then could the “civil and political fusion of the Jewish with their fellow-citizens” commence.44

What did Isaac mean by “fusion”? At the very end of the book he suggests that Jews and Christians should be distinguished only by their religious devotion. But in the first pages he blurred the distinction between the two faiths and pontificated that “in Judaism we have our Christianity, and in Christianity we are reminded of our Judaism.”⁴⁵ It was in the spirit of this conviction that Benjamin was raised. He was infused with a contempt for traditional Judaism and taught to think of Christianity as its worthier successor. While Jewish history offered vignettes that demonstrated certain virtues, there was otherwise nothing of value in his Jewish heritage. In his own writings Benjamin Disraeli would prove to be his father’s most slavish disciple.⁴⁶

II

Although Benjamin Disraeli was a prolific writer, we know little about his childhood and youth from his own hand. Biographers and literary historians have made up for this deficiency by drawing on three of his five early novels—Vivian Grey (1826), Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Romance (1832), and The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833)—as if they were autobiographical in theme if not in detail. There are sound reasons for this approach. In the fragments of a journal that survived in his papers (known to scholars as “The Mutilated Diary”) he wrote in September 1833, “In V[ivian] G[rey] I have pourtrayed [sic] my active and real ambition. In Alroy my ideal ambition. The P[sychological] R[omance] is a development of my poetic character. This trilogy is the secret history of my feelings. I shall write no more about myself.”47

These sentences have given those seeking a Jewish thread running through his life a licence to mine the early novels for anything suggesting a preoccupation with personal identity or reflections on the experience of dissonance between a boy of Jewish origin and his Christian environment.⁴⁸ And, at first sight, there is plenty to work with. Both Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming begin with accounts of the eponymous hero’s school days. In both novels the hero finds himself at odds with other schoolboys or with the school authorities.

Vivian Grey is the most obviously autobiographical in that Vivian is the son of “a man of distinguished literary abilities.” Like Benjamin’s, his parents are at odds over whether to send their beloved child to a public school, institutions which at that time had a poor reputation. Instead of Eton he attends a boarding school run by a clergyman who is also a classicist. In his first year he gets into trouble with the headmaster over the staging of a play, in defiance of school rules, causes his fellow pupils to “mob” him, and has a fistfight with the dominant personality among them. The following year he is expelled after an altercation with a master (involving a drawn pistol). After this his father recommends that he study at home, reading the classics.⁴⁹

Contarini Fleming appears doubly autobiographical insofar as the author writes in the first person and informs his readers that he aspires to “the history of my own life.” It, too, treats its hero’s years at school and university. Contarini is a “melancholy child,” the son of a “Saxon nobleman of ancient family” and a Venetian woman who died in childbirth. Baron Contarini remarried and had two more sons by his second wife. But whereas Contarini has a “Venetian countenance,” they are “white.” He feels out of place in his own family, fighting frequently with his half brothers, whom his stepmother favours. He hates the “northern country” where his father is a high official at court and longs for southern climes. His family regard him as stupid until, at the age of eight, a tutor unlocks his natural intelligence.50

At prep school Contarini initially feels inferior and self-conscious. After a short while, though, he recalls that “a new principle rose up in my breast; and I perceived only beings whom I was determined to control.” He begins to enjoy learning and discovers that he has a ready wit and the power of oratory: “My ambition conquered my nature. It seemed I was the soul of the school.” Instead of enjoying this popularity he alienates his fellows by his aloofness and soon longs to escape. He yearns to visit Italy, his other homeland. Despite the fact that he is only fifteen years old, he sets off alone. On his return his parents confront him again and ask why he is so moody. Contarini then delivers an adolescent rant that youth everywhere have repeated almost verbatim many millions of times: “Because I have no one I love, because there is no one who loves me, because I hate this country, because I hate everything and everybody, because I hate myself.”⁵¹

Are Vivian and Contarini autobiographical representations depicting a childhood and youth in which Disraeli was tormented by a sense of being different? Since the Danish-Jewish literary critic Georg Brandes published his study of Disraeli in 1880, this has been the standard view. Although Brandes warned against identifying the characters in the novels too closely with living persons and did not boil down Disraeli’s motives to his origins, he asserted that “all desired information as to his inner life in his boyhood and early youth may be found in his novels.” Indeed, he deduces from the novels that ambition for fame and power was the driving force in his early life. But Brandes assumed that Disraeli was conscious of being Jewish and aware that this posed a problem for him. For Brandes the question that haunted the teenager was how to achieve power in a country ruled by aristocrats when he was an outsider by social rank, Jewish born, and the grandson of foreigners.52

However, what Disraeli wrote about himself in “The Mutilated Diary” in September 1833 is not necessarily an accurate reflection of what he was actually thinking in 1826 or 1830 when he wrote the novels. Most of the journal was destroyed, possibly because it contained things he did not want exposed to posterity. It is precisely because these fragments did survive that they may be false clues. In any case, thanks to the profusion of letters he wrote, one can snatch some insight into Disraeli’s contemporaneous reaction to events, people, and places. These remarks, often addressed to his most trusted confidants, hardly support his own later claims, not to mention the assertions of historians. It ought to be salutary that his official biographers, William Flaville Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, were notably cool towards the novels as sources for grasping Disraeli’s thoughts and feelings. In particular they caution that “neither Vivian Grey nor Contarini Fleming can be used without discrimination as an authority for biographical details.”⁵³

Even if the novels were a reliable source, they are hardly indicative of a young man’s struggle with his religious and ethnic identity. Disraeli is careful to show that in spite of the usual schoolboy jealousies and rivalries Vivian quickly won popularity and established his ascendancy over the other students. When there was trouble it was because he provoked it. The novel makes no reference to religion or ethnicity. Instead, the source of Vivian’s unease lies in his inchoate ambition, the dissonance between his belief that he is destined to accomplish great things and his aimlessness, aggravated by his realisation that he can dominate others without knowing to what end. Nor does Contarini suffer obloquy because he is foreign. He first attracts adverse attention because he is a dandy. Contarini’s discontent stems rather from the gulf between his fantasies and what was possible: “In imagination a hero, I was in reality a boy.” As in Vivian Grey, the hero creates his own misery: “I entertained at this time a deep conviction that life must be intolerable unless I were the greatest of men. It seemed that I felt within me the power that could influence my kind. I longed to wave my sword at the head of armies or dash into the very heat and blaze of eloquent faction.”54

If anything, the early novels brilliantly render the maundering behaviour of a frustrated adolescent. Disraeli may or may not have faced taunts from other boys because he was a Jew or an ex-Jew; he certainly does not write anything that implies that sort of treatment. What he does make abundantly clear is the effect of ambition and ability on a young person who has not yet found an outlet for his energies or learned how to express them in a collegial fashion. From what little is known of his school days this experience seems just as likely as the travails of the “Jewish Disraeli” whose early life is interpreted through the lens of his later fiction.

From the age of six Benjamin was sent to an infant’s school in Islington run by a Miss Roper. He then boarded at an academy for middle-class boys in Blackheath, southeast of London, run by the Rev. John Potticary, a Quaker. In the absence of denominational schools for the children of respectable Jewish families it was quite common for them to send their young to establishments run by Protestant Nonconformists. The atmosphere in these schools was naturally more tolerant of religious difference; Protestant dissenters were excluded from full citizenship like the Jews and felt a kinship with them. Furthermore, thanks to their bibliolatry, the more radical Protestant sects were on familiar terms with the Old Testament and broadly sympathetic to its adherents. According to one who remembered him, Disraeli appears to have been a happy, popular student who did well at his studies. He was excused participation in the Christian act of worship that started the school day. On Saturdays he received lessons from a rabbi, although they seem to have left little trace. There is no evidence that as an adult he knew the Hebrew alphabet, and his grasp of Judaism was shaky.55

In 1817, after his conversion, Benjamin was sent to a new school, Higham Hall, in Walthamstow, an establishment for boarders on the northeast outskirts of London. It was run by Eli Cogan, a Unitarian minister who was an accomplished classicist. The strength of his school lay in the teaching of Latin and Greek, knowledge of which Disraeli absorbed and wielded throughout his life. However, his health was not good, and Maria D’Israeli had not wanted to send him away at all. She vehemently opposed any suggestion that he should attend Eton, believing (with reason) he would be in danger of physical ill-treatment at a public school. While Cogan’s may have been more humane than Eton, Disraeli himself seems to have been less than happy there. Nor was he much liked by the teachers. When he was sixteen years old he was pulled out.⁵⁶

For the next year he was left pretty much to his own devices, although he may have had a private tutor. Extensive reading lists from this period have been preserved that show he was an assiduous reader of classical texts spanning history, philosophy, and literature. He also consumed works by contemporary historical writers, such as Edward Gibbon, and modern thought, including Voltaire. For some reason no one appears to have contemplated sending him to university. Instead, in November 1821 his father, at considerable expense, arranged for him to be articled to a firm of solicitors, Messrs Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pease, Hunt in Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry. Isaac had done business with Thomas Maples and was on friendly terms with him, but the placement still cost four hundred guineas. According to Disraeli’s reminiscences, his father hoped his rather wayward son would qualify in law and get a secure, lucrative job with the Court of Chancery.57

For a while Benjamin did apply himself as a personal assistant to one of the partners and obtained some useful training. The work opened his eyes to the inner workings of the law and business, though it was deadly dull, and he was more interested in clothes than contracts. It was around this time that he fell in with the trend amongst young men for dandyism, turning up at the office in ever more spectacular and expensive outfits. He was also independently extending one foot into the literary and intellectual world. Thanks to his occasional presence, alongside Isaac, at Murray’s literary soirees in Albemarle Street, the publisher had formed a high opinion of Benjamin’s abilities. Murray started sending him manuscripts for evaluation. Meanwhile Benjamin started writing and composed a play with William Meredith, his best friend and his sister’s fiancé.⁵⁸

In July 1824 Meredith accompanied Benjamin and Isaac on a holiday trip to Europe. It was the young Disraeli’s first adventure abroad, and he chronicled their progress through Belgium and the Rhineland in a succession of exuberant letters to his sister. This correspondence and the surviving bits of a diary that he kept during the excursion show a well-informed interest in art and architecture. They also display an impressive appetite for haute cuisine and fine wines. What they do not indicate, however, is any interest in Jewish sights or history. While the group were in Frankfurt they do not seem to have paid any attention to the Judengasse (the crowded Jewish quarter along one street sometimes referred to as a ghetto, though no longer closed off) that still existed there. Although in later years Disraeli adverted to the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Crusaders, he passed through Mainz and Worms, where ancient Jewish communities had been slaughtered, without any reflection on their tragedy. Whereas he was careful to mention his epicurean adventures with frog legs, oysters, and “vol au vent of pigeon,” he did not register seeing a single Jew in any of the cities that were home to some of the largest, oldest Jewish communities in western Europe. However important his Jewish origins may have become to him in later life, at this stage they mattered less than a performance of Don Giovanni at the opera house in Mannheim.59

During the last stretch of the tour Disraeli appears to have turned against the idea of practicing the law. Despite being formally admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in November 1824 he decided to concentrate his energies on getting rich. London was enjoying one of its periodic bouts of speculative frenzy, this time triggered by the emergence of independent states in South America created out of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. These new nations were ushered into existence with British support, at the direction of Foreign Secretary George Canning. Commercial treaties opened them up to British investment, and shares in South American mining companies became the rage. Disraeli had no capital of his own with which to join the speculation and as a minor was not legally competent to borrow money or even to trade in shares. Instead, he and two other young men gambled with other peoples’ wealth. They included family and friends; Disraeli persuaded his cousin George Basevi and John Murray to let him invest considerable sums on their behalf. That he was able to bring this off is a tribute to his plausibility and charm as well as to the patina of legal and business experience that rubbed off on him while at Frederick’s Place. But the consequences were disastrous.⁶⁰

One of the chief speculators was John Powles, whose legal work was handled by Swain, Stevens, Maples, Pease, Hunt. Powles was worried in case the government stepped in to quell the fever, as was threatened, and wanted someone to write propaganda to sustain the South American eldorado. He was alerted to the talents of Benjamin Disraeli, and the two entered into a perilous alliance. At great speed Disraeli researched and wrote no fewer than three booklets extolling the progress of mining in the Americas. They were published by John Murray as objective reports, carrying all the respectability of his imprint. Unfortunately, this frantic puffery was of no avail. The value of the stock plummeted, and Disraeli (not to mention his cousin and one of his father’s oldest friends) faced a hammering.61

Undeterred by the looming disaster, Murray now conceived of starting a newspaper in support of Canning and the Tory government. He enlisted Disraeli’s assistance and through him brought in Powles as an investor. Perhaps they believed they could influence the stock market as well as politics. First they needed additional capital, so once again Disraeli tapped friends and family. The plan for the editorial side of things was to persuade the eminent writer and editor John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, to run the new paper, christened by Disraeli the Representative.⁶²

Murray sent Disraeli to Scotland to present the idea to Scott and Lockhart. In a flattering letter of introduction Murray declared, “I never met a young man of greater promise, from the sterling qualifications which he already possesses. He is a good scholar, hard student, a deep thinker, of great energy, equal perseverance, and indefatigable application, and a complete man of business. His knowledge of human nature, and the practical tendency of all his ideas, have often surprised me in a young man who has hardly passed his twentieth year, and above all, his mind and heart are as pure as when they were formed.” With his way opened in such style Disraeli spent three weeks in Edinburgh and Melrose, near Scott’s magnificent residence, meeting the two men. After he had departed Scott described him as “a sprig of the root of Aaron” and a “young coxcombe.” But Lockhart agreed to go to London to take the business further. Oddly, in the meantime Murray seems to have changed his mind and instead offered Lockhart the editorship of the Quarterly Review. This not only left the projected newspaper rudderless but also triggered a revolt amongst several of the Quarterly’s heavyweight contributors. A few weeks later Murray again sent Disraeli to Scotland, this time to reassure Lockhart that he was safe in the editorial chair. It was a thankless task, and everyone ended up taking offence. Disraeli returned to London, to the doghouse.63

Worse was to follow. In December 1825 the value of South American mining stock finally collapsed. Given his losses there was no way Disraeli could provide his share of the capital for the Representative. Having committed Murray and Powles to a vast outlay of cash by hiring correspondents and subeditors and commissioning Basevi, a well-known architect, to design an editorial office, he was obliged to withdraw from the project. The newspaper was a flop and closed after a few months, landing Murray with costs of £25,000. Benjamin and his two colleagues were left with debts of at least £7,000 between them (the equivalent of roughly £420,000 today). Had he not been under the legal age of responsibility, he would have faced debtors’ prison. As it was, these debts would haunt him for decades.⁶⁴

Disraeli now retreated to Hyde House, a country seat near Amersham his father had rented for the winter. The owner was Robert Plumer Ward, an author with whom Isaac shared a solicitor, Benjamin Austen. Ward had just enjoyed terrific success with a novel of upper-class mores, Tremaine, and Disraeli was inspired to try his hand at the same game. He knew he could write, and he desperately needed the money that could come from a best seller. He also had a plot: the debacle over the Representative. During January and February, working at his usual furious pace, he knocked out Vivian Grey. He was assisted by Sarah Austen, the wife of Isaac’s solicitor. The two had previously met at Murray’s offices, where Sarah helped with the publication of the Quarterly Review. She was in her early thirties, pretty and clever, and she was evidently attracted to the handsome and talented, if wayward, young man. In fact, she was crucial to the future of Vivian Grey. Disraeli wanted the manuscript to go to a publisher anonymously so that it could be marketed as an insider’s view of a scandal in high society. Sarah acted as his willing conspirator and negotiated the publication deal with London’s most aggressive and commercially minded publisher, Henry Colburn. Smelling a hit, Colburn paid the author £200 for the book and began placing adverts heralding the arrival of a shocking new talent.65

Vivian Grey tells the story of an ambitious young man who from his school days longs for fame and power. But how is he to get it when in England “to enter high society, a man must either have blood, a million, or genius”? Vivian realises that politics is his vocation and his route to the top. He devises a scheme to manipulate a washed-out politician, the Marquis of Carabas, into office and thereby rise on his coattails. Vivian easily seduces the vain and rather stupid Carabas, who is invigorated by the idea of leading his own parliamentary faction and regaining influence. He is assisted by the no-less-manipulative sister-in-law of the Marquis, Mrs Felix Lorraine, who also falls for Vivian’s charms. Together they assemble a cast of political misfits. One perceptive knight of the shire prevaricates until Vivian finds a means to get him on board. The baronet “although a bold man to the world was luckily henpecked; so Vivian made love to the wife, and secured the husband.”⁶⁶

Even with this clique in motion Vivian realises he needs a politician with genuine gravitas. He locks onto Frederick Cleveland, a former MP who had retired from politics in disgust, and sets out to persuade him back into the fray. Inconveniently, Cleveland and Carabas loathe each other. So Vivian himself has to travel to Cleveland’s country retreat in order to win him over. Just when it looks as if all the pieces are falling into place, the entire plan explodes. Mrs Felix Lorraine throws herself at Vivian and, after he spurns her advances, tries to poison him. Carabas is denied office in a government reshuffle. Cleveland’s wife dies, and he is turned against Grey. They fight a duel, and Vivian kills the one decent man he knows. The book ends with his flight abroad.67

As Disraeli anticipated, Vivian Grey was an instant success. Colburn had to rush a new edition into print to meet demand and offered Benjamin £500 for a second volume. Unfortunately, its notoriety provoked intense curiosity about the author’s identity, and, inevitably, Benjamin’s name leaked out. A shocked public discovered they had been gulled by a stripling who inhabited the world of high politics and high society only in his imagination. Some of the reviews were savage, exposing the kind of errors that only an ingénue would make. Worse, Murray worked out that Carabas was based on him. He was mortified.⁶⁸

By the summer Disraeli was a nervous wreck. Sarah Austen suggested he take a vacation on the continent with her and her husband, Benjamin. Seven years older than Sarah, Benjamin Austen was the son of a banker turned diplomat and occupied chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. He had performed a service for Ward’s Tremaine similar to that Sarah had for Disraeli’s Vivian Grey. They were, on the surface, perfect travelling companions: intelligent, cultured, and interested in authors. But Sarah began to seek too much of Disraeli’s company, while Disraeli ended up seeking too much of her husband’s money.⁶⁹

They set out from Dover at the beginning of August and took an apartment in Paris for several weeks. Having imbibed Parisian culture, they travelled by coach across the Juras and the Alps, which Benjamin described with romantic flourishes in letters to Isaac. In Geneva he recounted rowing on the lake with Lord Byron’s boatman and hearing firsthand tales of Byron’s exploits. Since he worshipped Byron, like so many of his youthful contemporaries, the encounter was an immense thrill, and he squeezed everything he could out of associating with the poet’s memory.⁷⁰

The party then made their way to Milan and Venice. Although this province was the birthplace of his maternal grandparents Disraeli paid it no special attention. Nor, indeed, did he show much interest in the Jewish aspects of Venice itself. In a letter to Isaac on 13 September he remarked that in St Marks Square “the Austrian military band and the bearded Jew with his black cap was not wanting.” This cursory observation, putting the significance of the city’s Jewish inhabitants on a par with a brass ensemble, jars with his later adulation of Venice as the place where his family had flourished for two centuries. As Monypenny and Buckle dryly observed, “Clearly Disraeli had not yet evolved the theory of his Venetian origin.”71

Disraeli and the Austens proceeded on to Florence, pausing in Bologna and Ferrara. On 29 September he wrote to Isaac extolling the delights of Bologna and mentioning as an aside that in Ferrara “and in this city only I saw a Regular Ghetto, a tolerably long street enclosed with real wooden gates and holding about 3000 Jews.” Although their route took them just a few miles south of Cento they did not visit the birthplace of Disraeli’s grandfather or look up any of his relatives, if he was aware he had any there.⁷²

Upon his return Disraeli fulfilled the obligation to write a sequel to Vivian Grey. It took the form of a picaresque down the Rhine. Vivian followed the route taken by Benjamin with his father in 1824, drawing on his letters and journal to provide the scenic background. On his travels Vivian meets various characters: a wise old baron, two bohemian students, and two women who both offer him redemption. He finally courts one of them, Violet Fane, but no sooner is he enjoying marital bliss than she dies. One of the few interesting figures is Count Beckendorff, the prime minister of a tiny German state, who is a prototype of the worldly-wise, politician father figures who populate his later novels.⁷³

There followed what Disraeli later denoted as the three blank years, 1827–29, during which he suffered debilitating ill-health. He was not entirely inactive. For part of the time he laboured on a satire that made fun of Utilitarianism, one of his pet hates. The Voyage of Captain Popanilla appeared in June 1828 but attracted little attention. It is significant mainly as an indication of where his political thought was trending: he was beginning to define himself against the liberal ideas of his day.74

A sad letter to Sharon Turner in March 1828 illustrates his state of mind: “Whether I shall ever do anything which may mark me out from the crowd I know not. I am one of those to whom moderate reputation can give no pleasure, and who in all probability, am incapable of achieving a great one. But how this may be I care not. I have ceased to be dazzled with the glittering bubbles which float on the troubled ocean of existence. Whatever is granted I shall receive with composure, and that which is withholden I shall not regret.”⁷⁵ This self-pitying refrain is also revealing for the light it sheds on his ambition and his pride. Neither was extinguished, and a year later he was plotting his next adventure: a journey to the East.

In the summer of 1829 Isaac leased a substantial country house at Bradeham in Buckinghamshire. The property was surrounded by thirteen hundred acres of parkland, and Isaac hoped Benjamin’s health would benefit from these sylvan surroundings. The library at the Bloomsbury house was transferred along with the rest of the household. This, too, may have played a part in Benjamin’s recovery. He rested, walked, read widely, and began to find inspiration for new novels. Early in December he wrote to Benjamin Austen that he had broached with his father the idea of a trip to Greece and the Near East. His father was none too keen and refused to supply the necessary money. So Disraeli resolved to “hack for it” and write a novel for Colburn that would be conceived and executed as a money-spinner. He was not sure his scheme would work, though, and asked Austen not to divulge it: “I have no ambition in case my dearest project fails to be pointed out as the young gentleman who was going to Constantinople. Let it be secret as the cave of the winds, and then perhaps a friendly breeze may yet bear me to Syria!”76

The reference to his destination is tantalising. Was Disraeli already thinking of going to the Holy Land and Jerusalem in search of material, as some biographers and literary historians have claimed? If so, he was strangely reticent about his objective. Nor when he next contacted his publisher did he broach his intention to research a novel set in the East. In February 1830 Disraeli told Colburn he had a scorching new tale for him, although he warned that he might have to finish it abroad—in Rome. He made no effort to tempt Colburn with a fresh project on an exotic, intriguing subject set in the Orient.⁷⁷

Colburn offered £500 for the book, and Disraeli now churned out a potboiler, The Young Duke, that was so excruciating he later tried to suppress it. The novel tells the story of George Augustus Frederick, Duke of St James. When it opens he is twenty-one years old, well educated, accomplished but entirely aimless and tormented by unfocussed ambition. Having squandered the family fortune, the duke is redeemed by the love of a woman, Mary Dacre, the daughter of his former guardian and a paragon of virtue.⁷⁸

Disraeli delivered the manuscript to Colburn around the end of February 1830. He also asked the writer Edward Lytton Bulwer to read it. Bulwer recommended a bit more polishing, but Disraeli was impatient to leave England. He wrote to Catherine Gore, not entirely as a joke, that “my only chance, and a very forlorn one, of not immediately quitting this life, is immediately quitting this country.” He was worried about his health, noting anxiously that his hair was thinning and showing signs of grey. Worse, he was coming under severe pressure from his creditors. His situation was so bad that despite the money he made from The Young Duke he still had to borrow from Benjamin Austen to finance the trip.⁷⁹

Disraeli scholars have treated the subsequent journey to the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans, and the Middle East as a pivotal moment in his development as a writer and a politician, but above all in his consciousness of being a Jew by birth if no longer by religion or communal association.80 Yet, as we have seen, there was little in his preparations to suggest he was travelling eastwards to research a novel with a Jewish motif or one that necessitated a gruelling journey to Jerusalem. In a letter of reminiscences in March 1860 he remarked simply, “I left England . . . in order to travel more extensively than hitherto.” He added that he began planning and writing his novel set partly in the Holy Land while he was there rather than before. In the “General Preface” to the 1870 edition of his novels, he offered another version of its composition, stating that he had started Alroy in 1827, well before he went to Jerusalem, but was inspired to resume it while in the city rather than arriving there as the fulfilment of some preexisting literary plan.⁸¹

The only contemporary pointers we have for his intentions are the reference to Constantinople and Syria in his letter to Austen and a note in the diary of his travelling companion, William Meredith. On 29 March 1830 Meredith wrote, “B.D. to dine with me. . . . He was in excellent spirits, full of schemes for the projected journey to Stamboul and Jerusalem.” Monypenny and Buckle appear to be the only researchers to have examined this source. Strangely, Meredith never did accompany Disraeli to Jerusalem, and there seems to have been a disagreement between them during the voyage as to whether they should go there at all.⁸²

The two young men left London on 25 May 1830. Over the next month they visited Gibraltar, Cádiz, Seville, Córdoba, and Granada. In his letters home Disraeli gave rich, interesting descriptions of their adventures, the landscapes they traversed, and the cities where they stayed. He lavished prose on Moorish architecture, the paintings of Bartolomé Murillo, the physiognomy of Spanish women, music, food, and drink. But although this region was saturated with Jewish history he is all but silent about Jews. As Cecil Roth noticed, this insouciance is all the more surprising in view of his later boast that his ancestors owned large estates in Aragon and Andalusia, from whence they were cruelly driven in 1492.83

His references to a Jewish presence, when he notes it, are perfunctory and show no particular affinity for or interest in Jews greater than anything he evinced for other national, ethnic, or faith groups. In an early letter to his father a description of the population in Gibraltar includes “Jews with gabardines and scull [sic] caps” amongst a list that embraces Moors, Genoese, Spaniards, and Scottish Highlanders. In Seville he attended a bullfight and tried the local snuff but ignored the Judería, an extensive, beautiful section of the city where Jews once lived. The splendours of the Alhambra enchanted him, occluding Granada’s rich Jewish heritage—if he was aware of it at all.⁸⁴

From Spain the pair took a packet boat to Malta, where they went into quarantine for a month. This seclusion was no hardship: they had a boisterous time with the local garrison and fortuitously hooked up with James Clay, a wealthy, dissolute young man who was sailing around the Mediterranean on his yacht. This luxurious vessel provided a convenient transport for the next stage of the voyage, to Corfu. Amongst the conveniences was Tita, Byron’s former manservant, who was to become attached to Disraeli and his family. Despite his supposed adulation of Byron, Disraeli does not seem to have shared much of his political outlook. While in Malta he was seized by the idea of joining the Ottoman Turkish army and taking part in the campaign it was then waging under the command of Grand Vizier Reshid Mehmet Pasha to suppress an uprising in Albania. Whereas Byron had fought with the Christian Greek nationalists against the Turks, Disraeli chose to identify not with the insurgents but with the imperial Muslim forces.⁸⁵

By the time he reached Prevesa on the Albanian coast the fighting had subsided; but this did not deter him. Instead of playing a soldier of fortune he donned the mantle of freelance diplomat and wangled an assignment to deliver a letter from the British high commissioner for the Ionian Islands to Mehmet Pasha congratulating him on his victory. Equipped with diplomatic papers and an armed escort, Disraeli and his chums set off for Ioannina, passing through countryside that had been ravaged in the recent fighting. The fate of the rebellious locals did not disturb him one bit, a curious response for one who supposedly hero-worshipped Byron. Writing from Constantinople, he later told Bulwer that “my Turkish prejudices are very much confirmed by my residence in Turkey.”86

Once he was safely back in Prevesa he described the expedition to his father, dwelling at length on his arrival in Ioannina and his meeting with the grand vizier. Although Ioannina had a sizeable and very old-established Jewish population, he did not touch on them. The only context in which he noted Jews was the local couture, a typical device he employed for ordering different ethnic and national groups: “The Albanian costume too is exquisite in its combinations, and Jews and Greek priests must not be forgotten.” In all respects that mattered to him, though, the trip had met his expectations. It confirmed the “obsolete magnificence of Oriental Life.”⁸⁷

Disraeli, Meredith, and Clay then sailed down the coast to Athens. His love affair with the opulent, sensual, mysterious world known as the Orient reached its climax during the six weeks he spent in Constantinople in December 1830–January 1831. Disraeli “went native,” dressing like a Turk, smoking Turkish pipes, and indulging the sort of pleasures that were forbidden in London or usually inaccessible to a young man of his station. (Thanks to one of them he returned with a sexually transmitted disease.) Once again he noted the exotic, diverse population, arranging them by their garb: “Here every people have a characteristic costume. Turks, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians are the staple population; the latter seem to predominate. The Armenians wear round and very unbecoming black caps and robes; the Jews a black hat wreathed with a white handkerchie—the Greeks black turbans; the Turks indulge in all combinations of costume.” Jews were merely one element of the backdrop to his personal odyssey.88

On 11 January 1831 Disraeli and Clay resumed their journey together, sailing through the Dardanelles. Meredith had left some time earlier, but they caught up with him in Smyrna. After a few days the party split again. Meredith went directly to Egypt, as they had originally intended; Disraeli sailed with Clay to Cyprus and thence to Jaffa, the main port of Ottoman Palestine. It was here that Disraeli set foot on the Holy Land.⁸⁹

After a night in Jaffa they obtained an escort and crossed the coastal plain as far as Ramle, where they put up at the Franciscan Terra Santa Convent. From Ramle the Judean Hills rise to a high plateau, and it was arduous country. Like many travellers before and since, he gained his first sight of the holy city when the road crested one last ridge before descending to the Jaffa Gate. But this was not the panorama he recalled. What impressed him more, and what stuck with him for the rest of his life, was the view from the Mount of Olives on the other side. This was the vista he described in his letters home and which recurred in his novels: “Jerusalem is entirely surrounded by an old feudal wall, with towers and gates of the time of the Crusaders, and in perfect preservation; as the town is built upon a hill, you can from the opposite height discern the roof of almost every house. In the front is the magnificent mosque built upon the site of the Temple, with its beautiful gardens and fantastic gates— variety of domes and towers rise in all directions; the houses are of a bright stone. I was thunderstruck. I saw before me apparently a gorgeous city.” The visitors initially lodged in the Terra Santa Convent, a traditional refuge for pilgrims inside the walled city close to the New Gate. For the next week they rented a house, with servants, and dined every night on the roof. They visited the Holy Sepulchre, the ancient tombs in the Shilo valley (which he erroneously considered the tombs of Judean kings), and the Mount of Olives. “I cd. write half a doz. [sic] sheets on this week,” he wrote to Sarah later, “the most delightful of all our travels.”90

But he did not. All we have are about seven hundred words that he recycled in his later works. He does not mention the Jewish Quarter or the Jews at all. This could be because the Jewish population was less than impressive: they were uniformly devout and subsisted almost wholly on charity from abroad. According to the historian Tudor Parfitt, the area in which they lived “was described by almost every traveller who left an account of his visit to Jerusalem as the filthiest and least agreeable part of the city.” Nor could they display any buildings to match the ornate churches and mosques. Due to an Ottoman edict forbidding synagogues to rise higher than a Muslim on horseback their places of worship were squat and unimpressive from the outside. In order to gain elevation the Jews had to burrow into the earth and create cavernous structures that were gloomy and dank.⁹¹

There is no evidence that Disraeli even visited a synagogue. Nor does he make any reference to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the sole surviving part of the magnificent edifice erected by Herod. The wall was then one side of a narrow alley, but it was always the focus of Jewish devotions, and he could hardly have missed it. He seems to have directed more energy to getting inside the Mosque of Omar, built over the temple ruins. As for meeting Jews, Disraeli mentions encounters with “the Vicar General of the Pope, the Spanish Prior” but no one from the Jewish community.⁹²

In contrast to the week he spent in Palestine, Disraeli passed five months in Egypt. As he told Sarah, “The more I see of Oriental life, the more I like it.” He and Clay arrived by yacht in Alexandria, then explored inland. They saw the pyramids and made a perilous journey seven hundred miles up the Nile to Thebes. Again, it apparently did not occur to Disraeli that he was crossing a land that held profound meaning for Jews: Moses, Abraham, Joseph, the exodus are not associations that sprang to his mind, or if they did were not deemed worth recording.93

In the midst of their carefree, indulgent existence, tragedy struck. Meredith returned from an expedition upriver and rejoined Disraeli and Clay in Cairo. While they were preparing to return home he caught smallpox and died on 19 July. The next day Disraeli had the awful task of informing Meredith’s mother that she had lost her son, Isaac his prospective son-in-law, and Sarah her fiancé.⁹⁴

Disraeli left Alexandria in early August and spent four weeks in quarantine in Malta. During his confinement, as throughout the trip, he kept up with the news from England. When he commenced the last leg of the homeward journey, he was aware of the turbid political situation that awaited him.

The month after he had left England, George IV died and William IV ascended the throne. The statutory general election was held against a background of popular agitation for parliamentary reform. William IV called on the Duke of Wellington to form a government dedicated to resisting change. But even the Iron Duke could not withstand the pressure. By November 1830 his government had fallen and the Whigs took office with a commitment to end rotten boroughs (constituencies with a tiny electorate that were effectively the gift of a single landowner), enfranchise the new industrial towns that lacked adequate parliamentary representation, and expand the electorate. The prime minister, Lord John Russell, introduced the first Reform Bill in March 1831 only to see it defeated in the House of Commons. Russell then called a general election explicitly to win a parliamentary majority for reform. The government was returned triumphantly and quickly brought in a second bill. It passed all its stages in the Commons but was rejected by the House of Lords. The obduracy of the peers and incitement by the Political Unions, which spearheaded the campaign for reform, led to riots in several cities on 8–10 October, culminating in severe disturbances in Bristol at the end of the month. Disraeli could not have arrived at a more tumultuous moment.95

If a career in politics had not been uppermost in his mind before the Mediterranean adventure, it certainly was by the time he returned. Almost immediately on landing he announced to his father, “If the Reform Bill pass, I intend to offer myself for Wycombe.” This was an audacious proposition: he had no party, no political allies, and no money. But he had ambition and nerve. Once he was installed in London he approached Benjamin Austen to finance his putative campaign. For the moment, though, Russell’s government pressed on with its existing majority, and in December a new Reform Bill began its progress through parliament. Russell obtained the king’s agreement to create peers if necessary to secure its passage. The bill hung on a knife-edge and the country held its breath. In March 1833, shortly before it passed a crucial stage in the Upper House, Disraeli wrote to Austen, “Whatever occur, I fancy I shall secure a seat at the dissolution.”⁹⁶

III

At the same time as he plunged into politics, Disraeli dived into London society. The two overlapped. He took rooms in Duke Street, Mayfair, and turned his back on the Austens, whose horizons were now too narrow for him, even if he still needed their cash. Thanks to his notoriety and his friendship with the successful author Lytton Bulwer he was soon invited to soirees and dinners given by prominent society hostesses. Their salons were the arena for political gossip and networking. He also tried to join a number of clubs, another crucial node of political life in early nineteenth-century London. Tellingly, Disraeli was not yet deemed clubbable. He was rejected by the Travellers and by the Athenaeum, even though his father had been a founding member.97

Given his father’s standing at the Athenaeum it is unlikely that the aversion to Benjamin derived from his Jewish origins. There were plenty of other reasons to blackball him. He was a controversial figure: a dandy whose main accomplishments were two novels, one of which was scandalous and neither of which would ever be considered great literature. Many other people, however, found him entrancing company. An American journalist vividly recorded the impression the young Disraeli made around this time: “He is satirical, contemptuous, pathetic, humorous, everything in a moment. Add to this that Disraeli’s face is the most intellectual face in England—pale, regular, and overshadowed with the most luxuriant mass of ravel black hair.”⁹⁸

Since returning, Disraeli had commenced work on a political tract attacking Whig foreign policy. England and France, or a Cure for the Ministerial Gallomania was published “anonymously” but was intended as a showcase for his talents and a launch pad for his political career. He told Sarah, “I hope to produce something which will not only ensure my election, but produce me a political reputation, which is the foundation of everything, second to none.” A couple of days later he added, “I am writing a very John Bull book, which will quite delight you and my mother. I am still a Reformer, but I shall destroy the foreign policy of the Grey faction.”⁹⁹

Disraeli tried to separate out his antipathy to Earl Grey, the prime minister, and his Whig Party, from their advocacy of parliamentary reform; but there is little in Gallomania to persuade the reader that its author is anything more than a conspiracy-minded reactionary. It was concocted in collaboration with a rather mysterious character, the self-styled Baron Moritz von Haber, a central European Jew. While Haber may have provided content, the writing is characterised by Disraeli’s style and, more significantly, his political ideas.100

Gallomania opens with a survey of the revolutionary wave in 1830–31 that had led to a change of regime in France, the creation of Belgium, an unsuccessful nationalist uprising in Poland, and unrest in Italy and Germany. England remained unscathed, but Disraeli warned that danger lurked ahead. According to the author, Lord Grey was in thrall to the revolutionary ideas that put paid to the French Bourbon dynasty. Like his father, Benjamin saw secret societies behind every political upheaval and instinctively sided with the establishment. He too believed that ancient institutions embodied the accumulated wisdom of society and the spirit of a people. “What we should desire, in all forms of government,” Disraeli intoned, “is, that the national character should be studied and respected.” It was “formed by the influence of particular modes of religious belief, ancient institutions, peculiar manners, venerable customs, and intelligible interests. The government that does not respect these the hallowed offspring of revered Antiquity and sage Experience can never stand.” Disraeli’s pen dripped with contempt for abstract political thinkers and reformers who sought to tinker with systems of government, not least the English constitution.¹⁰¹

While Disraeli may have posed as a friend of reform, it is difficult to reconcile this stance with the reactionary tenor of the piece. Gallomania is little more than an updated version of Edmund Burke’s polemical assault on the French Revolution of 1789. It was, nevertheless, a good read. Several chapters resemble a political thriller. Disraeli even managed to work himself into the story, referring to the adventures of an “Englishman recently resident in Egypt” who tried to warn the British authorities against French meddling there. The traveller’s jeremiad went unheeded, and “the solitary Englishman who was rather a poet than a politician, proceeded on his pilgrimage.”102

Nor did Disraeli omit Jewish involvement. He suggests that “Le Premier Baron Juif,” the banker James de Rothschild, visited the French royal family at the height of the crisis but left them in the lurch. Fortunately, Disraeli did not pursue the line he spelled out in a letter to Sarah in which he detected Jews behind the revolutionary movement: “I have discovered that the Grand Priest or Pope of the new St Simonian Religion, or heresy, is a Jew; Rodriguez. The affair spreads v. much; it will, I think, take with the Hebrews as it appears to me, they need reject nothing and accept nothing.” This was the first appearance of his belief that certain Jews gravitated to radical ideologies and subversive causes.¹⁰³

Gallomania did not shake the political world. It arrived too late to influence the fate of Grey’s government, and the Reform Bill filled people’s attention. A similar fate befell the novel in which Disraeli had invested equally high hopes for delivering financial success and the celebrity he needed to propel his political ambitions.

Contarini Fleming, subtitled A Psychological Romance, opens with the narrator’s explanation that he wants to write “the history of my own life.” This life story will exemplify how the creative mind, genius, is formed and finds expression. It will be written from the standpoint of one emancipated from “prejudice of an irrational education,” by which the author means the received wisdom of the day. Both of these aspirations echo themes that run through Isaac D’Israeli’s extensive writing on the formation of great poets and thinkers. Benjamin’s novel could be a case study from his father’s Essay on the Literary Character.¹⁰⁴

As we saw earlier, Contarini was a melancholy child who felt out of place. What really eats at him, though, is a sense of unfulfilled ambition. He travels and enters university, where he excels until he is sent down for expressing radical ideas. These experiences form the basis for his first attempt at a novel, which he sends to a publisher. Instead of becoming a writer, though, he follows his father’s advice to become a man of action.105

For the next few years Contarini works as private secretary to his father. He learns the skills of a politician and acquires polish, always with his own future in mind: “I laid it down as a principle, that all considerations must yield to the gratification of my ambition.” When the prime minister dies his father is passed over for high office because he is foreign and considered an “adventurer.” But the Baron succeeds in getting his son appointed in his stead as secretary of state. Contarini now engages in a whirlwind of diplomatic activity.¹⁰⁶

Ever the artist, Contarini publishes a novel, “Manstein,” full of satire and malice, that purports to describe the development of a poetic character. At the height of his diplomatic career a scandal erupts around his second book. Having survived a duel, he is crushed by a bad review: “I was sacrificed, I was scalped.” Unable to withstand ridicule, he flees society and resolves to reeducate himself.¹⁰⁷

Contarini settles in Venice and marries a cousin, Alcesté. Their life together is blissful, and at last he feels freed of ambition. But Alcesté dies in childbirth, and Contarini is once more gripped by restlessness. In Livorno he writes another novel, an “antidote” to “Manstein.” After a year plagued by a mysterious illness, he takes advice from his father and travels to the eastern Mediterranean. In Albania he offers his services to the sultan and takes part in a great battle at Ioannina in which a rebel force is mercilessly crushed. Then he journeys to Constantinople, Smyrna, Syria, and Jerusalem.¹⁰⁸

In the Holy City, Contarini is befriended by “a rich Hebrew merchant” named Besso. This idealized Jew is distinguished by his “easy manners” and “gracious carriage.” Though “sincere in his creed” he was “the least bigoted of his tribe.” Besso entertains Contarini lavishly and introduces him to various friends, including noble Arabs. Contarini then travels through the desert to Egypt, where he hears that his father is ill. He rushes home and arrives just in time to bid the baron a last farewell; shortly afterwards, his mother dies. Their demise leaves him a rich man. The king invites Contarini to become prime minister, and he sets about the regeneration of his country. Looking back, he concludes, “Circumstances are beyond the control of man; but his conduct is in his own power.”109

If much of this sounds familiar, it is. Disraeli worked in the scandal of Vivian Grey and drew liberally on his trips to Europe and to the Middle East. The novel captures his own vacillation between politics and poetry but clearly leans towards the former. It also suggests how marginal Jews were to his interests. The references to Hebrews are all stock; Besso is essentially de-Judaised and inhabits a city that in terms of morphology could be anywhere in the Arab world. Disraeli lavishes more detail on his description of Bedouins and “the Orient.”¹¹⁰

Contarini Fleming was a success d’estime but sold poorly. When it appeared both writer and readers were more enthralled by the political drama unfolding in England. In June 1832 Disraeli made his first attempt to enter parliament. He had been watching the High Wycombe constituency, near Bradenham, since the New Year, but the resignation of one of the sitting members in May caused a sudden by-election. Because the Reform Bill had not yet been enacted, the contest was held on the old franchise, which meant there were only twenty-four electors. His agent was a local man called Huffam, who was associated with the Tory interest. Huffam was assisted by Benjamin’s sister and by his cousin George Basevi, both of whom thought their candidate was running as a Radical. As Sarah pointed out, the thrust of Gallomania could only further confuse the tiny electorate. What was he doing? Disraeli seems to have aligned with the Radicals partly because their call for shorter parliaments and the secret ballot appealed to him as ways to curb Whig power, but mainly because it was a way of being anti-Whig without being Tory even if his sympathies tended in that direction. He told Benjamin Austen, one of his few financial backers, that “Toryism is worn out, and I cannot condescend to be a Whig.”111

His campaign was short and disastrous. He dashed to High Wycombe to declare and immediately on arrival made an impromptu speech from the portico of the Red Lion Inn. It was funny and audacious but hardly a clear statement of policy. Meanwhile, the government had awakened to the danger of losing a seat and sent the prime minister’s son, Col. Charles Grey, with a powerful retinue. The local press pointed out that other than a clutch of novels and striking good looks Disraeli had no qualifications or accomplishments to merit election. His claim to be backed by the foremost radicals of the day, Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the Irish MPs, Joseph Hume MP, and Francis Burdett MP, was largely fictive. Only O’Connell had actually responded to an appeal for support, and his endorsement was understandably cautious given that he didn’t know Disraeli from Adam. When the poll was held on 26 June he was defeated by twenty votes to twelve.¹¹²

Disraeli returned to London to lick his wounds. He was assisted by the ministrations of Clara Bolton, the wife of the D’Israeli family doctor, who lived with her husband in Park Lane, almost around the corner. The affair with Clara could offer temporary relief, but she was hardly a solution to his most pressing need: money. So, with Bulwer’s help, he continued to do the rounds of society events, scouting for a rich wife.¹¹³

He spent the rest of the year completing his next novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy. This was, supposedly, the pretext for his Mediterranean excursion, and some historians claim he wrote it while abroad. More likely its composition filled the months between his defeat at High Wycombe and the general election in December 1832. When he resumed writing in the new year, 1833, Alroy was in press, and he was already engaged on a companion piece, The Rise of Iskander.114

Alroy begins with a “historical preface” that explains the twelfth-century setting. The Muslim Caliphate, with its capital in Baghdad, is in decay. A large population of Jews, exiles from the Holy Land, lives within its domain as a subordinate people. Their leader, and the intermediary with their Muslim rulers, is the “Prince of Captivity,” a descendent of the Davidic line. He lives in Hamadan amongst a prosperous Jewish population. Most of this, like the notes at the back, was a farrago. The pseudoscholarly apparatus and peculiar prose style were intended to enhance the novel’s authenticity and conform to the orientalist genre.¹¹⁵

The story opens with the return of Bostunay, a rich Jewish merchant who is serving as the Prince of Captivity, from the demeaning ceremony in which he offers tribute to Hamadan’s Muslim ruler. Bostunay approaches David Alroy, a brilliant, handsome young man, and asks him to take over the role. Alroy refuses, saying, “I have but little heart to mount a throne which only ranks me as the first of slaves.” Like all of Disraeli’s heroes, Alroy burns with unformed, ill-directed ambition. He is tormented by the dissonance between his aspirations and his circumstances: “I, Alroy, the descendent of a sacred line of kings, and with a soul that pants for empire, I stand here extending my arm in vain for my lost sceptre, a most dishonoured slave.” Only his sister Miriam can calm him.¹¹⁶

An assault on Miriam by a Muslim nobleman triggers Alroy’s revolt. He hears her being attacked, comes to her rescue, and in the process fells her assailant. Like Moses (who also had a sister named Miriam), having killed one of the ruling caste he has to flee into the wilderness. High in the Caucasus mountains he encounters Jabaster, a high priest of Cabbalah. Jabaster tells him that if he wants to liberate the Jews and redeem the Holy Land he must first regain Solomon’s sceptre. Alroy duly sets off for Jerusalem but en route is seized by Honain, a half-breed bandit who is Jabaster’s brother. Alroy tries to win him over to the idea of rebellion, but Honain has already participated in one unsuccessful uprising and lacks appetite for more: “If redemption be but another name for carnage, I envy no Messiah.” Instead, Honain advises Alroy to seek a kingdom “infinitely more beautiful than the barren land of milk and honey.” The real Palestine holds no charms: “I have seen it, child; a rocky wilderness where I would not let my courser [horse] graze.”117

Alroy persists and eventually reaches Frankish-ruled Jerusalem, where he seeks the counsel of Chief Rabbi Zimri. The chief rabbi speaks in what Disraeli imagined to be rabbinical discourse but the effect is more like parody and takes Alroy to a service in a synagogue that does not resemble one ever built by Jews. Alroy gains the sceptre and leads the Jews in revolt against the decaying Caliphate. Within a short time he has liberated Hamadan and conquered Baghdad. There his plans go awry. He falls in love with a Muslim noblewoman and is equally seduced by the city’s opulence. When Jabaster reminds him of his messianic undertaking Alroy questions why he should yield a glorious empire for his “meanest province.” After all, he tells the high priest, “our people are but a remnant.” Jabaster retorts that the Jews have been set apart for a special task: “[God] has, by many curious rites and customs, marked us out from all other nations. . . . We must exist alone. To preserve that loneliness is the great end and essence of our law.” He warns Alroy, “You may be king of Baghdad, but you cannot, at the same time, be a Jew.”¹¹⁸

Jabaster’s admonitions have no effect, so he plans to overthrow the apostate messiah. Alroy foils the conspiracy, but while he disports himself with his Muslim wife an insurgent prince, Alp Arslan, invades. Alroy loses the sceptre, his army is defeated, and he is captured. When Arslan offers to spare him a horrible death if he converts to Islam, Alroy remains defiant. Just before his execution his sister comforts him with the thought that “a great career, though baulked at its end, is still a landmark of human energy. Failure when sublime is not without its purpose. Great deeds are great legacies, and work with wondrous usury. By what Man has done we learn what Man can do.”119

Some commentators have seen this ending as Disraeli’s attempt to plant the seed for someone else who will fulfil his dream. According to this reading he was too realistic to think that he could himself refound the Jewish nation in its ancient homeland. And, in any case, he had already set his heart on a political career in England. A variant on this account suggests that he was reining in his genuine desires, which he realised were impractical, by giving vent to them in a fictional construction.¹²⁰

Such interpretations presuppose a serious engagement with Jews and Jewish history. If that were the case, it is hard to understand why Disraeli made such a hash of describing them. Only someone ignorant or uncaring about Judaism could think that a Jew setting about his devotions “took off his turban, and unfolded it, and knelt and prayed.” True, it was common at the time for artists and writers to depict Jews as Arabs, kitting them out with turbans or Bedouin headgear. Given the nobility bestowed by orientalism on the Bedouin as a pure, unspoiled Arabian tribe, it is possible to see how Disraeli was inspired to this melding of stereotypes. Indeed, in their desperation to achieve the patina of a noble heritage Jews in Britain and across Europe would soon adopt an oriental style for synagogue architecture and decor. In this respect, Disraeli was in the vanguard and may have reinforced the trend. Even so, this does not account for other confabulations.¹²¹

Despite having access to a fine library with numerous works on theology he mangled the Jewish dietary laws, describing an animal with a cloven hoof as unclean when the opposite was more likely to be the case. He depicts Jabaster offering sacrifices in a synagogue, and on the Sabbath, even though the recitation of liturgy had supplanted such rituals. For all his claims to familiarity with Jewish texts such as Pirke Avoth, the Ethics of the Fathers, the Jewish aspect of Alroy is sheer persiflage.122

The estimation of Alroy also needs to be qualified in the light of the next piece Disraeli composed. In mid-January 1833 he told Sarah he was writing “a pretty tale about Iskander which will be a fine contrast to Alroy.” The Rise of Iskander is loosely based on the career of an Albanian Christian noble, Skanderberg, who led a successful rebellion against Ottoman rule in the 1440s. Disraeli probably got his inspiration from reading Gibbon, who records a bowdlerized version but transforms the hero from an Albanian into a Greek. This enabled him to draw on his own experiences and to honour Byron’s memory. Iskander also allowed him to counterbalance the implications of Alroy. The two were published simultaneously and in many editions are contained in the same volume. Whereas Alroy recounts the failure of Jewish national aspirations, Iskander is a celebration of Christian resilience. In the words of Monypenny and Buckle it is “the history of a Christian hero placed in a somewhat similar position but achieving a very different end.” If Alroy was an expression of Disraeli’s alleged Jewish patriotism, it was trumped by the Christian triumphalism of Iskander. Those who wish to depict him as a proto-Zionist because he “identifies with Alroy’s triumphs” must explain why he did not identify equally with Iskander.¹²³

Between completing Alroy and writing Iskander, Disraeli gained further, bitter experience of fighting political battles in reality as against in fiction. In December 1832 the government called a general election, the first to be held under the reformed franchise and in the redrawn constituencies. Disraeli again put himself forward for High Wycombe, standing as an independent. The policies he claimed to advocate were a bewildering mixture. From the Radicals he took the secret ballot, triennial parliaments, and repeal of the tax on newspapers. He also promised to support rigid economy and lower taxes. He included a ritual-sounding promise to “ameliorate the condition of the lower orders” while also championing the promotion of industry and the loosening of credit. Disraeli said he favoured modification of the criminal code and aligned himself with the movement to abolish slavery. On the increasingly vexed subject of the Corn Laws (a protectionist measure imposing duties on imported grain), he aspired to “relieve the consumer without injuring the farmer.” He concluded with a cross-party appeal, calling for the formation of “a great national party which alone can save the country from impending destruction.”124

The address already bore the hallmarks of Disraeli’s political rhetoric. It was characterised by redolent phraseology rather than practical details; when policies were stated they were often mutually irreconcilable. He was defeated, again, winning only 119 of the available 298 votes. Whether or not the voters punished his equivocation, he was certainly penalised by the lack of party funding and machinery. This was also the first time the press reported a strain of anti-Jewish prejudice directed against him on the hustings. According to The Times a candidate in a neighbouring constituency remarked that unlike in Buckinghamshire the voters of Berkshire “were not troubled by any Jews.”¹²⁵

Unbowed by the second rout in High Wycombe, Disraeli made a brief run at a vacant seat for the County of Buckinghamshire. He got as far as issuing his election address when it turned out that the Tories had already selected a running mate for the incumbent Lord Chandos. Disraeli then withdrew in favour of the Tory candidates and went on to speak for them. Not surprisingly, the local press was baffled: one moment he was standing as a Radical, the next he was supporting Chandos, one of the most reactionary Tories.126

His friend Bulwer fared better and was elected MP for Lincoln on a rather more conventional Whig–Radical ticket. Notwithstanding their mixed fortunes, they spent a month together in Bath recovering from their exertions. It was during this extremely sociable stay that Disraeli wrote Iskander. They returned to London in February for the state opening of the new parliament. Disraeli attended and with understandably mixed emotions watched Bulwer address the House of Commons. Although he liked him enormously, he was not impressed by this performance and thought he could have done much better. He wrote to Sarah, “I was never more confident of anything than that I could carry everything before me in that House. The time will come.”¹²⁷

Impatient, driven by ambition, Disraeli hoped that time would not be long delayed. In March he anticipated a vacancy for the London borough of Marylebone and rushed in with an address to the electors. This time he adapted his message to the more progressive metropolitan electorate and told his sister, “I profess moderate radical principles.” Two days later he joked to her that he would stand “on my head.” At best this was an amusing double entendre suggesting that he was running on the strength of his individual genius rather than party doctrine. But it underlines his lack of commitment to a coherent set of policies. His claim that he was not supported by either “aristocratic party” and had previously “fought the battle of the people” sat awkwardly with his contribution to the election of Lord Chandos. In the end there was no by-election, and he slipped away. The incident only confirmed the perception in many quarters that he was without scruple or principle, other than an almost irrational hatred of Whigs.¹²⁸

Such was the confusion about his politics that he sat down and wrote a personal manifesto to give potential voters something to hang on to and, perhaps, to clarify his own thinking. Entitled “What Is He?” it takes the form of a decalogue. The first point states that he is neither a Tory nor a Whig and advances the case for a third party. The Reform Act had ended the “aristocratic principle” on which stable governance had once rested, but without offering an alternative. The forces of democracy were now in the saddle, and it was impossible to return to the status quo ante, either by force or some realignment of the existing parliamentary factions, as the Tories hoped. Yet while there could be no such thing as a “Whig democrat,” he believed there was a possibility of restoring strong government by means of a Tory–Radical collaboration.129

Never one to waste his experiences when he could make much-needed money from them as a writer, Disraeli turned his election adventures into a novel. He wrote A Year at Hartlebury, or, the Election with his sister Sarah while staying at Bradenham in the summer of 1833. The hero is Lord Bohun, who returns from a period abroad to find his country in turmoil over the Reform Bill. Bohun bears more than a passing resemblance to Disraeli. He is fundamentally anti-Whig, regarding them as hypocrites because they preach the emancipation of “Niggers” while imposing conditions on northern factory workers that are little better than slavery. They passed the Reform Act ostensibly to enhance democracy but actually to entrench their influence. The new franchise merely delivered power in the towns into the hands of Protestant Nonconformists, whom he dubbed “the Sectarian low Whig Oligarchy.”¹³⁰

Bohun believes that the Tory Party is the true national party. Like the Tories, he is only in favour of change in England “which could be achieved with deference to its existing constitution.” Yet he would not stand as a Tory. Instead, he was “desirous of seeing a new party formed, which while it gratified those alternatives in our domestic policy which the spirit of the age required, should maintain and prosecute the ancient external policy by which the empire had been formed, and of this party he wished to place himself at the head.” After a tight contest, Bohun is elected. But no sooner has he taken a commanding role in the House of Commons than he is murdered.131

A Year at Hartlebury is a pioneering political novel that offers an insider’s perception of parliamentary elections conducted immediately after the great Reform Act. It also dramatises Disraeli’s emerging political vision of an anti-Whig, popular national party that would reassert traditional values. But it sheds scant light on his political motivation. Bohun decides to go into politics for no particular reason. Once elected he stands for nothing in particular. He is bumped off before he has to take a position on any policy matters. He is, however, a typical Disraelian hero in that he is driven by personal ambition and hates the Whigs. His individual genius and aloofness from received wisdom excuse him from obedience to principles or consistency. Apart from avoiding the need to address any hard or divisive policy questions, Bohun’s abrupt demise reflected Disraeli’s impatience to be rid of the novel. A major new distraction had entered in his life: he was in love.

Throughout 1833 Disraeli’s financial situation had deteriorated, and he was on the lookout for a rich wife. In a jocular letter he assured his sister Sarah, “I never intend to marry for love.” Rather, he set his sights on a match that would guarantee £25,000 a year. So it was something of a surprise to himself as much as to Sarah that he suspended wife hunting in order to pursue a genuinely passionate affair with Lady Henrietta Sykes. She was the wife of Sir Francis Sykes, the grandson of a nabob who had returned from India in the 1760s with a fortune of £300,000. Sir Francis inherited the title and what was left of the fortune but was raised by the Chandos family after both his parents died. He was undistinguished, frequently ill, and often abroad attending to his health. By contrast, Henrietta was a strong woman in every sense. She had grown up in a wealthy family that derived its income from brewing. In her thirties, she had already borne four children but retained her looks. She was clever, cultured, and great fun.132

They met at the opera, and soon afterwards Disraeli invited Henrietta to Bradenham. A few months later he stayed with the Sykeses at their home in Southend. Both Isaac and Sir Francis evidently possessed a broad mind on such matters. From Disraeli’s point of view these were blissful days. In September 1833 he recalled that he had spent the months since the Marylebone debacle “in uninterrupted lounging and pleasure.” It was the happiest year of his life. But he could not make up his mind whether he had found what he wanted: “My life has not been a happy one. Nature has given me an awful ambition and fiery passions. My life has been a struggle, with moments of rapture.” He anticipated that he would succeed, if his health held up, but for the moment he was at rest: “My disposition is now indolent. I wish to be idle, and enjoy myself, muse over the stormy past, and smile at the placid present. My career will probably be more energetic than ever, and the world will wonder at my ambition. Alas, I struggle from Pride. Yes it is pride that now prompts me, not Ambition. They shall not say I have failed. It is not Love that makes me say this.”¹³³

This tremendous urge to make his mark was now poured into the composition of an epic poem dissecting the political and social currents of the modern world. He started writing The Revolutionary Epick in the autumn, while staying with Henrietta, but it proved far more taxing than he expected. And despite all his heroic labours it was an utter failure. The Epick tells of the clash between Magros, the genius of feudalism, and Lyridon, the animating spirit of federalism. This contest, Disraeli argues, characterises modern history. The first section reflects on the French Revolution and warns against disturbing the natural order in society through the pursuit of equality. He never finished the work, and it ends inconclusively; but the overwhelming tenor is antirevolutionary.134

With his energy divided between the Epick and Henrietta, Disraeli had time for little else. His self-absorption strained relations with the Austens and, consequently, his finances. Benjamin and Sara Austen were offended that they hardly saw or heard from him any more. In the absence of a mutually rewarding relationship Austen wanted to recoup the money he had loaned Disraeli to fund his electioneering. His demands placed Disraeli in a quandary.¹³⁵

But Disraeli never allowed straitened financial circumstances to impede him from anything. By the spring of 1834 he was wining and dining with some of the main political actors of the day, trying to figure out what opportunities might come his way from the latest political turbulence. The Whig government led by Lord Grey had been weakened by a number of resignations and suffered defeat on its Irish policy. In July, Grey stood down as prime minister to be succeeded by Lord Melbourne. He lasted only a few months. In November 1834 the Duke of Wellington formed a Tory administration with Lord Lyndhurst, a diehard opponent of parliamentary reform, in a major supporting role as lord chancellor.¹³⁶

Disraeli’s political trajectory remained as erratic as ever. In the summer he met with Lord Durham, one of the chief Radicals, and Daniel O’Connell. In the autumn he dined with Lord Lyndhurst and told Sarah that he was a “staunch friend” who was ready to arrange a conversation with Lord Chandos. In November he again asked Durham about his prospects and mused whether he should join the Tories. A few weeks later he wrote to Lyndhurst saying that Durham had offered him a seat. He went on, “I wd. sooner lose with the Duke and yourself than win with Melborne [sic] and Durham, but win or lose I must—I cannot afford to be neutral. How then, my dear lord, am I to act?”¹³⁷

Disraeli’s opportunism, tacking to left and right, persisted until the end of 1834. It was hardly surprising that Lord Charles Greville, the Tory Party manager, disparaged Lyndhurst’s proposal to put up Disraeli as a running mate for Lord George Bentinck at Lynn. Greville noted witheringly in his journal, “If therefore he is undecided and wavering between Chandos and Durham, he must be a mighty impartial personage. I don’t think such a man will do.” Nevertheless, when Sir Robert Peel, who took over as prime minister in December, called a general election, Disraeli enjoyed more or less official Tory support for his third attempt to win High Wycombe. Wellington endorsed his bid and even attended a dinner in his honour before the poll. He lost again, but this time by a narrower margin.138

In the midst of this campaign Disraeli made a speech that finally announced his identification with the Tory Party. He considered the oration so important that he published it in pamphlet form as “The Crisis Examined.” It begins with his ritual assertion of consistency, although he later insists it is a mark of a statesman to change his views in response to events: politicians have to heed the public mood “because the people must have leaders.” He goes on to refute suggestions that the Tories were not yet fit to govern, supporting his argument for the first time with his pet version of political history. According to this, the English Revolution had resulted in a House of Commons with the capacity to rule despotically—unless balanced by the monarch and the peers. He ended his peroration by summoning up a “National Administration” and “patriotic House of Commons,” both codes for the Tories since he consistently described the Whigs as sectional rather than national and treated their policies as a threat to the country and the empire.¹³⁹

In April 1835 Peel’s administration fell due to a combination between the Irish MPs, led by O’Connell, and the Whigs. Lord Melbourne formed a predominantly Whig administration resting on Irish votes in the House of Commons. This new circumstance featured in Disraeli’s next attempt to enter parliament—at a by-election in Taunton for which he had been put forward by Lyndhurst. Now he was officially backed by the Tory Party and benefited from a subscription raised for him at the Carlton Club, the unofficial party headquarters. In the course of his nomination speech he condemned the machinations that brought down Peel’s government and denounced O’Connell for reneging on his former opposition to the Whigs. In a flight of rhetoric he called the Irishman an “incendiary politician” and implied that he had engaged in treasonous behaviour. The appeal to anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feeling did him no good, though. Disraeli lost by 282 votes to 452. Still, it was a creditable performance, one that left him in good stead with the Tories.140

Unfortunately, O’Connell was enraged by reports of Disraeli’s comments. Unwilling to let the slur on his reputation pass uncontested, he used a speech in Dublin to deliver a counterblast. O’Connell denied having had any real knowledge of Disraeli when he endorsed him in 1831, though he had since become aware of his changeable politics and accused him of giving up the Radical cause only because he could not get elected as one. He continued,

He is just fit now, after being twice discarded by the people, to become a Conservative. He possesses all the necessary requisites of perfidy, selfishness, depravity, want of principle etc, which would qualify him for the change. His name shews [sic] that he is of Jewish origin. I do not use it as a term of reproach; there are many most respectable Jews. But there are, as in every other people, some of the lowest and most disgusting grade of moral turpitude; and of those I look upon Mr Disraeli as the worst. He has just the qualities of the impenitent thief on the Cross, and I verily believe, if Mr Disraeli’s family herald were to be examined and his genealogy traced, the same personage would be discovered to be the heir at law of the exalted individual to whom I allude. I forgive Mr Disraeli now, and as the lineal descendent of the blasphemous robber, who ended his career beside the Founder of the Christian Faith, I leave the gentleman to the enjoyment of his infamous distinction and family honours.

O’Connell’s rejoinder was the first time Disraeli’s Jewish origins were used against him in national politics, and while the Irishman may have skewered his victim for his tergiversation many commentators agreed that he had overstepped the bounds of decency.141

Disraeli responded like a character in one of his novels: he demanded satisfaction in a duel. But since O’Connell had already killed a man under such circumstances and foresworn a repetition, Disraeli issued the challenge to his son, Morgan. The son understandably declined to be held accountable for the father and left Disraeli fulminating, pledging to get his revenge one way or another.¹⁴²

Strangely, Disraeli barely tackled the reference to his Jewish birth. He merely remarked, “I admire your scurrilous allusions to my origins” and went on to impugn O’Connell’s religious allegiances. The Roman Catholic Church, he thundered, “clamours for toleration, and it labours for supremacy.” The feebleness of this riposte shows that Disraeli had not yet developed the defence of Jews and Judaism that was to bulk so large in his writing and speeches from the mid-1840s. Indeed, it suggests that Disraeli did not take the slur that seriously at all. He was more excited about the prospect of a duel and, then, disconcerted to find himself arrested and bound over for breaching the peace. The affair rumbled on, with the Radical and Whig press adding insult to injury. The Morning Chronicle accused Disraeli of political apostasy and ingratitude. It condemned his “UnChristian conduct” and implied an affinity with Shylock, who also wanted blood by way of revenge. This particular attack provoked Disraeli to reprint O’Connell’s original vituperation plus his rebuttal in the form of an open letter to the voters of Taunton.143

For the next two years the press was to be the arena in which Disraeli fought his way forward. By now he was firmly ensconced in the Tory camp and working as an aide to Lord Lyndhurst. His mentor was no longer lord chancellor but remained a pivotal figure in the Tory hierarchy. Lyndhurst recognised Disraeli’s literary skills and encouraged him to write a series of leading articles for the Tory Morning Post attacking the Whigs and, not incidentally, bruiting the talents of the ex–lord chancellor. The savagery of the assaults on Melbourne, Lord Palmerston, and O’Connell was matched only by the obsequiousness of the remarks about Lyndhurst.¹⁴⁴

The articles have a more permanent significance with regard to the evolution of Disraeli’s political theory, his historical perspective, and his rhetorical armoury. Disraeli disputed the Whig–Radical claim to represent the people. He asserted that the Tories had a better title to this role because they stood for the interests of the crown, the Church, the peerage, the universities, the judiciary, and every other national institution. These time-honoured structures were being whittled away by the followers of the philosopher and political thinker Jeremy Bentham, who argued that everything had to be subjected to a rational utilitarian (cost-benefit) analysis. The “Brutalitarians” were the true enemy of the people.¹⁴⁵

Behind the contemporary rough and tumble lay Disraeli’s conception of English political history, now crystallising into dogma. In reality, he said, representative government was not government by the people but another form of oligarchy. The newly enfranchised voters in urban constituencies were a self-perpetuating clique dominated by well-organised and highly motivated Protestant Nonconformists. The House of Commons actually represented only three hundred thousand electors who “form a class in the State, privileged, irresponsible, hereditary, like the Peers.” Indeed, while it was possible to observe the peers, of whom there were only three hundred, it was impossible to keep an eye on the sectarian electorate.146

Disraeli strove to rehabilitate the Tories, who had been tarred with the brush of reaction as a consequence of their opposition to the Reform Act. Yet his assertion that the Tories were the true voice of the nation barely concealed an antidemocratic thrum in all he wrote. He resisted any change to the power and influence of the peerage precisely because they were not amenable to public feeling and could withstand popular passions: “Destroy the existing Constitution of England and establish the principle that no class shall exercise irresponsible power, and universal suffrage follows, of course. Whether a social system under any circumstances could flourish on such a basis is more than doubtful—that it could be established in this ancient realm is morally and physically impossible.”¹⁴⁷

Disraeli’s association with Lyndhurst tightened in other ways. While Clara Bolton had an affair with Sir Francis Sykes, Lord Lyndhurst took a shine to Henrietta. Disraeli did not stand in the way of his chief’s amorous intentions. In addition to being his political dependant, he was also financially indebted to him. Fortunately, Sir Francis took himself off to Venice for two years, allowing Disraeli free run of his wife and his London home.¹⁴⁸

During the autumn of 1835 Disraeli settled down to write a substantial work that would bring together his scattered reflections on history and politics. Vindication of the English Constitution was written in the form of a letter to Lyndhurst. It opened with a witty critique of Utilitarianism, broadening into a warning against the application of abstract theories to society and government. He maintained that the pattern of rights and obligations in English society had undergone steady evolution from the Magna Carta through the Petition of Rights to the Bill of Rights. Working boldly against the tenor of the times, he defended prescription, precedence, and antiquity against the tests of utility, popularity, and modernity.149

Disraeli explained that England had enjoyed its greatest freedom under the Plantagenet monarchs. It did not seem to bother him that this freedom did not benefit Jews, who suffered exploitation and massacre under Plantagenet rule. The Tudors began to restrict the liberties of freeborn Englishmen, while the Reformation, particularly the dissolution of the monasteries, created the conditions for a political class identified with religious sectarianism to colonise parliament. This class produced the republicanism of the 1640s and aspired to the “despotic” rule of parliament. Charles I came to grief because he pushed back against their advance. The people, though, learned their lesson under Cromwell and welcomed the return of balanced monarchical and aristocratic rule in 1660. Unfortunately, James II squandered this goodwill. The aristocracy threw him out and brought in William of Orange. As William III he proved to be rather less pliable than the Whig nobility had hoped, but they got a second chance to realise their oligarchical ambitions after the death of Queen Anne. By inviting George, the elector of Hanover and grandson of James I, to become king of England they actually staged a “coup.” Thanks to the fact that George I was a foreigner it was easy for the Whigs to box him in and establish rule by cabal, disguised as Cabinet government. This was the origin of what Disraeli ever after referred to derisively as “the Venetian Republic,” a system of oligarchic rule in which the monarch was reduced to an appointed doge.¹⁵⁰

The reactionary tone of the piece is striking. Disraeli defended the House of Lords as representative because it contained bishops, some of whom were from humble origins. The nobles owned vast tracts of land that, he alleged, made them representative of the peasantry. His wilful disregard of the inexorable tension between the owners of property and those who lacked land or capital can be understood only as a rhetorical device. He may have genuinely envisaged parliament as a body representing corporate, as against individual, interests; but his defence of the ancien regime in France, the status quo in England, and the hereditary principle in general was remarkably anachronistic. When he lauded the Tory Party as “the really democratic party of England” which championed “equality of civil right,” it can best be said that he was engaged in the struggle to redefine political discourse rather than a description of reality.151

Disraeli urged Tory politicians not to allow the Whigs to mystify the public any longer. Yet he excelled in mystification himself. What he offered was one set of phrases for another. “The basis of English society,” he opined, “is Equality [and] the principle of English equality is that everyone should be privileged.” This verbiage ignored the vast differentials of wealth, power, and access to the courts, not to mention lawmaking. When he wrote of the worker that “there is no master whom he is obliged to serve” he ignored his own strictures on Whig factory owners who virtually enslaved their labour force. When he stated of the peasant that “the soil on which he labours must supply him” he was substituting words for actuality.¹⁵²

Thanks to its scintillating style and sheer rhetorical power Vindication of the English Constitution achieved everything that Lyndhurst and Disraeli hoped it would. It gave the Tories a raison d’etre that was not merely negative and a positive claim on power. Disraeli sent a copy to Peel hardly expecting a response, only to get a warm letter from the former prime minister explaining that he had already obtained a copy and found it most valuable. Over subsequent years Disraeli would not know whether to feel flattered or irritated when he detected chunks of the Vindication in Peel’s speeches.¹⁵³

Disraeli was now a hired pen for the Tory Party. Between January and May 1836 he wrote a series of pieces for The Times over the pen name Runnymede that became the talk of Westminster. His scabrous attacks on Whig politicos and his toe-curling approbation of Tory chiefs earned him entry to the Carlton Club. The Marquis of Chandos, no less, was one of his proposers. With good reason he confided to his diary that the Runnymede epistles “Estab. My character as a great political writer.”154

As he moved closer to the inner circle of Conservative politics Disraeli started to change his demeanour, tidy up his personal life, and improve his image. In March 1836 he became a justice of the peace for Buckinghamshire, a stepping-stone on the way to becoming a country gentleman. In the latter part of the year he disengaged from Henrietta, writing the most sublime farewell note in the form of a novel, Henrietta Temple: A Love Story. Disraeli being Disraeli, the novel was not simply an adieu to a woman he adored: it was also designed as a money-spinner.¹⁵⁵

By late 1835 his debts stood at around £20,000 and servicing them was by itself a crippling burden. The income from Henrietta Temple allowed Disraeli to settle his most urgent obligations to Austen but left a horde of other creditors, some of whom Disraeli had never met or even knew about. They had purchased his debts from other moneylenders, sometimes at a discount, and now wanted to make good on their investment. In desperation, Disraeli placed his affairs in the hands of William Pyne, a solicitor who tried to monitor Disraeli’s finances and arrange payment when his client was cornered. Pyne gamely kept an eye out for bailiffs who were tracking his perpetually improvident client.¹⁵⁶

Disraeli’s greatest fear was that the sheriff of Buckinghamshire would serve a writ on him, upsetting his family, sullying his reputation, and compromising him in the eyes of potential voters. Once, when he was scheduled to address the annual dinner of the Buckinghamshire Conservatives in the presence of the Duke of Wellington, he asked Pyne anxiously, “I trust there is no danger of my being nabbed by Mash [a moneylender], as this would be a fatal contretemps, inasmuch as in all probability I am addressing my future constituents.”157

The other thing he feared was the contagion spread by his debts. Various friends, such as the dandy Count D’Orsay and Henrietta Sykes, had guaranteed loans made to him. If the moneylenders could not serve a writ on Disraeli, they could drag his friends into court. At the end of the year he wrote pityingly to Bulwer that he was overwhelmed with “domestic vexations” and feeling wretched. Bulwer offered him a hideout in Albany, an exclusive block of bachelor apartments off Piccadilly where he could work on the novel, the best hope he had of raising money.¹⁵⁸

The weight of his debts was reflected in both the composition of Henrietta Temple and its content. The hero is Ferdinand Armine, the scion of an old Catholic family fallen on hard times. Armine, which was, not coincidentally, Henrietta Sykes’s pet name for Disraeli, runs up large debts in the mistaken expectation of a sizeable inheritance. Tapping his own sour experience, Disraeli wrote, “Debt is the prolific mother of folly and crime; it taints the course of life in all its dreams. Hence so many unhappy marriages, so many prostituted pens, and venal politicians!” And yet, he asks mischievously, how else are young men to enjoy life while they have vigour and ambition? Ferdinand tries to rescue his family name by marrying an heiress, but like Vivian Grey, the young duke, Contarini Fleming, and Lord Bohun, he yearns for something greater. At this vulnerable moment he falls rapturously in love with Henrietta Temple. Now he feels trapped between a potentially loveless marriage and financial ruin. In the end, Armine’s friends bail him out and love triumphs. However, the happy resolution is not reached before the impecunious hero has been subjected to the humiliation of seeking money from a Jewish usurer.¹⁵⁹

The encounter between Ferdinand and the moneylender Levison is one of the most realistic and disturbing scenes in Disraeli’s fiction. The usurer is clearly identified as a Jew by his name. He is described as being stout and bald, attired in gaudy clothing with gold rings on his fingers. His diction reinforces the message that he is foreign, vulgar, and Jewish: “Times is very bad,” he tells Armine when they first meet. During a bout of animated haggling, he adds, “Me and my pardner don’t do no annuities now.” Disraeli gives Levison every stereotypical characteristic of the Victorian stage Jew, including a lisp. Later on, Ferdinand is held in a “spunging house,” a sort of privately run debtors’ prison. Disraeli leaves his readers in no doubt about who owns it: the room in which he is detained contains little else apart from his host’s portrait, “the Hebrew Bible and the Racing Calendar.”160

Henrietta Temple is a delightful romance and one of the most coherent stories Disraeli ever wrote. The only discordant note is provided by the characterisation of Levison, which draws on a range of anti-Jewish tropes. The fact that these stereotypes were employed by a man who was supposed to identify with Jews and to champion their cause brings into question both propositions. William Kuhn, one of the few Disraeli biographers to address this passage seriously, comments that “debt led him into a kind of treachery against fellow Jews, with whom his identification in this period was only passing and fitful.” The absence of any evidence that Disraeli was himself in debt to Jewish moneylenders renders his use of Jewish stereotyping purely gratuitous and all the more shocking.¹⁶¹

Eventually, he could no longer avoid appealing to his father for financial help. In March 1837 he confessed his prodigality to Isaac and said he needed £2,000. Given that this would be roughly equivalent to £120,000 today, Isaac was understandably upset. “He looked blue,” Disraeli told Pyne, “but said it must be settled.” Actually, he told Isaac only part of the truth and concealed how much he really owed.162

Even though he managed to pay down some of his debts there was such a queue of creditors, headed by Austen, that writs arrived one after another. Injunctions were issued against D’Orsay and Disraeli’s brother Ralph, both of whom had guaranteed loans to him. With nowhere left to turn, he was compelled to ask his father for more cash. When they met over dinner Isaac was “very gouty and grumpy” but stumped up the money. Remarkably, as soon as the worst threats were lifted, Disraeli asked Pyne about the possibility of purchasing an estate.¹⁶³

To generate income Disraeli dashed off another novel, Venetia, published in May 1837. It was based loosely on the lives of Shelley and Byron and, insofar as it had a theme, set out to explore the poetic temperament. Venetia can also be read as a peculiar act of defiance: a celebration of two revolutionary figures by a man who had now cozied up to the party they hated for its reactionary tendencies. Unfortunately, the novel has a chaotic structure, evidence of the haste with which it was thrown together. It was as inconsistent as it was meretricious.¹⁶⁴

Disraeli spent much of the year either campaigning for Tories who were seeking election or canvassing on his own behalf. A number of Tory associations asked him to be their candidate, but he had his eye on Maidstone. This was possibly a consequence of his friendship with Mary Anne Lewis, whose husband, Wyndham Lewis, was the Tory MP for the constituency. He first met Mary Anne in April 1832 at a party given by Bulwer, after which he reported to Sarah that she was “a pretty little woman, a flirt and a rattle.” Mary Anne was a close friend of Rosina, Bulwer’s wife, who was also a writer. Over the next four years Mary Anne met Disraeli frequently at social events and came to regard him as her “parliamentary protégé.” When he visited Maidstone with Lewis he was greatly cheered by what he found. Lewis could rely on over half of the registered voters and seemed willing to expend a good part of his ample fortune (derived from iron foundries in south Wales) getting himself reelected, with Disraeli as his running mate.165

In June 1837 the death of William IV and the accession of Victoria triggered a general election. It came at an opportune moment for Disraeli, who was again beset by creditors: if elected to parliament he would have immunity from arrest for debt. The contest thus turned into a race between the House of Commons and the spunging house. This time his chances were much enhanced, as he was the official candidate of the Carlton Club and was backed with funds from Lewis. Thanks to both, he was successful at last, polling 616 votes—91 behind Lewis but 204 ahead of the opposition.¹⁶⁶

Exultant and exhausted, he had made it into the House of Commons, the stage on which he hoped to make his mark on history and, rather more immediately, achieve sanctuary from his creditors. He was now a player in national politics. But his elevation came at a price. Disraeli had become more visible and more of an important target. The Maidstone election was the first of several in which his Jewishness (and his indebtedness) would be hurled at him both for the sake of insult and because to some people they rendered him unfit for office. Hecklers at public meetings taunted him with cries of “Old Clothes” and “Shylock.” Some stuck slices of bacon and ham on poles and waved them in his face while he was speaking. According to one observer, Sir John Holloms, “He was not popular with the mob. . . . They offered him bacon, ham etc, and repeatedly suggested that he was a Jew.” The Radical candidate drew attention to his foreign origins by deliberately mispronouncing his name.¹⁶⁷

But how far did he provoke this treatment? Holloms noted, “His appearance was very remarkable.” Disraeli indulged in flashy clothing and extravagant gestures. His rhetoric was florid, although he usually calmed down and delivered powerfully reasoned statements. When heckled from the crowd “he was very ready in replying to them.” So he hardly ducked notoriety or demurred from a fight. He attracted attention to himself, and this inevitably alighted on his atypical origins. To some this made him exotic and appealing; to others, obnoxious and repulsive. Watching him at the time, Lady Salisbury, a member of a Tory dynasty, noted, “He bears the mark of the Jew strongly about him. . . . He is evidently clever, but superlatively vulgar.”168

Nevertheless, such prejudice did not obstruct his progress in politics or society, and there were actually many other reasons to take a dim view of him. In August 1837 he narrowly avoided being named in the divorce proceedings that Sir Francis brought against Henrietta after catching her in flagrante delicto with the artist Daniel Maclise (a friend of Disraeli who produced one of the best early portraits of him). Not only was Disraeli at risk of being named as a correspondent, but Sir Francis also refused to honour a guarantee of £2,000 that Henrietta had made on behalf of her lover. Although Disraeli’s friends kept his name out of court, his involvement in the ménage à quatre remained a well-known scandal within London society.¹⁶⁹

Admittedly, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, adultery, improvidence, indebtedness, and vulgarity were endemic to high society in the capital and rarely raised more than an eyebrow. Even so, Disraeli had won a reputation for disreputable behaviour and was associated with a “raffish” crowd, including Lord Lyndhurst, Lady Blessington, and Count D’Orsay. To staid Tory MPs from the shires these were barely respectable personages. His genealogy may have been a drag on his progress but no more than his impropriety and perhaps less so. In the autumn, prior to the state opening of parliament, he was a guest at various country houses, where he was a great success with the ladies precisely because he was so mannered and unmanly.170

On 15 November 1837 Disraeli took his seat in the House of Commons and placed himself in the second row of benches directly behind Sir Robert Peel. Three weeks after the start of the session he was in the chamber when Sir Moses Montefiore, recently appointed a sheriff of the City of London, presented several petitions on behalf of the city’s inhabitants. One of the petitions asked for Quakers and Moravians to be excused from the requirement under the Test and Corporations Act to take an oath, a practice to which they objected, prior to assuming municipal office. A debate as to the merits of the request expanded into a full-blown argument about Jewish disabilities.¹⁷¹

Montefiore, an observant Jew, watched the debate unfold. However, Disraeli showed little sympathy for his cause and quite literally kept his head down. The next day he wrote to Sarah, “Yesterday was rather amusing in the house. The Sheriffs of London, Sir Bob or Tom [in fact, George Carroll], and Sir Moses and no mistake, appeared at the bar in full state to present, according to the privilege of the city of London, some petitions; after which, they took their place under the gallery and listened to the debate which turned out to be the Jew Question by a sidewind. Nobody looked at me and I was not at all uncomfortable, but voted in the majority (only of 12) with the utmost sangfroid.” His less than valorous conduct is further evidence that at this point in his life Disraeli really did not care terribly much about Jews or his Jewish roots. And why should he have done so?¹⁷²

Disraeli had entered society and broken into politics. When Benjamin had written The Young Duke, Isaac had asked incredulously, “What does Ben know of Dukes?” But Ben now shared the company of peers and politicians, enjoying weekends at their country houses. His Jewish origins had not been a significant barrier and were, therefore, barely worth reflecting on.173

Apart from O’Connell’s broadside and the vulgarity of the hustings, few public attacks on him referred to his Jewish origins. Indeed, it is remarkable how lightly he escaped criticism despite his record of profligacy, insincerity, and opportunism. Then again, many politicians changed their views and their parties; many were spendthrift and went bankrupt; and many were adulterous, lecherous, or promiscuous. But few managed to accomplish many or all of these things at the same time while also being of foreign extraction. That Disraeli became an insider in spite of all this is a tribute to his exceptional abilities and the openness of English politics and society.

His achievement helps to explain his lack of interest in his Jewish heritage. Had it been a real hindrance it would have preoccupied him more—as much as his debts, perhaps. But it did not. This obliges us to reconsider whether his writing on Jews and Judaism really constituted a “compensatory myth.” There was, at this stage, little to compensate for. Moreover, the opinions he did express about Jewish matters are almost entirely negative. Alroy is a story of Jewish failure; Iskander is a tale of Christian triumph. While it is impossible to ignore the declaration in “The Mutilated Diary” about his “ideal ambition,” the meaning of “ideal” is ambiguous whereas “ambition” is not. Disraeli’s early life is a story of ambition, nothing more and nothing less. His Jewishness did not impinge on it either way; not as a spur nor as an obstacle.