"Benjamin Disraeli was a novelist, a statesman and a professing, practicing Christian, but to understand him one also needs to know that he was born a Jew. It was in the working out of the implications of this bare fact that his literary and political career, as well as his confessional affiliation, are to be understood. Or this, at least, is what Adam Kirsch contends in “Benjamin Disraeli,” his contribution to the “Jewish Encounters” series. “Disraeli’s Jewishness,” Kirsch writes, was “the central fact about him.” It was “both the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine.” Does Kirsch, a contributor to The New Yorker and other publications, make good on his thesis?
For sure, he offers a rounded account of his subject. We learn that the proximate cause of Disraeli’s baptism was a quarrel his father had with his synagogue, that Disraeli himself had an incomplete education, that he was a novelist before he became a politician and was a politician for many years before he became a statesman. Kirsch acknowledges his political skills, his ability to outmaneuver his opponents, both by compromise and by an even greater radicalism, even his unattractive habit of identifying himself with the powerful instead of the powerless. Disraeli’s positions on the principal issues of the day are identified — his early opposition to free trade and his championing of the cause of empire, his criticism of Victorian utilitarianism and materialism, his defense of the established Church of England, his willingness to extend the franchise to defeat his liberal enemies and the eccentric grounds of his support for Jewish emancipation. All this can be obtained elsewhere, but Kirsch sets it out succinctly and authoritatively.
For sure, he offers a rounded account of his subject. We learn that the proximate cause of Disraeli’s baptism was a quarrel his father had with his synagogue, that Disraeli himself had an incomplete education, that he was a novelist before he became a politician and was a politician for many years before he became a statesman. Kirsch acknowledges his political skills, his ability to outmaneuver his opponents, both by compromise and by an even greater radicalism, even his unattractive habit of identifying himself with the powerful instead of the powerless. Disraeli’s positions on the principal issues of the day are identified — his early opposition to free trade and his championing of the cause of empire, his criticism of Victorian utilitarianism and materialism, his defense of the established Church of England, his willingness to extend the franchise to defeat his liberal enemies and the eccentric grounds of his support for Jewish emancipation. All this can be obtained elsewhere, but Kirsch sets it out succinctly and authoritatively.
Disraeli was born in 1804, more than half a century before Jews were permitted to sit in the British Parliament. He died in 1881, just months before the first pogroms in Russia. That is to say, his life spanned the final years of one kind of anti-Semitism and the first years of a much more dangerous kind. The first kind sought to preserve the Jews in their pre-emancipation condition, as far as was possible. It resisted liberal efforts to bring Jews into civil society on equal terms; in politics it maintained Christian suspicions of Judaism. It was not violent so much as exclusionary. When it failed at the legal level, it persisted at the social level — keeping Jews out of clubs, societies, universities and so on. It expressed itself in snobbery and ill-tempered condescension.
The second kind of anti-Semitism was quite different. It was predicated on beliefs in the immense power of the Jews, their malignity, their responsibility for everything that was wrong about the modern world. It was based, as Kirsch writes, “no longer on contempt but on fear and hatred.” It was lethal in its ultimate object. Jews here constituted not a vexation, but a menace.
It was in relation to the first kind of anti-Semitism that Disraeli defined himself. He sought to arrive at a self-definition that made him immune from being regarded as contemptible. He invented a bogus pedigree for himself (out of Spain, from Venice), and he talked up whenever he could the intellectual and social distinctions of the Jews as a whole. As part of this project, however, he inadvertently contributed to the emergence of the second kind of anti-Semitism.
Disraeli redefined Judaism as a matter of race rather than religion, and in his novels “Coningsby” (1844), “Sybil” (1845) and “Tancred” (1847), he celebrated occult Jewish power, always exercised behind the scenes, and always determinative. The mysterious Sidonia (who figures in all three novels), Kirsch correctly observes, “looks like nothing so much as an anti-Semitic hate figure.” In “Coningsby,” Disraeli has Sidonia confide, “You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate.” “Russian diplomacy,” he says, is “organized and principally carried on by Jews”; the “mighty revolution” that will come in Germany is “entirely developing under the auspices of Jews.” “The myth of Jewish superiority,” Kirsch writes, “which Disraeli had advanced to counter the fact of social inferiority, now interacted with the paranoid superstitions of anti-Semites to disastrous effect.”
Disraeli was himself the object of anti-Semitic attack in the late 1870s because he insisted that the British national interest lay in supporting the Ottoman Empire against its Christian minority communities. For this piece of “realist” international politics, he was abused as “a very Hebrew of Hebrews,” the “Jew Earl, Philo-Turkish Jew and Jew Premier,” and the “traitorous Jew,” the “haughty Jew” and the “abominable Jew.” He was a leader of the “Turkophile party,” its “most rabid element.” He was the premier of a “Jew government.” He was a wizard, a conjurer, a magician, an alchemist. He was a “man of the East,” an “Asiatic.” “For the past six years we have had an Asiatic ruler.” He was a “wandering Jew,” “sprung from a race of migratory Jews.” He was raised “amid a people for whose ideas and habits he has no sympathy and little respect.” He was a “sham Christian and a sham Englishman.” He was the “charioteer” of a “Juggernaut car,” dragging “the whole of Christendom” over the rights of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
Most cartoons gave him an immense nose and curly black hair; he was represented as “our modern Shylock.” Many of the illustrations related him to the Devil (“the most authentic incarnation of the Evil One”). At least two portrayed him in the act of ritually murdering the infant Britannia, and in one of these his great adversary, the liberal politician Gladstone, is the distressed mother, arriving perhaps too late to save her child. And there was a note sounded for the first time, but to be repeated many times thereafter: the Jews want war, against the national interest.
The anti-Semites of his day insisted that Disraeli was bogus in every respect but his identification with Jews and Judaism. A superficial reading of Kirsch’s book might conclude that its author agrees with this judgment. But that would be mistaken. First, because Kirsch shows that on the specifically political issues, Disraeli was promoting British interests, rather than anything that could be identified as a “Jewish” interest. And second, because Kirsch also demonstrates that Disraeli’s engagement with Jews and Judaism was an almost entirely literary affair. It was in his fiction, not in his political judgments, that he endeavored to counter “the myth of Jewish vulgarity and greed with an empowering myth of Jewish talent and influence.” “Disraeli’s imagination of Jewishness did what he needed it to,” Kirsch concludes. “It gave him the confidence to compete with the best-born men in England.”
Kirsch argues that the alternative career of Jewish leader was ever before Disraeli but that he did not want it. Though what Kirsch describes as “the dream” of Zionism had a “powerful allure” for Disraeli, “neither the conditions of Jewish life in Europe nor his own personality allowed Disraeli to play the role that would eventually fall to Theodor Herzl.” He imagined Judaism in ways that were psychologically empowering, but paid little attention to the condition of actually existing Jewry.
Disraeli was not a man who was easily discouraged. His strong desire to impress others led him in the unusual direction of provocativeness rather than ingratiation. He did not want to escape his English milieu, he wanted to triumph within it. He did indeed triumph, achieving everything in his life that he set out to achieve. It was an extraordinary career, one to which Kirsch, in this elegantly written book, does considerable justice."
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
By Adam Kirsch
Illustrated. 258 pp. Nextbook/Schocken. $21
