Cesarani David - Disraeli: the novel politician

DISRAELI

Disraeli

The Novel Politician

DAVID CESARANI

Frontispiece: Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, by or after Daniel Maclise, circa 1833. National Portrait Gallery, London

Copyright 2016 by David Cesarani.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953578
ISBN: 978-0-300-13751-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WOULD LIKE to thank Anita Shapira and Steve Zipperstein, the editors of this series, who commissioned the book and whose comments made it better than it would otherwise have been. I owe a double debt to Todd Endelman. His scholarship paves the way for anyone interested in Disraelis Jewishness and his Anglo-Jewish milieu, but he also read the manuscript and made numerous valuable observations. I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to the staff of the London Library and to all those who keep that remarkable institution in rude health. At a time when university libraries have become information centres, when even the British Library (where Isaac DIsraeli spent much of his time) resembles a glorified internet caf, the London Library stands out as a haven for scholarship and contemplation. At that institution, which was founded during Disraelis lifetime and is associated with many who knew him, I found it possible to locate on its shelves almost everything necessary for my research, while the building, like Hughendon Manor, exudes an aura that helps one connect with the world he knew. I would also like to thank Ileene Smith and Erica Hanson at Yale University Press and Lawrence Kenney for his excellent editorial work on the manuscript.

D OES B ENJAMIN D ISRAELI deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives? It would certainly be possible to construct one narrative of his life that piled up evidence of his attachment to the people from whom he sprang. Although his story was so extraordinaryso like the plot of one of his own novels as to be sui generismany Jewish writers did just this after his death and celebrated him as a representative Jew. Many anti-Semites did the same, though of course for different reasons.

This version stresses the fact that he was born a Jew and raised as one until he was thirteen years old, when he was baptised on the instructions of his father. Although he thereafter identified himself religiously as a member of the Church of England, he never denied his origins and never changed his name, which advertised his ties to both his family and his people. Moreover, he made a perilous trip to Jerusalem in his youth

Initially, Conservative writers like T. E. Kebbel, who had been employed as a journalist by Disraeli, played down his Jewishness and played up his patriotism. Those less kindly inclined, like J. A. Froude, characterised him as an Oriental and an alien. This was held to explain his florid rhetoric, flights of fancy, and reprehensible conduct. The first two volumes of the official biography, by William Monypenny, were published in 1910 and made use of pioneering research by the Anglo-Jewish historian Lucien Wolf that exposed the myth Disraeli constructed around his origins. Monypenny depicted him as a brilliant outsider

But it is also possible to tell the story of Disraelis life discounting every element in the former version. For a long time that is what most British academic historians chose to do. At best they treated his Jewish origins as an obstacle to his political career that had to be overcome and the font of an outsider mentality that gave him a highly original way of seeing things. At worst, the specifically Jewish aspects were deemed irrelevant.

After all, Disraeli did manage to make his way in society and enter politics despite the handicap of his birth. B. R. Jerman, using previously suppressed documents, showed that his scandalous youth and political inconsistency when he was starting out were perhaps more of a hindrance. His early novels undoubtedly made grandiose claims for Judaism, but his inactivity on any practical issue concerning Jews told another story. Robert Blake, his first modern biographer, treated the novels with their fantastic Jewish heroes as wish fulfilment, a way of letting off steam. The myth he constructed about his Jewish lineage, tracing his line back to wealthy and noble Sephardi Jews, was just a device to put him on a par with the English aristocrats with whom he had to deal. To the consternation of Jewish campaigners and their allies, not to mention the irritation of those who sought to preserve the Christian character of the nations legislature, when he raised his voice in favour of Jewish emancipation he spoke as a Christian and asserted that he did so for the sake of Christianity. He declared that Christianity was a

More recently, scholars have revisited his career, his writing, and his politics to tease out the influence of the Jewish milieu from which he emerged and the impact of the hostility he faced because of it. They have revisioned Disraeli as a Jewish figure and located him in the sweep of European Jewish history, depicting him as more typical than unusual. To some extent this reevaluation was preceded by the insights of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin. To Arendt, Disraeli was a classic Jewish parvenu from the transitional era between the ghetto and full equality who used his Jewishness in his relations with the English elite to give him a feeling of superiority over those who despised him. But his boastfulness and use of racial ideas in his image making gave birth to a host of fallacious claims about the wealth, power, and influence of Jews that would fructify modern anti-Semitism. Berlin saw Disraeli as representative of a generation of European Jews who could enter society and succeed only on the terms set by Gentiles, a humiliating situation that could be met by either transforming themselves or transforming society. Disraeli compensated for the contempt in which his people were held by turning them into paragons of virtue, a noble race superior to the Anglo-Saxons. This Jewish myth, combined with his romantic individualism, his belief in