One of the defences offered during the recent controversy over antisemitism within the Labour party was an insistence that anti-Jewish racism was always, in fact, a Tory problem. A vivid and illuminating new biography of Benjamin Disraeli – published as part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series and one of the last two works by the much-admired historian David Cesarani, who died aged 58 last year – provides corroborating evidence on almost every page.
Disraeli, who was born a Jew but baptised as a Christian before his 13th birthday, may have risen to the top of what he enduringly called “the greasy pole”, serving as a Tory prime minister and becoming a favourite of Queen Victoria, but he was never allowed to forget his origins, especially by those on his own side. He was castigated and abused as a Jew till the day he died (and afterwards, too). He won election as the member for Maidstone in 1837, but not without facing hecklers who interrupted his public meetings with cries of “Shylock!” Others preferred to stick slices of bacon and ham on poles and wave them in his face while he was speaking.
A decade later Punch magazine would compose a doggerel whose last line read, “Yah! Vy vos you shilent, Mishter Disraeli?” The same magazine would depict the Tory leader with exaggerated Jewish features or, again, as Shylock. (Even then, it seems, Punch was not as funny as it used to be.)
For all Disraeli’s avowals of his Christian faith, his contemporaries could only see him as a Jew. Even the affectionate monarch would record after their first meeting that he was “thoroughly Jewish looking”. When that Liberal titan, William Gladstone, came to renovate his country house at Hawarden, he equipped the new study with false bookends, one of which was entitled “An Israelite Without Guile by Ben Disraeli Esq”.
All this might seem no more than confirmation of the rueful, anti-assimilationist view that no matter how much a Jew tries to adapt and fit in, he will always be seen as alien and other. That view still persists: plenty of Jews felt a twinge of it as they watched the fuss over Ed Miliband’s attempt to eat a bacon sandwich. Why was he so mocked, they asked themselves. Was it solely because he looked awkward, or because, at bottom, his fellow Britons felt they had caught him in the act of pretending to be something he was not?
Still, even for those convinced of the futility of assimilation, Disraeli would seem an extreme case. Not only had he taken the ultimate step by converting to Christianity – though of course that was his father’s decision, rather than his – he became the leading advocate, even the would-be custodian, of the very culture from which, and by which, Jews had so palpably been shut out.
In the middle decades of the 19th century, it was Disraeli who articulated the core Burkean creed of Tory continuity, standing firm against notions of democracy, equality or radical change, arguing that it was the landed aristocracy who, along with the church and the monarchy, were the best protectors of the national interest. He spoke for agrarian England against the new, urban, manufacturing class who, he argued, looked out only for itself and for profit.
This high Tory affiliation made Disraeli an exception. As European Jews emerged from the ghetto, both real and metaphorical, thanks to the enlightenment and emancipation, most of those who entered public life did so as radicals and dissenters. Cesarani provides a long list of such Jewish reformers, from Ferdinand Lasalle to Karl Marx. Yet Disraeli headed in the opposite direction. As Cesarani puts it: “It was odd indeed for Jews to defend and even seek to perpetuate the ancien regime that had excluded and persecuted their kind.”
Yet that is only one of several paradoxes Cesarani lays bare. He hands us, for example, the ammunition that, these days, would be used to assail Disraeli as a self-hating Jew. There is lots of it: Disraeli clearly internalised the anti-Jewish sentiment in which his society was drenched. Through a close reading of his prodigious fictional output – the book’s subtitle is “The Novel Politician” – Cesarani suggests that his subject was either not that interested in Jews or, when he was, saw them through a lens fogged with prejudice. Henrietta Temple features Levison, a vulgar moneylender, in gaudy clothes and with gold rings on his fingers, armed with “every stereotypical characteristic of the Victorian stage Jew, including a lisp”.
And yet Disraeli often spoke boastfully of a Jewish “race” that represented a kind of Hebrew nobility, even a superior caste. Historians have wrestled with this contradiction, some suggesting he sought to make himself the equal, or even the superior, of the aristocrats who disdained him by claiming an aristocratic lineage even purer than theirs. Cesarani is sceptical of this notion that Dizzy’s late-blooming Jewish pride was an exercise in either compensation or emotional consolation, seeing a more likely explanation in a “meretricious” desire to ingratiate himself with those Jews, such as the Rothschild family, who might help his career or his constantly perilous finances. This, suggests Cesarani, also explains Disraeli’s erratic and often muted support for the fiercely contested legislation that finally allowed Jews political rights.
Disraeli’s myth-making about Jews was to have a lasting and toxic legacy. In Coningsby, he introduces a Jewish wise man, Sidonia, who sketches out a philosophy in which a hierarchy of race is the organising principle of human affairs and in which Jews, operating through “subterranean agencies”, are the secret power behind world events. Cesarani writes that “no one had so far conjured up the image of the Jews as a potent global force”. Disraeli was the first to shape what would become the enduringly poisonous myth of a world Jewish conspiracy.
As with Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question”, so Disraeli’s words would live on in the hearts of antisemites. In 1920 the English version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion cited Sidonia. In 1941, as the final solution was under way, Hitler quoted “The British Jew, Lord Disraeli” approvingly. It is a terrible, unexpected legacy, one exposed in a crisp, persuasive book.
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