In 1830, a 25-year-old writer traveled to Jerusalem. The writer was Benjamin Disraeli, and in 1833 he published a novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, that was an early meditation on his own Jewishness and the state of European Jewry. According to lead critic Adam Kirsch, author of a book on Disraeli, this novel is a proto-Zionist text, as much a political writing as it is an exploration of Disraeli’s thoughts on the still far-from-nascent notion of a Jewish state. All this from one trip to Jerusalem!

“But for Disraeli, a journey to Jerusalem had more than literary significance. Although he had been baptized at the age of twelve into the Church of England, Disraeli’s very name made clear that he was a Jew, and the experience of visiting the Jewish homeland was to transform the way he thought about himself, his ancestors, and politics in general,” Kirsch explained. “Almost fifty years later, when he was Prime Minister of England, it would be his destiny to redraw the maps of the countries he visited as a young man.”

Read The Road Not Taken, by Adam Kirsch

Miliband, who told the Times, “I’ve always felt my home is in Britain, but I love being in America,” is a Boston Red Sox fan whose favorite U.S. president is Theodore Roosevelt. He comes from a family of Polish Jews (his maternal grandfather died at Auschwitz) who sought refuge in the U.K., which, oddly enough, according to the article, “has engendered a strong sense of gratitude and rootedness in Britain.” His admiration for the U.S. is being seen as part of a larger, post-hacking shift:

“It is rare for a British politician, particularly one with roots in the traditional, leftist wing of the Labour Party like Mr. Miliband, to speak with such unguarded enthusiasm of the United States, particularly in ways that make for unflattering comparisons with Britain. But it is the House of Commons’ summer recess, the end of the first parliamentary term since Mr. Miliband was elected leader of the Labour Party last fall, and his admiration for American civics is more than a graceful nod to American visitors. At least for now, it is a measure of a new spirit engendered by the turmoil over what seems to have been a wave of criminality in British tabloid newsrooms, the biggest scandal of its kind to hit Britain in 50 years.”

Ben Jacobs introduced Miliband to the Scroll last month, explaining, “He essentially comes from the British equivalent of the Upper West Side (and not just because he’s from a secular Jewish left-wing background). He has degrees from Oxford and the London School of Economics and spent a decade working as a speechwriter and policy adviser for Gordon Brown before being elected to Parliament in 2005. He had been considered one of the party’s rising stars and joined the cabinet in 2007, once Brown had become prime minister.”

But those looking forward to the first Jewish prime minister since (debatably) Benjamin Disreali might want to be patient—Jacobs said there’s little chance for Miliband to become Prime Minister until the next election for the House of Commons.

“There’s no plausible scenario in the short-term. It is very hard in modern British politics to bring down a sitting government in the middle of a Parliament. However, sometime between now and June 2015, there will have to be an election for the House of Commons, and it seems more likely than not as of this moment that Labour would win that election and Ed Miliband would become prime minister.”

A British Admirer of America Finds His Voice [NYT]
Earlier: The Man Who Would Be Prime Minister
Younger Miliband Defeats Elder to Lead Labour

This week’s winner is “Roy,” who, musing on books critic Adam Kirsch’s review-cum-profile of French ballet impresario René Blum and the fact that Blum was the younger brother of the great wartime prime minister Léon, observed, “I find it extraordinary that in the milieu of early twentieth-century century French politics leaders could spring from families of intellectuals. Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré’s cousin was the legendary mathematician Henri Poincaré. Somehow I can’t imagine that happening in the U.S. these days.” (I have pedantically added the accents aigus.)

Roy receives a copy of Nextbook Press’s Benjamin Disraeli, in whose subject the political leader and the intellectual were joined. Plus, its author is Adam Kirsch.

Ballet Master [Tablet Magazine]
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]

Joanna Neborsky

We scoured Tablet Magazine’s and Nextbook.org’s archives to find books (and their writers) long forgotten. Each week we will feature one lost book and the story behind it. So blow the dust off the cover, and begin!

Hurst and Hurston: Seventy years after their road trip, the best-selling sentimental novelist has run out of gas, while Zora is still in the driver’s seat. By Kate Bolick

No Exit: Raised in the last golden days of the Hapsburgs, the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig found his world shattered by war. By Jennifer Weisberg

Restoration Project: Where have all Bernard Malamud’s readers gone? By Rachel Donadio

Back from the Shadows: Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art. By Boris Fishman

Third Look: On rereading Leonard Michaels’s I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. By Shalom Auslander

The Odd-Bod: In literary London, Elias Canetti was everybody’s favorite refugee. By Jonathan Wilson

School Ties: Jacques de Lacretelle won praise when he wrote in Dreyfus’ shadow, but today his portrait of a prep-school peer looks grotesque. By Paul LaFarge

Glamour and Peril: Tempestuous, cold, and intensely private, Elsa Morante considered herself a genius. Are others finally starting to agree? By Andrea Crawford

Melting Point: British playwright Israel Zangwill coined America’s most enduring metaphor as his reputation dissolved in controversy. By Chloe Veltman

Give ‘Em Hecht: A young Chicago newspaperman thought he was perfect for the part of his hero. By Neal Pollack

The Spy Who Loved Me: An Israeli thriller that captivated Graham Greene. By Paul LaFarge

King of the Forest: The Viennese pornographer turned critic who dreamed up Bambi. By David Rakoff

Funny Guys Finish Last: Philip Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman were rising stars in the 1960s. Roth became part of the canon. Friedman became “that guy who wrote Splash.” By Meg Wolitzer

Westward Expansion: Prostitutes, Christian Scientists, cross-dressing teachers. By Margy Rochlin

A Fine Mess: How a filmmaker turned his movie flop into a groundbreaking book. By Lawrence Levi

Asch’s Passion: A popular Yiddish novelist strove for immortality by taking on Jesus, but it cost him his core audience and made him a marked man. By Ellen Umansky

So Big: Human awkwardness was at the heart of Edna Ferber’s popular novels, but she shied away from writing about the outsiders she knew best. By Mollie Wilson

Fall From Grace: In 1843, British novelist Grace Aguilar was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. So how come we’ve never heard of her? By Justin Taylor

A Woman Out of Time: In 1938, at the height of U.S. isolationism, Americans devoured Phyllis Bottome’s chronicle of a German-Jewish family’s struggle to survive under the Nazi regime. By Andrea Crawford

Regatta Land: Amid Harvard’s ivy-covered bricks, the hero of Myron Kaufmann’s Remember Me to God struggles to become part of the in crowd. By Josh Lambert

Great Pretenders: In Romain Gary’s family, invention was the necessity of mother and son. By Emma Garman

Wartime Truths: In 1945, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel of the Warsaw ghetto enraged Poles and Jews alike. How will it read to audiences today? By Andrea Crawford

Dizzy with Life: Clarice Lispector’s gorgeous, vibrant writings made one writer’s head—and heart—spin. By Anderson Tepper

Storm Warning: The surprising alliance at the heart of John Oliver Killens. By Josh Lambert

In Bloom: Pearl Buck breathes life into a disappearing Chinese community. By Jennifer Cody Epstein

Toward the Abyss: The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist. By Elizabeth Mitchell

The Student Who Wouldn’t Go Away: How a bumbling immigrant from Kiev became a literary sensation. By Jennifer Weisberg

What Happened to Mary Berg? A young girl’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto was a big success. Then the diary—and its author—disappeared. By Amy Rosenberg

The Good of ‘A Bad Man:’ How Stanley Elkin hit his stride. By Sarah Almond

The Hermit of Oliphant: After the literary pioneer Dvora Baron immigrated to Palestine, she never again ventured out. By Haim Watzman

The Road Not Taken: Decades before Herzl, Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel that grappled with Zionism. By Adam Kirsch

Third Life: For Jakov Lind, reinvention was the heart of fiction. By Sasha Weiss

The Paragraph That Changed My Life: On Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous. By Todd Hask-Lowy

Baruch Obama: How a black president was imagined as a Jewish one, more or less. By Ben Greenman

Comeback Kid: Having failed to assimilate, Ludwig Lewisohn went on to write the great American Jewish novel. By Josh Lambert

Beginning of the End: Decadence and anti-Semitism in Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna. By Wesley Yang

Touchy Subject: Frederick Busch feared his novel Invisible Mending would upset readers. He didn’t anticipate his own discomfort. By Andrea Crawford

Child’s Play: Seventy years ago, a contentious novel scrutinized Judaism through the eyes of a young boy. By Sasha Weiss

Where the Heart Is: A 1951 novel parses the meaning of home. By Elizabeth Gumport

Swallowed Whole: Réjean Ducharme’s mysterious 1966 novel. By Benjamin Nugent

Big Bang: With Lionel Trilling and Robert Giroux cheerleading, Sam Astrachan had a stellar future. Then the glimmer faded. By Josh Lambert

A Wanderer in the Desert: How a tubercular shoemaker became a great Yiddish poet. By Jacqueline Osherow

Of a Feather: Communing with Bernard Malamud’s Jewbird. By Joe Hill

This week’s winner is Madeline McGuckin, who commented (on Facebook—yep, that counts too!), apropos Allison Hoffman’s profile of the man behind the group Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, “WTH? Jews for Palin? That’s like Felons For Judge.” (Bonus points for passing up the chance at even an abbreviated curse word.)

She gets a copy of Adam Kirsch’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli, who in the 19th century somehow made being an archconservative a Semitic matter, joining a club that didn’t want him as a member, refashioning it, and arguably becoming the true godfather of Jewish conservatives (even though he joined the Christians, another club that didn’t want him as a member and that continued to see him—as he saw himself—as a Jew).

Jew for Sarah [Tablet Magazine]
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]

This week’s winner is “L Weber.” I wrote a little diatribe in this week’s “Huppah Dreams”: “Kids,” I argued, “if it’s important to you to have your friend marry you and the religion is irrelevant, just get them licensed by the state, or just have a non-religious wedding. No reason to endorse this Universal Life stuff!” “L Weber” responded: “Love, and agree wholeheartedly, with the ‘Kids’ note! Thank you! An Anglican priest … .”

I love the ecumenicism! “L Weber” gets a copy of Adam Kirsch’s biography of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was born a Jew but baptised into the Anglican Church as a boy, and who later told Queen Victoria, “Your Majesty, you know that in most editions of the Holy Bible there is the Old Testament and then there is the New Testament, and in between the two there is an empty, blank page. I am that blank page.” There can be plenitude in such blankness.

Related: Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
Old School [Tablet Magazine]

This week’s winner, “J Carpenter,” wrote of former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, now “running” to be mayor of Chicago, “I ran against Rahm in a 5K race last October in Chicago and beat him by over a minute . . . . :?).”

“J Carpenter” gets a copy of Adam Kirsch’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli, another brash Jewish put-down artist, who, when told by his great rival Gladstone that he would “die either by hanging or of some vile disease,” responded: “That all depends, sir, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.” Oh, snap.

You described your 2007 novel Kalooki Nights as “the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody anywhere” and we agree—

It certainly uses the word “Jew” more than any other novel.

So what do you mean by that?

I suppose I meant that its preoccupations are unrelievedly Jew talking to Jew thinking about Jew. This was deliberate. That’s what I wanted to write. Jew, Jew, Jew, joke, joke, joke, the world as seen entirely through the eyes of Jews for Jews. There are some Jews who live like that. To a degree, there’s a possibility in every Jew I ever met, for them to live like that. That you ask the question “Why?” and then back you go to the Holocaust and back to the pogroms before that, and everyone wants to know what it is that’s made this particular kind of Jewish morbidity into a positive feature now of the Jewish imagination. So, the book was really about that. Jews thinking about Jews talking about Jews to Jews written by somebody who is a Jew, who is obsessed by the subject, has some crazy obsession, who wants to get to the bottom of this obsession and wonders where this obsession comes from. And will deploy every kind of act of the mind to think about it, including, primarily, what Jews do best, which is make jokes. No one makes jokes like Jews.

So, it’s not only the most Jewish book ever written, it’s got more Jewish jokes in it, good or bad, than any book ever written. Certainly more about Jews and more jokes in it than the Old Testament.

That leads us directly to Shylock. What do you make of him?

I don’t have as many problems as others do. Shakespeare does no wrong for me. I think he’s thinking about what it’s like to bear that stereotype. To have to wear that stereotype as a badge and how hellish that is. That doesn’t stop him thinking that in the end Shylock is Shylock and doing Jewish things. Shakespeare is about as humane about it as you could expect for that time and given his knowledge.

You are most often described as an English Jewish novelist, but you might feel you have more in common with post-colonial literature, Indian writers, Irish, or others. Or do you see yourself and other Jewish writers in Britain doing something more like a regionalism, something more like Scotsmen, or cockneys, or people from Wales?

Funny, I don’t think of myself like that. I’m an “Eng Lit” man. I gave up my table tennis, and I went to Cambridge, although I played a bit there, and I studied English literature, and I went to Australia and I went back to Cambridge, and I taught here for 20-odd years English literature. I’m an absolutely English Literature Man. English literature is what I read. When my first novel came out and people said he’s like Philip Roth, I hadn’t read any Philip Roth then. I was what was called a Leavisite, and if you know Leavis, I was taught by F.R. Leavis, and those of us who were taught by F.R. Leavis believe that D.H. Lawrence was the last great English novelist and he died in 1930 and that was that. I hadn’t read modern books. And I went on to read Roth and I thought, Christ being compared to him ain’t bad—he’s some writer! He’s fantastic! And then I went on to read him more, and Saul Bellow, and I became more consciously working a bit like them, but not in their tradition. Their Jewish roots are in European novels. They’re sort of Kafka and Dostoyevsky and Babel and the better for it. I—and I’ve made this joke about myself—I’m not the English Philip Roth, I’m the Jewish Jane Austen. As far as I’m concerned I’m an English novelist working absolutely square in the English tradition. I’m regional to the degree that I’m Manchester. I try to write the sentences of a centralized, cosmopolitan English writer who has read all the great English writers. The voices in my head are Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Dickens, George Eliot.

And then onto that, I have laid—and God knows why, it has astonished my parents—this whole Jewish palaver. My parents didn’t get it. “Where’s this from?” my dad said. On his death bed, my dad said, “You’re not going to be a rabbi, are you?” I thought he’d be proud of me. Well, he was proud of me. But I thought, “Look, look at all this Jewishness that you wanted me to go in for. You wanted me to have a Jewish wife, you wanted me to give you Jewish grandchildren, what I’m really giving you now are Jewish books.” And he thought they were great, but he didn’t get it.

I never thought when I was trying to write in my 20s and even in my 30s, that I was going to write about Jews. But I wasn’t getting anywhere not writing about Jews. I couldn’t write a page.

Margaret Drabble wrote an essay for Tablet Magazine and singled you out for your exceptional novels, and then told us that there isn’t much anti-Semitism in England. How are the Jews of England doing these days?

The novel I’ve just published—about which I saw a very interesting review on Tablet the other day—raises this question. Do you know? We don’t know. This is the thing we don’t know. The last time I was in America talking about Kalooki Nights, many people asked me there what’s it like in England. There was a real sense of, “What’s it like on the streets of England for a Jew to go walking without a bodyguard?” That Muslim extremists would attack him; that ordinary English anti-Semites would attack him. It isn’t like that. I don’t need to tell you that. It doesn’t feel like a dangerous country to be Jewish in.

There is a sense that when something like Gaza erupts, the flotilla episode erupted, things get said by the intelligentsia that feed down into the populace, and every now and then you know someone will kick a Jew. At the time of Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza thing, there were probably several dozen, maybe even a few hundred anti-Semitic incidents here, some of them truly violent, people really being physically attacked, sometimes abuse, upsetting things like Jewish kids at school being told by Muslim kids at school, “Your people are killers,” and all of that. How do you measure that? How do you decide what any of that is? There’s always been low-level bits of skinhead brutality: A Jew is somebody you push around. There’s always been a little of that.

What we don’t know and what we’re all trying to figure out and measure, those of us who think this is worth putting our mind to, is how far the rhetoric of anti-Zionism is spilling over into another thing, through the sheer violence and virulence of its own language. Because it might very well be that a person might say, “I’m not anti-Semitic, not at all, my best friends are Jews”—you know the story—“I just think this has to be said.” But it might be that if enough people are saying that, then a kind of linguistic climate is created in which people feel Jews are what they’ve always felt Jews to be: fair game.

Do you find yourself feeling obliged to defend Israel’s right to do all kinds of bad things that other nations do to survive?

Oh, non-stop. I write a column in the Independent, which has some journalists who are known throughout the world for their undisguised, and perfectly well-expressed and declared anti-Zionism and worse, and I have to bite my tongue off each week. Do I now become a person who writes about nothing but Israel? Is there or isn’t there something to complain about? Are we going mad by thinking that there is? Does it make sense to shut up? And sometimes, quite simply, can you afford to go on thinking about this? Can you wake up each morning, and go to the computer, and go to the websites, go to the hate sites and then go to the few sites in which the people are calmer and take a more rational approach to these things. When I was writing The Finkler Question, this is what was happening.

And we’re not just talking about those bloody settlements. I’d go out with my own bare hands and pull them down. I want to throttle [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu for not knowing that you’ve got a golden opportunity here: Stop the bloody settlements. It’s not that kind of thing, which is perfectly fair. It’s the other stuff, that goes from that to “Israel is an apartheid country,” which is rubbish, “Israel is a fascist country,” “Israel is a Nazi country,” to “Zionism has always been colonialist in ambition,” to a whole false re-evaluation of the history of Israel, as though what Israel at its very worst now and then is is what Israel was always bound to be and always had to be. And that’s unforgivable.

I remember very vividly in 1967, the Six-Day War. I remember it vividly because I was at sea. I was coming back from Australia from my first job in Australia and the ships were disrupted and we had to go a long way around. I remember reading the newspapers on the boat—could we have gotten newspapers on the boat? Yes, as we landed—and my sense was that the whole world felt that Israel was about to be beaten and about to be destroyed, and everybody was on its side, poor little Israel. And the moment Israel won, you could almost start to see people’s expressions change. Israel winning became a problem. And Israel winning big became a bigger problem. Israel swaggering around—well, Israel swaggering around is a problem for all of us—Israel not in trouble, not under threat has been a problem for people, and you have to ask, Why is that?

It’s one thing to feel, “Those poor Jews, they’re about to be murdered,” and another thing to feel, “Those bastard Jews have just won.”

How do you see the relationship between Jewishness and Britishness? Is there a connection or affinity, or is it just an accident?

It’s an accident. There isn’t an affinity. Except of course there’s a puritan tradition in English literature, which I quite like, actually. My old teacher F.R. Leavis made bones about his really being in sympathy a sort of Puritan. That’s got its roots in the Old Testament. They read the Old Testament, studied the Old Testament, and a kind of biblical connection between the Jews and the English. But essentially, temperamentally, no. And that’s been my great challenge, really, to try and sell it. Can I sell it to the English? Here’s Jane Austen’s world, I’ll beef it up a bit with some Yiddish expressions, with some Yiddish obscenities, even. But the real way in which this has expressed itself is through comedy.

Continue reading: the prospects for a Jewish prime minister, and ping-pong champion Marty Reisman.

That’s not all! Oona King, the daughter of a black father and a Jewish mother, was defeated last week in her bid to be Labour’s nominee for mayor of London. The victor, Ken Livingstone, a former mayor, is not a big fan of Israel! He will face incumbent Boris Johnson, a Tory, who previously unseated him.

And! Susan Kramer, who is running to be president of the Liberal Democrats, is a Jew (the party’s Nick Clegg serves as the deputy prime minister in the coalition government led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron). A former MP, Kramer lost her London seat earlier this year to Conservative Zac Goldsmith, who, yes.

British politicians: Some of them are Jewish!

New Labour Leader Looks to ‘Middle England’ [NYT]
Ken Livingstone Beats Oona King to Labour Nomination for London Mayor [Guardian]
Related: Labour’s Fraternal Struggle [The Nation]
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
Yes, Minister [Tablet Magazine]

But most intriguing to The Scroll is a reference that comes early in the play. The young protagonist (Robbins) is writing a letter to his hero, the theater legend (Glover), hoping to secure a meeting:

“I read in the paper that you’re going to mount your musical Disraeli this summer in London … I did the show at my high school. I played Ben (in the original keys) and designed the sets … I was also the one who persuaded Mrs. Leach to do it when everyone else wanted to do Bye Bye Birdie.”

We don’t know of any actual musical about Benjamin Disraeli; nor do we know if the Disraeli of the maybe-nonexistent musical or the Disraeli of real life answered to “Ben.” But anyone interested in musicalizing the life of England’s first Jewish prime minister might want to check out the Nextbook Press biography by Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch.

Related: Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
The Old ‘Coming Out’ Story Gets Twisted [Capital]

Basically:

• Under Tony Blair and then current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Labour Party has been in power since 1997.

• Brown, whom it is unlawful to discuss without describing as “dour,” is massively unpopular, and so it was thought that the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, had an easy victory.

• Stunningly, however, the perpetual also-ran Liberal Democrats have leaped into a neck-and-neck race with the Tories (Labour is in third) ever since Clegg gave an exceptional performance in the first televised debate, two weeks ago.

• So now there is talk of a hung Parliament and of the Lib Dems likely to be brought into a coalition government with one or the other of the two major parties.

According to The Jerusalem Post, Israel has been a political football—or what we would call a political soccer ball!—for all of the parties. One Labour MP accused Israel’s “long tentacles” of controlling the Conservative Party, while another Labour MP (this one Jewish) described the opposition as partly controlled by right-wing Jewish millionaires. Meanwhile, Lib Dem flyers in predominantly Bangladeshi neighborhoods of London demand, “Stop Arming Israel!” Meanwhile, Cameron, the Tory leader, has spoken of “occupied East Jerusalem.” (Stephen Pollard, editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, is voting Tory for the first time.)

Both a previous Labour Secretary of State, Jack Straw, and the current one, David Miliband, are Members of the Tribe (as is Miliband’s brother, the Secretary of Energy). Then again, the Tories are the party of Britain’s most famous Jew, Benjamin Disraeli. And did we mention that Disraeli is the subject of a Nextbook Press biography by our books critic, Adam Kirsch?

Unchartered Waters [JPost]

Benjamin Disraeli: Dead Cool [Daily Beast]
Related:
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]
What Disraeli Can Teach the GOP [Tablet]

What made Britain’s first and only Jewish prime minister so prescient? Adam Kirsch, fresh off his absorbing biography of Disraeli, observed that what his subject and Obama have most in common is literary origin. Both men used their writing as a “laboratory” in which to test to the same question that would mark their political careers: “is it possible to genuinely belong to, and even lead, a society that shuns people like you?” Yet while Obama is no doubt the elegant yield of an evolved zeitgeist, it remains to be seen if he can precipitate the next stage in that zeitgeist’s evolution. Disraeli’s great virtue was to understand that the world of the 19th century, of which he was that paradoxical oddity—a romantic conservative, a baptized Jew—was changing under the dual engines of industrial capitalism and colonial expansion, and that the Tories must also change or perish. Rather than remain fixed in some curmudgeonly idyll for a feudal past, responsive only to cooked-up resentments against so-called “elites” (he proudly was one), he fashioned a pragmatic materialism that set about to answer what Thomas Carlyle called the “condition-of-England question.” Acting out of a mixture of principle and expediency, Disraeli pioneered the Third Way, avant la lettre.

Following Edmund Burke, he believed that the customs and institutions that were already in place in England, and had been for centuries, could be harnessed to lessen the plight of the working-class, who might otherwise threaten those customs and institutions with violent revolution. This philosophy used to guide the thinking American Right in its heyday—the 1950s—so much so that up until Richard Nixon, some of the most sweeping civil rights and healthcare initiatives were undertaken by Republican presidents. Whittaker Chambers, once a revered sage on the National Review masthead—not least because he was the most famous ex-Communist in existence—termed his own brand of activist conservatism “Beaconsfieldism,” after the peer title Disraeli was given in 1876, and luxuriated in until his death a few years later.

Of course, to hold the current mealy crop of GOP leaders and tacticians to the standard of Beaconsfieldism is to be laughably disappointed. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Queen Victoria’s favorite politician, who was a student of the blue book and the dark, Satanic mill, calling England a “nation of whiners,” as Senator Phil Gramm did in reacting to the financial market crisis last year. Nor can one envision Disraeli kowtowing to crass demagogues such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, who today burble on overpriced airwaves that any and all attempts to expand the role of government is “socialism.” Disraeli would have looked at his watch or sighed extravagantly in the face of such witless bloviation. He was by no means a socialist, but nor was he afraid of heeding the warnings of his radical opponents in order to undermine their revolutionary goals with gradualist measures. He was one of 5 MPs to vote for leniency for the leaders of 1830′s Chartism, probably because he sympathized with their chief plaint for universal male suffrage, which is why, three decades on, he railroaded the Second Reform Bill of 1867 through parliament despite party pressure not to do so (the Tories were then in opposition).

Indeed, a full hundred and fifty years before John Edwards coined the phrase “Two Americas”—itself borrowed from Michael Harrington’s seminal work The Other America—there was Disraeli’s concept of “Two Nations,” consisting of the rich and poor. In his novel Sybil, which was subtitled “The Two Nations,” Disraeli explained that these two binary constituencies were “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones; or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different foods, are ordered by different manners, and are governed by the same laws.” Everything that informed the sentimental fiction of Dickens and the hard-nosed non-fiction of Orwell is captured in that diagnosis, and it’s a wonder, knowing the man who ventured it, that Engels could write to Marx in 1867, a year that saw industrial workers vote overwhelmingly Conservative, “Once again the English working class has disgraced itself.” Had it?

During his second term as prime minister, beginning in 1874, Disraeli passed a whole tranche of progressive legislation that caused Alexander Macdonald, one of the first Labor MPs, to conclude that “the Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.” These bills included the Artisans Dwellings Act, which mandated slum-clearing and public housing works; the Employers and Workmen Act, which made it legal for trade unions to strike; the Rivers Pollution Act, which regulated the disposal of waste; the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts, which established standards of safety and purity; and the Factory Act, which limited the work hours of women and children. “Tory men and Whig measures” was how one of the characters in Sybil satirized such an approach to governance. (Today, anyone on the right who advocated similar policies would be sneeringly called a “RINO,” Republican in Name Only, by a pundit or blogger determined to keep the GOP out of power for the foreseeable future.) All told, however, this list of accomplishments was more than what Disraeli’s career-long rival Gladstone could ever boast in terms of social welfare reform.

There aren’t many Disraelian figures dotting the landscape at present, although the Canadian David Frum, who has become a preeminent gadfly of movement conservatism, has done his part to uphold a kind of Beaconsfieldism modified for the 21st century. In a Newsweek cover essay he wrote last March, directed primarily against Limbaugh, Frum argued that the Republican Party was about thirty years out of date and almost autistically out of touch with popular demands. Instead of placing free market healthcare reform at the top of the economic agenda, the call of the hour was for more tax cuts. Instead of acknowledging that the rising generation of voters was quite comfortable with gay rights and incorporating new immigrant groups, the response was to drum up populist hysteria about a liberal assault on American “values.” (Disraeli also understood how minorities should be conscripted, not alienated by the right. “[T]he persecution of the Jewish race,” he wrote, “had deprived European society of an important conservative element and added to the destructive party an influential ally.”)

In the face of a seemingly unstoppable Democratic majority, what conservatives need most, according to Frum, is “every resource of mind and heart, every good argument, every creative alternative and every bit of compassionate sympathy for the distress that is pushing Americans in the wrong direction.” What they need, in other words, is a refresher course on the most eminent of Victorians.

Eliot was, as Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in her compact and absorbing new book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, “the rare novelist who was also a genuine intellectual, whose most serious ideas found dramatic expression in her novels.” Yet if her ideas were radical, her fiction glorified the “conservative” virtues—compassion, reverence, self-control. Indeed, Eliot believed that the more freely men thought, the more disciplined their behavior must be. A famous story has Eliot talking about “the words God, Immortality, and Duty,” and saying “with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”

This makes Eliot a natural subject for Himmelfarb, the eminent conservative historian, whose admiration for the English 19th century has led her to call for a return to “Victorian virtues.” In her new book, Himmelfarb focuses on one particular strand of Eliot’s achievement: her surprising intellectual engagement with Jews and Judaism, of which Daniel Deronda was the fruit. When the novel appeared, following Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch, it left readers nonplussed, as she knew it would: “the Jewish element,” Eliot predicted, would “satisfy nobody.” After all, as Himmelfarb says, in the 1870s “the ‘Jewish question’ was of no great public concern, certainly not in England.” And there was virtually no precedent in English literature for a novel devoted to a sympathetic treatment of Jews, Jewish history, and Jewish belief. Only Benjamin Disraeli, who was prime minister when Daniel Deronda appeared, might count as an exception; and compared to Eliot’s, Disraeli’s Jewish novels Alroy and Tancred look like sheer fantasy.

Certainly Eliot did not admire Disraeli’s theories about Jewish racial superiority. Himmelfarb quotes a letter Eliot wrote in 1848, shortly after Disraeli’s Tancred appeared, in which she insists that “the fellowship of race, to which D’Israeli so exultingly refers . . . is . . . evidently an inferior impulse which must ultimately be superseded.” In this, the modern reader, even the Jewish reader, will probably agree with her: Disraeli’s loose talk about Jewish racial purity and the international conspiracy of powerful Jews now looks distinctly ugly. But Eliot went further, writing that “much of [the Jews’] early mythology and almost all their history is revolting . . . . Everything specifically Jewish is of low grade.”

This sort of anti-Semitism was common in the progressive circles Eliot travelled in. As Himmelfarb expertly shows, in a tour-de-force review of mid-19th century German philosophy, the most advanced thinkers of the age—including writers Eliot herself translated, like David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach—agreed in using Judaism as a kind of shorthand for everything they considered reactionary and superstitious in Christianity itself. When Feuerbach argued, in The Essence of Christianity, that Christianity was a man-made myth, he traced that myth back to the ancient Israelites, whose God was “nothing but the personified selfishness of the Israelite people.” Karl Marx, the descendant of a long line of rabbis, went even further, writing in his notorious essay “On the Jewish Question”: “What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly god? Money . . . . The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”

These were the influences that shaped Eliot’s mind. How, Himmelfarb asks, did she leave them so far behind as to achieve the profound philo-Semitism of Daniel Deronda? Himmelfarb finds no sudden conversion, only a series of eye-opening encounters with Jews. Visiting Prague in 1858, Eliot and Lewes went to the synagogue, where “an intelligent Jew was our cicerone and read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the Law.” More significantly, in 1866 Eliot befriended Emanuel Deutsch, a Polish-born Jew who worked in the British Museum. Deutsch became Eliot’s tutor in Judaism. Her notebooks, Himmelfarb shows, began to fill with quotations “from the Bible and Prophets, the Mishnah and Talmud, Maimonides, medieval rabbis and Kabbalistic works, as well as contemporary German scholars.” Thanks to what Himmelfarb calls this “arduous initiation,” by the time she began to write Daniel Deronda, in 1874, she knew more about Judaism than most English Jews, not to mention English Christians.

She had also been converted to the cause of Jewish national rebirth, which was Deutsch’s passion. It was two decades before Theodor Herzl would give a name and an organization to that cause, and the word “Zionism” nowhere appears in Daniel Deronda. Yet in The Jewish State, Herzl would credit Eliot with inspiring his mission. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the restorer of Hebrew as a modern spoken language, moved to Palestine after reading Daniel Deronda in a Russian translation. “By the time the state was established,” Himmelfarb writes, “Israel’s three largest cities, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa, had streets named after George Eliot.”

What earned Eliot such admiration from Jews was her treatment of Daniel, which broke the longstanding tradition of English literary anti-Semitism that stretches from Shylock to Fagin. When the novel begins, Daniel believes that he is English—he has been raised as the ward of a wealthy English gentleman—but he knows that some mystery surrounds his birth. His journey of self-discovery starts when he rescues a beautiful Jewish woman, Mirah Lapidoth, who is trying to drown herself in the Thames. His growing love for Mirah leads Daniel to investigate the customs and history of the Jews, and he forms a friendship with Mirah’s brother Mordecai, who is Eliot’s fictional homage to Emanuel Deutsch.

Mordecai—whose real name, it emerges, is Ezra, like the rebuilder of the Temple—is a passionate believer in Jewish national rebirth: “Revive the organic center: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West . . . . Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel.”

But Mordecai is dying, and he wants Daniel to become his spiritual heir, to carry on the Zionist dream. Daniel resists this burden, until the dramatic, inevitable revelation that he is himself a Jew—the son of a Jewish actress who gave him up for adoption. When he finally confronts his mother, she tells him that she wanted above all to spare him the stigma of being a Jew: “I have rid myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that make people nudge each other at the sight of us, as if we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as theirs. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. It was better for you,” she declares. But Daniel responds by affirming a Jewish patriotism that is new in English literature, as it was new in European Jewish consciousness. “For months events have been preparing me to be glad that I am a Jew . . . . It is no shame to have Jewish parents—the shame is to disown it.” At the end of the novel, he marries Mirah and sets sail for Palestine, to work for Mordecai’s cause.

It is no wonder that Jewish readers were so enthusiastic about Daniel Deronda. Eliot received grateful letters from “learned Jews and impassioned Jewesses” in Germany, Poland, France, and America, who “assured her that she had ‘really touched and set vibrating a deep chord.’” Yet as Himmelfarb shows, gentile critics were much less positive. In particular, they complained about Eliot’s decision to tell two stories in the same book. For in addition to the title character, Daniel Deronda follows at equal length the destiny of Gwendolen Harleth, a spoiled young girl whose marriage to a cruel egotist begins her painful moral education. Gwendolen is a much more familiar type in European fiction than Daniel—she looks back to Emma Bovary and forward to Isabel Archer—and many readers have believed that, without its eccentric Jewish elements, the novel would have been better. The 20th-century English critic F.R. Leavis went so far as to prepare an edited version of the book, shorn of the Deronda half and retitled Gwendolen Harleth.

Yet Eliot insisted that she “meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there,” and Himmelfarb argues convincingly that Gwendolen and Daniel are one another’s necessary complement: Daniel is redeemed by joining a larger cause, while Gwendolen is damned by pursuing her own selfish ends. As Eliot wrote, in a passage Himmelfarb applauds, every individual needs “a continual inspiration to self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease or prosperity.” The Eliot Himmelfarb gives us is more conservative and friendlier to religion than she usually appears—or, perhaps, than she actually was. But even readers more sympathetic than Himmelfarb is to feminism and freethinking will find a great deal to enjoy and ponder in The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/2409/daniel-and-the-lions-den/feed/ 0 http://www.tabletmag.com/bookseries/342/benjamin-disraeli/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=benjamin-disraeli http://www.tabletmag.com/bookseries/342/benjamin-disraeli/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 23:20:07 +0000 Abigail Miller http://www.tabletmag.com/?p=342 http://www.tabletmag.com/bookseries/342/benjamin-disraeli/feed/ 0 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/1447/an-unexpected-leader/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=an-unexpected-leader http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/1447/an-unexpected-leader/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:18:15 +0000 Adam Kirsch http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/an-unexpected-leader/
Illustration based on Obama addresses the crowd by Ben Stanfield; some rights reserved.

This election, I’ve been thinking a lot about an unlikely political superstar. He belongs to a historically oppressed minority group, and faced down intense prejudice from a political establishment who never believed a man like him could rise to the top. He skyrocketed to the leadership of his party, bringing down a much more established party leader on the way, and prompting questions about whether he was ready for the highest office. He is a writer who bared his soul in print in a way no ordinary, cautious politician would dare, then used his writerly imagination to capture the imagination of a country.

He is Benjamin Disraeli.

Of course, he is also Barack Obama. Indeed, the similarity between Obama and Disraeli, whose biography I recently wrote for Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series, is striking. Disraeli was the first Jewish prime minister of England, and Obama, it now appears, is likely to become the first African American president of the United States. Like Disraeli, Obama belongs to an ethnic minority that has traditionally been abused by the majority he seeks to lead. If he does win next week, it will represent a triumph of democratic openness and equality, just as Disraeli’s career did in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. Indeed, as one French statesman joked, the greatest triumph of English liberalism was that a Jew could rise to lead England’s Conservative party.

But the most significant thing Obama and Disraeli have in common, despite all the differences in their characters and politics, is that they were both writers before they became politicians. Disraeli published his first novel when he was just 21, more than a decade before he entered Parliament, and his early fiction was heavily autobiographical—a laboratory in which he could experiment with his persona and ambition. Likewise, Obama published an autobiography, Dreams from My Father, years before he entered politics; and his book, like Disraeli’s, is surprising coming from a politician, both for its high literary skill and its honest wrestling with issues of identity and belonging.

Both men turned first to writing to explore the question that would eventually define their public lives: is it possible to genuinely belong to, and even lead, a society that shuns people like you? In his autobiographical novel Contarini Fleming, Disraeli made his alter ego an Italian living in Scandinavia, rather than a Jew living in England, but the parallel is clear. Contarini complains that he does not look like other boys, and he dreams of returning to Venice, his mother’s homeland, and restoring it to its ancient glory. In his next book, Alroy,

Disraeli would create an explicitly Jewish fantasy, imagining a medieval hero-king, David Alroy, who conquers the Middle East and restores the Jewish state in Palestine. Dreams from My Father is far less romantic and fantastic, but it, too, is a workshop for its author’s identity, as he struggles with the legacy of his idealistic white mother and his absent African father. In his book, Obama writes about traveling to Kenya to confront and reclaim his African heritage, just as Disraeli made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in 1831, to come face to face with the Jewish past.

When Disraeli entered English politics in earnest, he abandoned his youthful dreams of becoming a Jewish national leader. But he never stopped making his Jewishness central to his public and political identity. In the novels he wrote in the 1840s, as he was rising to the top of the Conservative Party, and in his speeches during the debates over whether to allow Jews into Parliament, Disraeli advanced very provocative ideas about Jewish power, Jewish racial identity, and the spiritual debt Christians owed to Judaism. These ideas were actively detrimental to his career—members of his own party thought them bizarre or blasphemous—yet Disraeli never tried to mute them, to become simply a mainstream Tory politician. Knowing that he would always stand out from his surroundings, he decided to stand out vividly and memorably—even his clothes were extravagant.

Still, it’s risky to press the comparison too far. For there is a deep and treacherous gulf between 19th-century British politics and 21st-century American politics. Disraeli’s Conservatives, who like him believed in tradition, social hierarchy, and class deference, have nothing in common with conservative Republicans, whose belief in small government and free markets hews closely to the platform of the nineteenth century’s Liberals. By another irony, liberal Democrats, like Obama, would find much to admire in Disraeli’s program of social welfare legislation. As prime minister, his environmental, labor, and education policies led one British labor leader to say that the Conservatives had done more for the working man in the five years of Disraeli’s government than the Liberals had in the previous fifty. Yet the policy that was perhaps most important of all to Disraeli—maintaining the glory of his country’s empire—finds no resonance at all in American politics, where even the most hawkish politicians discuss war as a dire necessity rather than a glorious adventure.

Even more important, when it comes to comparing Obama and Disraeli, is the very different status of Jews in England and blacks in America. When Disraeli was born, in 1804, there were about 15,000 Jews in the whole of Britain, out of a population of some twelve million. Jews may have loomed large in the English imagination, thanks to Jewish villains imagined by Chaucer, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, and to the role of the Jews, for good and evil, in English Christian thought. But in real life, there were too few Jews to make much impression on English politics or society, and there was certainly no such thing as a Jewish voting bloc for Disraeli to appeal to. (In fact, the few Jewish voters generally supported the Liberals.) There is no comparison to the absolutely central role of African Americans in the history of this country, from before its founding down to the present. Historically, politically, demographically, and culturally, African Americans are at the heart of American life, in a way that Jews never were in England. Above all, the legacy of slavery and racism is infinitely more poisonous in America than anti-Semitism ever was in England.

But there is another, more significant difference between the two men. As he gets closer to the presidency, Obama is becoming less and less like Disraeli—that is, less vivid, less imaginative, less original as a thinker and speaker. To put it in one word, Obama is deliberately making himself less of a writer.

Since his great speech on race and racism in March, delivered in response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Obama has tried earnestly and with surprising success to downplay the significance of his race in the election. He prefers, when possible, to shrug off the whole question, as when he remarks that he doesn’t look like the presidents on our currency, or alludes to his “funny name.” The reason for this, of course, is that Obama recognizes better than anyone just how momentous his election would be as a milestone in American history. The issue of race is so terribly freighted that he does not need to add another ounce to it. In this sense, contrasting Obama’s reticence with Disraeli’s loquacity shows how much more serious American racism is than English anti-Semitism.

The less he dwells on race in his campaign, Obama has apparently calculated, the more likely he is to win. In other words, the less he challenges voters to make the election about racial progress, the more likely he is to strike a terrific blow for racial progress. Disraeli grew up in a Romantic age—Lord Byron was his idol—and what he wanted more than power was to impress himself on the world, to become known on his own terms—which were inevitably Jewish terms. Obama, a more pragmatic man, is willing to efface some of the self we can glimpse in his writing, if that is what it takes to rise to the top of the greasy pole. This calculus seems to be working; but ironically, it may end up making Obama, whose achievement promises to be greater than Disraeli’s, a less memorable historical figure.

At a time when most European Jews lived in abject poverty and weren’t even allowed to vote, Benjamin Disraeli’s career reached stratospheric heights. Intimate with royalty and the elite of British society, he was twice prime minister, and served as leader of the Tory party. Yet, because of his Jewish background, his loyalty was questioned, his motives thought suspect, and his honesty was a frequent topic of debate.

Born into an unobservant, middle-class Jewish family, Disraeli was baptized by his father—who was irate over a perceived snub by his synagogue—at the age of twelve. Ambitious, driven, and charming, Disraeli embellished his Jewish ancestry with great flair, creating a vibrant (albeit false) aristocratic personal history to compensate for his status as a relative outsider in British society. Blending his talents as the author of almost twenty novels with astute political skills, Disraeli was in the public eye for over fifty years, as writer, politician, and statesman. In his new biography of Disraeli (to be published next week as part of Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series), Adam Kirsch elegantly untangles the mythology to reveal a man who in many ways lived his life as a character in one of his own novels, a creation unique to himself.

Is Disraeli’s life story a particularly Jewish one? Is it more particular to the Jewish experience in England than to the experience of Jews in the rest of Europe?

It’s a story that couldn’t have happened anywhere but England, because England did have this very liberal, tolerant attitude toward Jews, compared to other European countries. It was still very difficult for him. He had this remarkable self-confidence and towering ambition, and also a very deep, instinctive sense of how to turn his Jewishness into something appealing to the English, making it an asset rather than a handicap in politics. Compared to the men who were his rivals and colleagues, he was always the lowest born and the one with the least advantages. But he recognized that because there was this margin of opportunity in England, he could make being Jewish something that was not contemptible, but was great and aristocratic.

For all of Disraeli’s success and integration into the highest levels of English society, he was, for the most part, pretty much an outsider.

I was surprised to see how much that remained true during his life and even long after his death. I asked English people as I was writing this book, “How were you taught about Disraeli in school?” And they always said that, to this day, he’s taught as the brilliant but unreliable Jew. Churchill, The Encyclopedia Britannica, very established sources, the very first thing they all say about Disraeli is he wasn’t an Englishman.

What do you mean when you talk about Disraeli as an “exception Jew,” in the words of Hannah Arendt?

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt talks about Jews who made a place for themselves in nineteenth-century European society by virtue of their great talents and gifts, but always knew that they were exceptions. They were able to have success because they were not like the ordinary Frenchman or the ordinary Englishman; they were exotic and interesting. Arendt says Disraeli is the great example of the exception Jew who managed to do everything he wanted.

But there was also a great psychological cost, which you see in all kinds of Jewish stories in Europe leading up to the Holocaust. Between emancipation, beginning in the early nineteenth century, and the Holocaust, there was this open question—could Jews belong in Europe? Could they succeed in Europe? That question, for the Jews as a whole, was answered negatively. But for Disraeli, it was answered positively. So that is the tragic tension in his life: He had to accommodate himself to the expectations of England in order to get what he wanted.

Earlier in his career, he had a more nationalist leaning, and then, when he became a greater political actor, he favored these large multiethnic empires that, if you think of the Austro-Hungarian empire, really worked better for the Jews in the long run. But at the same time, he didn’t really work in any way to further Jewish causes.

Before he really got into politics, in the 1830s, when he was beginning to make his name as a politician, he was able to entertain these Zionist fantasies. In his novel Alroy, he imagines what it would be like to be a Jewish national leader, which at that time was a completely hypothetical prospect, because there were no Jewish national movements to be the leader of! I think that there’s a part of his nature that was very proud of being Jewish and wanted to make that the basis of his career. But he was also very practical and worldly, and he recognized that that was not in fact a possibility for him. He basically decided that he was going to be an English leader, not a Jewish leader. An observer of the time said that England was the Israel of his imagination. And that’s a good way of saying that he transferred the idealism and historical imagination that might have gone toward Judaism and Jews into England and the British empire.

He liked that idea of power, of running the world. He preferred the powers-that-be pretty much always; that was part of what it meant to be a conservative in the nineteenth century. At the time when the Liberal party, especially in England, was associated with national liberation movements, Disraeli was always on the other side. He wanted to be the person who controls the great empire rather than the person who liberates the people.

Which brings to mind the character Sidonia, who appears in not one but three of Disraeli’s novels. He’s an admirable character—full of power, has lots of prestige—but carries with him so many nineteenth-century stereotypes about Jews.

Sidonia was a Jew who exercised power, but always behind the scenes. He was very rich, was the kind of person everybody respected, was attractive to women—he has all of these fantasy elements. To Disraeli, who often found himself being snubbed and excluded, this was an appealing image. Today, in a post-Zionist context, I think we now see that this is the opposite of what Jews want to present to the world. All of these ideas of secret power and operating behind the scenes and being not quite human, we now associate with anti-Semitism. That’s a good example of the tragedy of Disraeli: In order to feel proud of himself as a Jew, he had to erect this image of Judaism that’s actually reprehensible.

Do you have a favorite of his novels?

I find his novels slightly difficult to read. The early ones in particular, the ones that aren’t about politics, you wouldn’t necessarily read them unless you were a student of Disraeli or the period, novels like Vivian Grey or Contarini Fleming.

Which was his favorite, wasn’t it?

Contarini Fleming was his favorite, yes. It’s a very romantic book that fits in perfectly with the literature of the period. It’s about a brilliant young artist and how he realizes that he’s gifted and different from everyone else. And in that sense, it tells in an allegorical form the story of Disraeli’s own growing up. It’s significant in that unlike any other novel that I know of, it’s one in which the poet character decides that actually he would rather be a politician. I do think that although he was a natural-born novelist, he wasn’t really a great novelist. Sybil and Coningsby, I’d say, are probably the best. Tancred, I think, is the biggest surprise, or would be the most interesting for someone today. It starts out being the story of a naïve aristocrat and his education, but then the action moves startlingly to Palestine, and it suddenly becomes this Zionist fantasy of a Jewish society that didn’t really exist at the time. He imagined this whole Jewish world, with Jewish tribesmen on horseback and Jewish debutantes and merchants. You see how it might be to live in a Jewish society and belong to it, rather than living as an exception. Later, he transferred his imaginative abilities from novel writing to politics. I think he actually always preferred politics and wrote novels only so long as he couldn’t get anywhere in his political career.

What was his relationship like with Queen Victoria?

He started off on the wrong foot with Queen Victoria. She didn’t trust him and she particularly disliked the way that he came to power by overthrowing Robert Peel. She and Prince Albert thought of him as dangerous and disgraceful. The real turning point came after Albert died in 1861, when Disraeli, with his talent for flattery, became one of Albert’s most vocal eulogists and gave speeches about how he represented the ideal human being. All of that was music to Victoria’s ears, because she was so deeply in mourning for him and thought that he wasn’t sufficiently appreciated. And then, as he served in offices where he had to deal with her officially, he charmed her very much by his manner—he gave her the sense that she was hearing things about politics that other people wouldn’t tell her. He was very reverential toward her in a way that had a definite romantic tinge to it, a courtier’s way of dealing with a queen.

Although this may make Disraeli seem like a court Jew, or a Jew behind the scenes, he was a politician in a democracy, or a limited democracy. He managed to win the approval of the electorate in a way that would have never been possible before. He was actually in front of the scenes, at center stage, and had to win power on his own account.

What do you think being Jewish meant to Disraeli beyond a means of aggrandizing his own background?

It meant contradictory things. He was an outsider in the land that he was born in and could never truly belong to the class that he admired the most, which was the English aristocracy. As a response to that, he made his Jewishness into a racial aristocracy with a very ancient tradition that he was proud of belonging to. I don’t think that he thought very much about Judaism as a religion or knew much about it. He didn’t necessarily care about existing Jews so much as the idea of what Jews and Judaism could be. That’s both what kept him from being a Zionist or Jewish leader, and also what allowed him to reinvent Judaism as this gorgeous myth.

Do you think ultimately that his life was a tragedy?

Well, I went back and forth on that. I started out thinking of him as someone who told lies about Jews in order to serve his own ends, and who gave up what might have been a Zionist career for this English political career—which was very successful, but was, as we were saying, an exception, like a flash in the pan that didn’t lead to anything for the Jews, although it obviously had lots of consequences for English history. In the end I came to see that we all have our own ways of dealing with what it means to be Jews in the Western world.

By the beginning of 1830, when he was twenty-five, Benjamin Disraeli was tired of England. For three years, he had been suffering from acute depression, brought on by the triple fiasco that marked his entrance into public life. Before he turned twenty-two, Disraeli had lost thousands of pounds in stock-market speculations; alienated the publisher John Murray after their plan to launch a newspaper ended in failure; and caused a scandal with his first novel, Vivian Gray, a satirical roman à clef about high society. For the young Disraeli, already supremely ambitious, these reverses had come as a terrible shock, and it took him years to recover his nerve.

Now, with his second novel completed and the advance in his pocket, Disraeli was set on traveling. But he did not want to follow the usual itinerary of the Grand Tour, which took rich young Englishmen to the churches of Rome and the salons of Paris. Instead, he set his sights on the East—Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine. In part, he was following the example of his beloved Byron, who had created a vogue for the East in his highly colored poems. But for Disraeli, a journey to Jerusalem had more than literary significance. Although he had been baptized at the age of twelve into the Church of England, Disraeli’s very name made clear that he was a Jew, and the experience of visiting the Jewish homeland was to transform the way he thought about himself, his ancestors, and politics in general. Almost fifty years later, when he was Prime Minister of England, it would be his destiny to redraw the maps of the countries he visited as a young man.

The first fruit of Disraeli’s pilgrimage, however, was a novel—The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, published in 1833. Disraeli wrote that he had been “attracted” to the “marvellous career” of David Alroy even as a child. But Disraeli’s Alroy bears little resemblance to the minor figure mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela, the Spanish Jew whose Travels are a classic of medieval Hebrew literature. According to Benjamin, Alroy, a Kurdish Jew, raised a revolt against the Seljuk Turks in Azerbaijan around 1160 AD. He was credited with magic powers by his followers, who proclaimed him the Messiah, but this pretension won him the hostility of Jewish leaders in Baghdad, who begged him not to antagonize the Turks. Finally he was betrayed by his father-in-law and killed, probably without winning a single battle.

Disraeli’s Alroy is a much grander figure, a kind of Jewish Alexander the Great. In his novel, Alroy wins victory after victory, conquers Baghdad, and comes close to establishing a new empire in the Middle East. Disraeli also provides his hero with a loyal sister, Miriam, and a lover, the Princess Schirene. There is also a good deal of what Disraeli called “supernatural machinery” in the novel, including a magic ring, a secret underground temple, and the Scepter of Solomon, which Alroy must claim if he is to conquer Jerusalem.

Disraeli writes that all this is based on Jewish tradition—“Cabalistical and correct,” he puts it—but it is clear that the real sources of the novel’s mysticism lie in The Thousand and One Nights, the Eastern tales of Byron, and the quest poems of Shelley. In general, Alroy is better understood as high Orientalist fantasy than historical fiction. Even Disraeli’s prose, the emphatic rhythms and repetitions of which suggest that some sections started out as verse, is kitschily intoxicated: “‘Ah! bright gazelle! Ah! bright gazelle!’ the princess cried, the princess cried; ‘thy lips are softer than the swan, thy lips are softer than the swan; but his breathed passion when they pressed, my bright gazelle! my bright gazelle!’”

But if Alroy seems impossibly overripe today, its psychological core remains entirely serious. Disraeli said that he began to write the novel in Jerusalem in 1831, at a moment when he was pondering the role Jewishness might play in his own life and career. And in his hands, the story of David Alroy becomes a veiled meditation on the state of the Jews in Europe, and a parable of his own possible future.

From the beginning of the novel, Alroy, a scion of the house of David, rages against the degradation of the Jews under Muslim rule. But as Disraeli makes clear, the condition of the Jews is hardly unbearable. On the contrary, Alroy’s uncle, Bostenay, is a rich man, and enjoys the honorary title of Prince of the Captivity. “The age of power has passed; it is by prudence now that we must flourish,” he declares. He is, perhaps, Disraeli’s critical portrait of the wealthy English Jews of his own day—men like the Rothschilds and Montefiores, who had all the advantages of wealth, but none of the dignity of power.

Alroy, like Disraeli himself, cannot be satisfied with making money. He is an ardent patriot, disgusted by the state into which his people have fallen: “I am ashamed, uncle, ashamed, ashamed,” he tells Bostenay. When he sees a Turkish official accost his sister, Alroy impetuously kills him and flees into the desert. He is about to die of thirst when he is rescued by Jabaster, a magician and fanatical Jewish patriot. When Alroy has a dream of being acclaimed by a vast army as “the great Messiah of our ancient hopes,” Jabaster decides that the young man represents his long-awaited chance to reestablish the kingdom of David. After a series of romantic adventures, Alroy begins to put Jabaster’s plan into action, scattering the Turks and conquering Baghdad.

But in the meantime, Alroy acquires another advisor—Jabaster’s brother and mirror image, Honain. Honain represents the tempting path of Jewish assimilation: He has achieved wealth and honor, but only at the price of “passing” as a Muslim. In his own view, however, he has not betrayed his people, but simply effected his own liberation. “I too would be free and honoured,” he tells Alroy. “Freedom and honour are mine, but I was my own messiah.” Honain introduces Alroy to the beautiful Princess Schirene, the daughter of the Caliph, and though she is a Muslim he falls in love with her. (“The daughters of my tribe, they please me not, though they are passing fair,” Alroy admits—a sentiment Disraeli himself shared.)

But now, at the height of his fortune, with an empire in his grasp and a princess for his wife, Alroy begins to succumb to Honain’s worldly counsel. Why, he asks, should he exchange rich Baghdad for poor Jerusalem? Why not rule over a cosmopolitan empire, rather than a single small nation? “The world is mine: and shall I yield the prize, the universal and heroic prize, to realise the dull tradition of some dreaming priest, and consecrate a legend?” Alroy asks. “Is the Lord of Hosts so slight a God that we must place a barrier to His sovereignty, and fix the boundaries of Omnipotence between the Jordan and the Lebanon?” Mischievously, Disraeli even makes Alroy begin to speak in the stock phrases of modern English liberalism: “Universal empire must not be founded on sectarian prejudices and exclusive rights.”

From a portrait by Count D’Orsay, 1834

Jabaster tries to recall his king to the righteous, Jewish path, but to no avail. At last he attempts a coup against Alroy, but he is defeated and sentenced to death. From that moment, however, God’s favor deserts Alroy. In his next battle he is defeated, and a Muslim king, Alp Arslan, takes him prisoner. Now Honain reappears with one last, Satanic temptation: If Alroy converts to Islam, his life will be spared. But the scion of the house of David has learned his lesson. His strength is not his own but his nation’s, and individual glory means nothing next to the redemption of the Jews. He taunts Alp Arslan with his refusal, and the king, in a rage, cuts off his head.

For Disraeli, writing at the very beginning of his own career as an English politician, the moral of Alroy was deeply ambiguous. After all, David Alroy is a gifted youth like himself, but one who sacrifices worldly ambitions for love of the Jewish people, and is exalted by that love. The novel does not endorse the Jewish sectarianism of Jabaster—Disraeli expresses a Voltairean hatred of priestcraft—but it clearly repudiates the plausible assimilationism of Honain, which leads only to dishonor and disaster. Indeed, it is Disraeli’s distinction between Jewish belief and Jewish solidarity, and his insistence that it is possible to have the latter without the former, that makes Alroy a significant proto-Zionist text. If Disraeli had obeyed the novel’s logic in his own life, if he had tried to translate Alroy’s vision to the nineteenth century, he might have become a real-life Daniel Deronda.

But Alroy was a fantasy, not a program, and by the time he published it Disraeli had already decided that English history, not Jewish history, would be his theater of action. Writing Alroy served Disraeli, it seems, as a a kind of exorcism. By imagining a fantastic alternative career for himself as a Jewish political leader, he convinced himself that such a career was impossible. And, in fact, there is no way that Disraeli, in the 1830s, could play the role that Theodor Herzl would play in the 1890s. It was not until after Disraeli’s death that the rise of political anti-Semitism and the increasing persecution of Jews in Russia made the necessity of Zionism clear to the Jews themselves, and it was not until Zionism became necessary that it could appear credible. In the Europe Disraeli knew, the proto-Zionism of Alroy could only be what he called an “ideal ambition.”

Disraeli in the 1870s

In fact, Disraeli followed the advice Honain gives to Alroy: “With your person and talents, you may be grand vizir. Clear your head of nonsense.” But in some corner of his mind, he always kept faith with Alroy’s nationalist “nonsense.” The diaries of Lord Stanley, Disraeli’s younger Conservative colleague, offer a surprising confirmation of this. In the 1850s, when Stanley was serving his apprenticeship in politics, he was more than a little fascinated by the exotic figure of Disraeli. In his journals, he is continually trying to figure out whether Disraeli was ever in earnest—whether he had political principles, or merely political tactics. “There is certainly a very prevalent impression,” he writes, “that Disraeli has no well-defined opinions of his own: but is content to adopt, and defend, any which may be popular with the Conservative party at the time.”

There is just one moment in the diaries when Stanley believes he is seeing Disraeli genuinely inspired. It comes during a visit Stanley paid Disraeli at the beginning of 1851, twenty years after he visited Palestine.

“On one occasion, during this very visit, he talked to me with great apparent earnestness on the subject of restoring the Jews to their own land. . . . The country, he said, had ample natural capabilities; all it wanted was labour, and protection for the labourer: the ownership of the soil might be bought from Turkey: money would be forthcoming: the Rothschilds and leading Hebrew capitalists would all help: the Turkish empire was falling into ruin: the Turkish Govt would do anything for money: all that was necessary was to establish colonies, with rights over the soil, and security for ill treatment. The question of nationality might wait until these had taken hold. He added that these ideas were extensively entertained among the nation. A man who should carry them out would be the next Messiah, the true Saviour of his people.”

It is almost exactly the program Herzl would advance in The Jewish State in 1896. Who knows what might have happened if Disraeli, who knew so many English and European statesmen, had advanced it half a century earlier? Yet by the time Disraeli revealed this plan to Stanley, he had long since realized that being Prime Minister of England and being “the next Messiah” were incompatible goals. Indeed, Stanley writes, “he never recurred to it again,” and in later years mentioned that he had “heard of no practical step taken, or attempted to be taken, by him in the matter.” Stanley was left to wonder whether “the whole scene was a mystification. . . . But which purpose could the mystification, if it were one, serve?” The answer, as Alroy shows, is that it was not a mystification; it was another life, which Disraeli was destined never to lead.

“Good news,” I said to my wife, Ilana, as the family sat down for Shabbat lunch. “Charles Murray says that you aren’t genetically stupider than me after all.”

She gave me one of those looks that says, “Take your Y chromosome and go to hell.”

“Who is Charles Murray and how does he know about our brains?” she asked sternly.

I explained that Murray is a conservative political scientist who has written a great deal about intelligence. “He co-wrote a book called The Bell Curve that argued that white people’s genes make them smarter than black people,” I told her.

“Is he Jewish?” Ilana wondered.

“No.”

“So how smart can he be?” Ilana asked, dishing out the meat-stuffed celery her mother made us. “Anyway, who said I’m biologically stupider than you in the first place?”

I told her about a scientific paper published by some scholars at the University of Utah which proposes to explain why there have been so many high-achieving Ashkenazim in the arts and sciences over the past millennium. They suggest it was a result of selective breeding; legal restrictions forced Ashkenazi Jews into financial and trade occupations, which require more intelligence than farming, crafts, and manual labor. They had to know math, languages, and be good at analytic reasoning. Sephardi Jews didn’t need those skills.

“Your parents were born in Iraq. So ethnically you are an Oriental or Sephardi Jew. My grandparents were born in Eastern Europe, so I’m Ashkenazi. So according to the guys in Utah, of the two of us, I’ve got the better brain.”

Ilana reminded me dryly that her maternal grandfather had been a successful businessmen and trader in Baghdad before losing everything he had when he fled Iraq and moved his family to Palestine in the 1930s. Her father’s father left Baghdad at about the same time but reestablished himself successfully in Bombay, before losing everything he had when he moved his family to Israel in 1949.

“That article appeared in a very respectable venue, The Journal of Biosocial Science, which gives it great credence,” I pointed out defensively.

“Remind me how your great-grandfathers made a living?” she asked.

“One was a dirt-poor schoolteacher,” I said hopefully. “And another was a dirt-poor storekeeper.”

“And the other two?”

“A baker and a blacksmith,” I admitted. “But no matter. Murray, in a display of scholarly panache, has torn the Utah paper to shreds. He argues that it’s not just Ashkenazi Jews who are smarter than everyone else. Sephardi Jews are smarter than everyone else, too.”

“Where does he say that?” asked my scholarly son Asor, who has honed his reasoning skills by studying for a year and a half at a yeshiva.

“It was in Commentary, which is a magazine read by a lot of very smart Ashkenazi Jews, for example ones that favored invading Iraq.”

My oldest daughter, Mizmor, who with her mixture of choice Ashkenazi and Sephardi genes must have quite a brain, seemed unconvinced. “How does he reach that conclusion?”

“He points out that some Sephardis were hot stuff. Maimonides, for example, and Benjamin Disraeli. And he suggests that selection for sharp brains began much earlier, back in the first century, before the Second Temple was destroyed. That was when Joshua ben Gamla ruled that all male Jews go to school beginning at age six. Ever since then, Jews have been nearly universally literate, compared to other nations.”

“You mean, if I lived before the first century I wouldn’t have had to go to school?” asked my youngest daughter Misgav, for whom the Second Temple Period had just become a golden age.

“They were learning business theory and math and science?” asked Ilana.

No, I told them. The sources around today show that the elementary school curriculum consisted mostly of memorizing the Bible.

“So according to Murray’s thesis, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews should be equally represented in Israel’s universities and top-earning professions.” Ilana said.

“But in reality Ashkenazi Jews make up a solid majority of Israel’s student body, university faculty, and professions, even though Sephardi Jews are a majority in the population,” I answered back.

“So the Utah guys are right?” she asked.

I had to be honest and tell her that over the past three decades, Israeli society has become less stratified between an Ashkenazi elite and a Sephardi underclass, and that as that has happened, the number of Sephardi Jews in universities and white collar professions has increased considerably—even if there isn’t yet full equality.

“So Murray might be proved right, once we cancel out those annoying effects of social and class discrimination?” Ilana asked.

“Israel’s Arabs have also made considerable gains as the country’s society has opened up,” I added, pointing out other explanations for Jewish academic success. “As a minority population, Arab citizens of Israel see education as a key to advancement, just like Jews did.”

“So do my genes make me smarter than everyone else or don’t they?” asked my younger son, Niot.

“That’s open to debate,” I said, “but they definitely make you smarter than Charles Murray.”