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.

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.

Though schoolchildren today are undoubtedly acquainted with Robin Hood, the merry outlaw who steals the spotlight in Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe, they’re unlikely to recognize the knight who lends the book its title, or Scott’s long-suffering heroine Rebecca. Beautiful, modest, and brave, Rebecca is a figure of English womanhood par excellence—novels of the period, from Camilla to Mansfield Park, were populated with similar characters—but for one “flaw”: she’s Jewish. Or, at least, she starts out that way. Shackled with a miserable, materialistic father, she falls hard for a Christian knight and trades faith for love.

Published on the heels of Scott’s tremendously popular Rob Roy, Ivanhoe sold out its entire print run in two weeks and spawned countless imitations—conversionist novels—that appropriated both Scott’s fictional milieu and his exotically Jewish heroine. Conversionism was much on the minds of 19th-century English reformists, who joined “philo-Judaic” societies, befriending Jews with hopes of converting them.

As such novels reached new heights of popularity, a 15-year-old Londoner named Grace Aguilar began work on The Vale of Cedars; or The Martyr, a novel written in direct response to Ivanhoe. Set in Spain during the Inquisition—Aguilar’s ancestors had sought asylum in England, generations earlier—the novel follows Marie, the titular martyr, as she rejects a Christian suitor named Stanley and marries a Jewish man of her father’s choosing. When her husband is murdered, Stanley is wrongly charged with the crime. To save him, Marie must admit that she is a Jew, endangering not only her own life but also a tight-knit community of crypto-Jews hiding out in a vale of cedar trees.

Confined to bed at age three with an illness that left her permanently weakened, Aguilar became something of a literary prodigy, in the style of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. At seven, she began keeping a journal. At 12, she wrote her first play. At 14, she turned to poetry. In 1834, around her 18th birthday, her tubercular father took a turn for the worse, then her mother fell ill, and the family began an economic downward spiral. Aguilar, though herself an invalid, began to think about writing as a profession, rather than a hobby. The following year, she published The Magic Wreath of Hidden Flowers, a collection of riddle poems similar to the verses read by Emma Woodhouse and Harriet Smith in Emma.). The book went through two editions, effectively keeping the wolf from the Aguilar family’s door.

That same year, Aguilar finished up The Vale of Cedars, though she didn’t seek a publisher for it, for reasons that have been lost to history. Perhaps she worried about its quality—fiction was new to her—and perhaps she worried that it was, simply, too explicitly Jewish for a mainstream audience. In the end, however, it was Judaism that would secure her first large audience.

For a woman of her day, Aguilar had a vast religious education. At thirteen, she began studying Hebrew and reading scripture under her father’s tutelage. And in the mid-1830s, she began writing on spiritual matters. At her father’s request, she translated Orobio de Castro’s Israel Defended from the French. In 1838, the text was circulated privately and fell into the hands of Isaac Leeser, publisher of the popular Philadelphia-based Jewish periodical The Occident. Four years later, Leeser published The Spirit of Judaism, a collection of Aguilar’s theological essays. Within months, Aguilar had become a household name among Jews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Multilayered and daring, The Spirit of Judaism challenged contemporary assumptions about the practice of Judaism and called for some major reforms, including an English vernacular translation of the Hebrew Bible. Most importantly, “she polemicized on behalf of both English tolerance and Jewish religious reform,” explains Michael Galchinsky in The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, “and she offered a new vision of the spiritual needs of women in general and Jewish women in particular.”

Aguilar’s views clearly made an impact and nowhere more than in the American South, where the book made its way into the hands of the influential educator Rebecca Gratz, founder of the American Jewish Sunday School Movement (and allegedly the model for Scott’s heroine Rebecca), who began distributing it to her students. Gratz passed on a copy to her niece, Miriam Moses Cohen, who wrote Aguilar a gushing fan letter—beginning a lifelong correspondence with the author—and pushed her husband, Solomon (Georgia’s first Jewish state senator) to get involved with its promotion.

Aguilar’s sentimental style fit perfectly with prevailing Southern literary sensibilities of the time. Her poetry—published in Christian ladies’ journals—and her morally instructive novels, featuring Christian characters (in the vein of Home), brought her an enthusiastic audience of non-Jewish readers.

In 1843, as her health declined and her Christian readership grew, Aguilar was invited to write a book for Charlotte Montefiore‘s “Cheap Jewish Library” series, which the Jewish publisher, philanthropist, and writer had launched as a way to indoctrinate and elevate “the humbler class of Israelites.” Despite the runaway success of The Spirit of Judaism, Aguilar herself was still having money troubles and she quickly signed on with Montefiore. The resulting novel, The Perez Family, reads today as didactic and sentimental—to the extent that it’s barely readable—but it possesses an odd bit of historical significance: It was the first literary depiction of Anglo-Jewish life actually written by a Jew.

Concerned with issues of faith and morality, the novella is basically a chronicle of suffering: The good, noble Perezes—devout Sephardic Jews living in Liverpool—endure hardship after hardship, while maintaining a home of such grace and gentility “even poverty…looked respectable.” By 1845, the increasingly ill Aguilar was still struggling to do the same, as she tended to her dying father and finished up a collection of biographical sketches of Jewish women from the Biblical period to the modern. She wrote of her difficulties to the Cohens: “I dare not publish at a loss.”

She had nothing to fear. Critics hailed Women of Israel as a masterpiece. The next year, even as her health further declined, she published The Jewish Faith, an epistolary novel, and a long essay, “A History of the Jews in England,” in the radical Scottish journal Chambers’ Miscellany. By the end of the year, Aguilar was dead.

In the years that followed Aguilar’s mother published her daughter’s prodigious body of unpublished work: the early novels, including Vale and Home, a sequel to Home called A Mother’s Recompense, and The Days of Bruce, a Scottish historical romance and a tribute to her old nemesis—or inspiration—Sir Walter Scott. In 1853, her private theological writings, which she kept at until the very end, came out under the title Sabbath Thoughts and Sacred Communings. In death, Aguilar’s fame grew and grew, and in 1869 a retrospective edition of her collected works was published to international acclaim.

But by the end of the century, her books had fallen out of print and her name had been forgotten. The rise of feminism made her domestic ideology seem quaint, even regressive. The Anglo-Jewish community underwent a sea change as Russian and Polish immigrants fled pogroms and brought with them their own literary heroes. The values of the Victorian era—which Aguilar had embraced, if not embodied—gave way to the more radical thought of the Edwardians. Literary tastes shifted. Sentimental fiction was no longer in vogue. Grace Aguilar, a woman whose works had been advertised in the end pages of Dickens’ Bleak House, was a literary and cultural nonentity. But then again, so was Sir Walter Scott.