Benjamin Disraeli

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n78095587

Disraeli, Benjamin, earl of Beaconsfield (1804–1881), prime minister and novelist, was born on 21 December 1804 at 6 King's Road, Bedford Row, London, the eldest son and second of five children of Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) and his wife, Maria (1775–1847), daughter of Naphtali and Ricca Basevi. From 1810 or 1811 he attended a school at Islington kept by a Miss Roper, and then, probably from 1813, one at Blackheath belonging to the Revd John Potticary, where he was given separate instruction in Judaism. However, he was baptized into the Christian faith (as an Anglican) on 31 July 1817 and thereafter attended a different school, Higham Hall in Epping Forest, run by the Unitarian minister Eli Cogan, until 1819 or 1820, after which he was taught at home. The family had moved to 6 Bloomsbury Square after the death of Benjamin's grandfather in 1816 had increased Isaac D'Israeli's means. That death also removed the family's last tie with the Jewish religion and led to the baptism of the children. Isaac was an easy-going Voltairean sceptic whose interests were those of a reclusive literary dilettante and whose friends tended to be London publishers and antiquaries. From an early age Benjamin was introduced to this circle and to his father's extensive and eclectic library, which left a much clearer stamp on his mind and tastes than the more disciplined classical training offered at Higham Hall. Benjamin had dropped the apostrophe in his surname by December 1822, though it was still widely used (for example, in Hansard) until the 1840s.

Disraeli in the 1820s

In November 1821 Disraeli was articled at his father's arrangement to a solicitor's firm in the Old Jewry, and spent three years there. Subsequently (in April 1827) his name was entered at Lincoln's Inn, but though he ate dinners for a time, he had rejected the idea of a career at the bar some years before he withdrew his name in November 1831. He had, and retained, a strong dislike of the mundane lifestyle of the English middle classes: for them, ‘often the only adventure of life’ was marriage (Smith, Disraeli, 69). ‘To be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man’ (Vivian Grey, bk 1, chap. 9). An ardent admirer of Byron (whom his father knew), he dreamed instead of literary fame. The example of Byron—and of Canning in politics—showed him how men of unusual charisma and insight could win international admiration with the aid of the burgeoning media. Disraeli fell heavily under the influence of Romanticism. From the early 1820s he had adopted an appropriately eye-catching and narcissistic style of dress, with ruffled shirts, velvet trousers, coloured waistcoats, and jewellery, and he wore his hair in cascades of ringlets. It was on his first continental travels, to Germany in 1824 with his father, that he decided to try to escape from a legal career. The latter parts of his first published novel, Vivian Grey, were set in Germany—the home of Goethe, whose Wilhelm Meister, translated into English in 1824, clearly influenced his early literary style. A longer tour of the continent in August 1826 included a stay at Geneva, where Disraeli engaged Byron's former boatman to row him on the lake. He reflected self-consciously, in Romantic fashion, on the sublime natural creations that he observed on his travels, and concluded that he loved ‘trees better than men’ (Letters, 1.92).

In May 1824 Disraeli submitted a manuscript to his father's friend John Murray, but it was not published. His attempt over the next year to establish the financial independence necessary for a literary career was a catastrophic failure. With a friend he sought to capitalize on the speculative bubble in South American mining companies. Disraeli also wrote pamphlets puffing the operations. By June 1825 they had lost £7000. A third partner took on much of this debt; Disraeli could not finally settle with him until 1849. Later in 1825 he urged a willing Murray to establish a new morning paper, The Representative, to compete with The Times. He worked hard on this venture, impressing Murray with his energy and insight, but failed to persuade J. G. Lockhart to take up a major editorial role, and the journal collapsed after six months. Disraeli used this episode in Vivian Grey, the first part of which was published anonymously in two volumes in April 1826. It was publicized by the publisher Henry Colburn as a sensational roman-à-clef in the then fashionable silver-fork style. It portrayed with intensity the desperate, unscrupulous ambition of a clever young man, and his come-uppance. It also set out a highly irreverent view of London society, exposing the egotism, superficiality, and charlatanism of its members. This combination of unmistakable self-exposure and reckless satire did Disraeli's reputation great and lasting damage—for the identity of the author was soon revealed. The book also earned some damning reviews, which dwelt on its solecisms and general immaturity. Moreover, Murray and Lockhart, men of great influence in literary circles, were deeply offended by the sneering treatment of characters based on them.

The financial disaster and literary abuse to which Disraeli was subjected in 1825–6 almost certainly contributed to the onset of a major nervous crisis that affected him for much of the next four years. He had always been moody, sensitive, and solitary by nature, but now became seriously depressed and lethargic. The ‘cold, dull world’, he later wrote, could not remotely conceive the ‘despondency’ of ‘youthful genius’ that was conscious of ‘the strong necessity for fame’, yet had ‘no simultaneous faith in [its] own power’ (Contarini Fleming, pt 1, chap. 11).

Widening horizons, 1830–1832

It was not until a lengthier journey, to the East in 1830–31 (financed partly by a fashionable but light novel, The Young Duke, written in 1829–30), that Disraeli finally acquired a strong enough sense of identity to sustain him in his search for fame. Between June and September 1830 he travelled with William Meredith in Gibraltar, Spain, and Malta, where they joined up with James Clay, an Oxford friend of Meredith. Clay's buccaneering temperament, raffish habits, and sexual experience fascinated Disraeli and made the rest of the journey more adventurous. Joined by Byron's former servant Tita, the three men toured the Ottoman empire experiencing Eastern lifestyles. Disraeli spent a week at the court of the grand vizier Redschid Ali in Albania, and, after visiting Athens, a further six weeks in Constantinople. The exotic, colourful splendour of Turkish courts appealed immensely to his imagination; he felt that the ‘calm and luxurious’ existence of the people accorded with his ‘indolent and melancholy’ tastes (Monypenny and Buckle, 1.159, 170). He loved the duplicitous intrigue of court politics and its distance from the puritanical moralism of the Western bourgeoisie; staying with Redschid, Disraeli wrote of the ‘delight of being made much of by a man who was daily decapitating half the province’ (ibid., 158). The travellers then proceeded to Jerusalem, where Disraeli spent a seminal week, before staying five months in Egypt. The tour was cut short dramatically by Meredith's death from smallpox in Cairo in July 1831. Disraeli had to be treated for venereal disease on his return to London.

Like other nineteenth-century travellers to the East, Disraeli felt enriched by his experiences, becoming aware of values that seemed denied to his insular countrymen. The journey encouraged his self-consciousness, his moral relativism, and his interest in Eastern racial and religious attitudes. On his return he could strike others as insufferably affected: according to one account, he was much given to sticking his fingers in his lapels and drawling, ‘Allah is great’ (Bradford, 51). There is a malicious contemporary portrait of him in dandy mode, as Jericho Jabber in Rosina Bulwer's Very Successful (1856). In 1833 he published a novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, which concerned the dilemma faced by a twelfth-century Middle Eastern Jew who sought fame, but who faced conflicting ideals: between establishing a purely Jewish regime and a larger empire assimilating other religions. The moral of his failure was that a taste for action and the power of imagination were both needed in a leader. Though neither meritorious nor commercially successful, Alroy shows Disraeli thinking about problems that were to concern him a great deal in the future; it portrayed ‘my ideal ambition’ (Monypenny and Buckle, 1.236).

The other literary product of Disraeli's travels was Contarini Fleming (1832). Subtitled ‘a psychological autobiography’, Contarini, like Vivian Grey, was a Bildungsroman exploring the development of the artistic consciousness and containing much tortured reflection on Disraeli's destiny. It presents the dual nature of the eponymous hero, a man of mixed Mediterranean and northern background, a brooding artist but aspiring man of action, deeply imaginative yet energetic and courageous. Disraeli was very aware of these two sides of his personality. Contarini ends on a new theme, the transition of Europe from feudal to federal principles (pt 7, chap. 2). In a diary of 1833 Disraeli claimed that his insights were ‘continental’ and ‘revolutionary’ (Monypenny and Buckle, 1.236), by which he presumably meant broad and original enough to encompass the intellectual and social forces that were shaping Europe. In 1834 he finished a heroic poem, on the scale of Homer and apparently conceived when standing on the plain of Troy; its object was to evoke the clash of feudal and democratic principles in Europe since the French Revolution. Entitled The Revolutionary Epick, it was not remotely a success, but it testified to Disraeli's enthusiasm for the fashionable continental conception that the progress of human affairs was realized through the interaction of individual will, ideas, and great social forces. Disraeli was fascinated by the creativity with which the greatest statesmen, such as Napoleon, moulded social change and thus won worldwide renown.

It was in the early 1830s that Disraeli decided to begin a political career. In 1833 he recorded that he would ‘write no more about myself’ (Monypenny and Buckle, 1.236); certainly there seemed little prospect of fame through literature. His pride sought an existence independent of the literary pundits and titled and frivolous patrons who seemed to dictate fortunes in letters. Politics, he later wrote, offered the chance of ‘power o'er the powerful’ (Letters, 4.250). It also offered therapeutic excitement: ‘action may not always be happiness, but there is no happiness without action’ (Lothair, chap. 79). The reform crisis of 1830–32 opened the prospect of political realignments and quick fame for men of resource and vision. The Disraelite hero of A Year at Hartlebury, the novel he wrote with his sister and published anonymously in 1834 (and whose authorship was established in 1983 by Ellen Henderson and John P. Matthews), turned, ‘at the prospect of insurrection ... with more affection towards a country he had hitherto condemned as too uneventful for a man of genius’ (p. 58). More mundanely, the cost of attempting to cut a dash in society, on top of his incompetent management of his previous debts, ensured that a long queue of creditors hounded him. A seat in parliament offered immunity from imprisonment for debt.

Towards parliament and marriage

Disraeli's first parliamentary candidature was at High Wycombe, the nearest borough to the house at Bradenham that his father rented from 1829. The two sitting MPs were whigs, and one was the son of the local landowner Lord Carrington. It was both necessary and congenial for Disraeli to declare himself an independent radical, opposed to whiggism and oligarchy, at a by-election in June 1832 and then at the general election held on the new franchise in December 1832. On both occasions he was defeated. His friend Edward Lytton Bulwer secured him letters of support from leading radicals O'Connell and Burdett. As the only opposition candidate, Disraeli naturally courted tory voters, and in 1833, excited by accusations that in doing so he was inconsistent, he published What is He?, in which he argued for a tory–radical coalition against the whigs. His background, ostentatious manner, and verbal pyrotechnics ensured that opponents would charge him with lack of principle, but in fact few politicians of the 1830s were more interested than he was in fashioning a coherent individual perspective on politics. Disraeli sought independence from faction and from condescension, and to be noticed; his rise would surely have been more rapid had he made more compromises with the system.

Disraeli's political path began to clear when in 1834 he met one of the few leading tories colourful, indiscreet, and clever enough to appreciate his talents: Lord Lyndhurst. Disraeli was introduced to him by Henrietta Sykes, an older married lady with whom Lyndhurst had been having an increasingly public affair since the summer of 1833. She seems to have cured Disraeli of some immature affectations. It was suspected that he was happy to share Henrietta's affections with Lyndhurst. Certainly the triangular friendship expanded his political circle and lowered her social reputation. Disraeli loved Lyndhurst's gossip and taste for intrigue, and became his secretary and go-between. When he stood again at Wycombe at the 1835 election, once more unsuccessfully, and still as an independent radical, it was with the assistance of £500 from tory funds. The events of this period made it clear that the future lay with a two-party system, and in the spring of 1835 he fought the Taunton by-election as a tory. In March 1836 he was elected to the Carlton Club. Encouraged by Lyndhurst, and invoking Bolingbroke as an exemplar, he wrote some vigorous tory propaganda. The most important, his Vindication of the English Constitution, was published in December 1835. It used a historical perspective to claim the tories' sympathy with the people, to attack whig, Irish, and utilitarian views, and to assert the legitimacy of the House of Lords' opposition to government policy. More scurrilous were The Letters of Runnymede, nineteen anonymous pieces of satire on politicians of the day, which he published in The Times in 1836. They included some abuse of the Irish. Disraeli used the whigs' increasingly pro-Catholic Irish policy to justify his toryism, as did the famous former radical Sir Francis Burdett, for whom he canvassed at the Westminster election of 1837. At Taunton in 1835 Disraeli had compared the proposal of Irish church appropriation to the spoliation of the monasteries by the whigs' ancestors. His misreported remarks about O'Connell led the latter to charge him with being a Jew ‘of the lowest and most disgusting grade of moral turpitude’ (Monypenny and Buckle, 1.288). As on other occasions, Disraeli's pride flared up at such language, and he provoked a public row with O'Connell and his son Morgan, whom he challenged to a duel.

Disraeli was also taken up by Lady Londonderry in the 1836 season, a sign of his increasing reputation in tory circles. He was given a winnable seat at the 1837 election, when he became MP for Maidstone with the other tory candidate, Wyndham Lewis, who lent him money to pay part of the election expenses. Disraeli's debts had grown into a serious problem, and Henrietta's husband's solicitor had helped him to manage them. However, in late 1836 he terminated the affair with her; she was very demanding emotionally, and began a passionate romance with the painter Daniel Maclise (whose drawing of Disraeli in 1828 effectively recorded his dandyism). Shortly afterwards Disraeli published Henrietta Temple, a love story and social comedy, and followed it by Venetia (1837), a portrayal of Byronic existence in the late eighteenth century, which was written quickly in order to raise money.

When Wyndham Lewis died suddenly in March 1838, Disraeli consoled his widow, who had been left with an income of about £5000 per year, together with their house in London, 1 Grosvenor Gate. Mary Anne Lewis [see Disraeli, Mary Anne (1792–1872)] was the daughter of a naval lieutenant and farmer, John Evans, of Brampford Speke, near Exeter, and his wife, Eleanor. She was coquettish, impulsive, not well educated, and extremely talkative, but also warm, loyal, and sensible. She shared something of Disraeli's love of striking clothes and social glitter while feeling, like him, an outsider in very high social circles. Her money, house, and solid position were undoubtedly attractive to him (though she had only a life interest in her husband's estate). But so also were her vivacity and her childless motherliness. All his life older women appealed to Disraeli, apparently in search of a mother-substitute more appreciative of his genius than his own stolid parent had been. Their courtship lasted most of a year, for much of which time she seems to have been unsure of his motives. In the end he convinced her of his genuine emotional attachment; he certainly pursued her ardently. As before when he was absorbed in passion, he wrote a poetic work, the blank verse play The Tragedy of Count Alarcos, which was only performed as a curiosity after Disraeli became prime minister. They were married at St George's, Hanover Square, on 28 August 1839. Their union thereafter presented a picture of remarkable mutual devotion and respect. She provided the domestic stability and constant admiration that he sorely needed. She also paid off many of his debts: she had spent £13,000 on these and his elections by 1842 alone. Like his father's, her payments would have been more effective had Disraeli straightened out his affairs, approached his debts rationally, and been straightforward with her about the sums owing; instead, his tendency was to renew his obligations at ruinous interest rates. At the 1841 election his opponent printed posters listing judgments in the courts against Disraeli to the extent of over £22,000, and alleged that he owed at least £6800 more than that.

Political career, 1837–1846

Disraeli made his maiden speech in parliament on 7 December 1837, in a debate on MPs' privileges. It was another challenge to O'Connell, the previous speaker, and was hooted down by jeering O'Connellite Irishmen, though not before its extraordinarily elaborate and affected language had caused much hilarity. After that unpropitious beginning Disraeli avoided publicity for most of the rest of the parliament, generally supporting Peel and attacking the free trade agitators. However, he did urge respect for the Chartist movement. Feeling unable to satisfy the financial expectations of the electors of Maidstone, he sought a cheaper seat for the 1841 election; his friend Lord Forester secured him the nomination at Shrewsbury. At this election his crest made its first appearance, with the motto forti nihil difficile (‘nothing is difficult to the brave’).

When Peel became prime minister after the 1841 election, Disraeli sought office from him; unsurprisingly, he did not get it. He continued his support for Peel in 1842 and 1843, seeking fame by attacking the foreign policy of the late government. He blamed the economic depression partly on the whigs' warmongering extravagance and failure to sign a commercial treaty with France. He projected himself as an authority on the needs of British international trade, urging a reversion to the historical policy of commercial diplomacy and reciprocity. He went to France in late 1842 in order to make connections at the court there which would assist his claim to be promoting a new entente with that country. His contacts there—supplied through Bulwer, Count d'Orsay, and Lyndhurst—gained him an audience with Louis Philippe.

In a memorandum to the French king, Disraeli talked of organizing a party of youthful, energetic tory back-benchers in pursuit of a policy sympathetic to France. Though nothing came of this notion as such, it showed his susceptibility to the excitement of high intrigue with a group of youthful men of independence and vision. A small group of such men was in fact forming on the tory benches, inspired by George Smythe, Lord John Manners, and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane. This trio had been at Eton and Cambridge together and had a romantic attachment to the ideals of chivalry, paternalism, and religious orthodoxy which had become fashionable in some landed and university circles in reaction to reform, utilitarianism, and political economy. Disraeli did not adopt all of the specific enthusiasms of Young England, as the group came to be known in 1843. But by the end of the session he was accepted as a fertile contributor to its activities in the house, and some of the group's enthusiasms rubbed off on him, especially a respect for historic religious ideals evident in Sybil. Over the winter of 1843–4 Disraeli wrote Coningsby, his most effective and successful novel to date, a vibrant commentary on the political and social worlds of the 1830s. Featuring the three friends, it gave considerable publicity to the idea of Young England, contrasting its ideals with Peel's lack of principle. Published in May 1844, it quickly sold 3000 copies, for which Disraeli received about £1000.

In 1843 Disraeli offended the Conservative leadership by his vote against the Canada Corn Bill and his speech against Irish coercion. Early in 1844 Peel rebuked him by omitting him from the list of MPs to be summoned to the official party meeting at the start of the session. Over the coming months Disraeli made three speeches containing pointed and sarcastic criticism of the party leadership, such as his attack on its inability to tolerate dissent over the sugar issue.

In October 1844 Disraeli, Manners, and Smythe made successful addresses to young artisans at the Manchester Athenaeum, testifying to the impact made by Young England. While in the north, Disraeli also collected observations about industrial life which he used in Sybil, the novel which he wrote over the winter of 1844–5 and published in May 1845, again to considerable interest; it too sold 3000 copies. But Young England broke up in 1845, partly owing to a difference of opinion on the government's proposals for the Maynooth seminary, and partly because of parental pressure on Smythe and Manners not to be disloyal to the party. Meanwhile, Disraeli's abuse of Peel was mounting. In late February he made a celebrated, extended, and neatly vindictive assault on Peel's shiftiness, described by one onlooker as ‘aimed with deadly precision’, yet delivered with Disraeli's normal ‘extreme coolness and impassibility’ (Monypenny and Buckle, 2.316). On 17 March he declared that a ‘Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy’ (Selected Speeches, 1.80). His opposition to the Maynooth grant (11 April) was similarly based on the argument that Peel cared nothing for tory principles and sought to extend the ‘police surveillance’ of Downing Street to entrap Irish Catholics, when they required independence and respect (ibid., 88). By the end of the 1845 session Disraeli had become a celebrated orator. He undoubtedly helped to stimulate the questioning of Peel's trustworthiness on the back benches. Yet he stood essentially alone, without allies, and in such circumstances his capacity to tolerate abuse and short-term political injury is testimony to his remarkable self-confidence and self-reliance.

Disraeli's position was transformed by the events of late 1845, which brought Peel to the Commons in January 1846 as an advocate of repealing the corn laws, in defence of which the vast majority of tory MPs had been elected in 1841. Disraeli seized the initiative against him with a stinging attack (22 January), accusing him of betraying ‘the independence of party’ and thus ‘the integrity of public men, and the power and influence of Parliament itself’ (Selected Speeches, 1.110). Now, suddenly, he was no longer alone, as Lord George Bentinck and Lord Stanley took the lead in organizing party opposition to the repeal, while in the constituencies there was an active protectionist campaign. In his speeches on the subject in 1846 Disraeli reiterated his earlier arguments in favour of the historic policy of multilateral tariff reductions through treaty diplomacy. But his greatest contribution to the movement against Peel continued to be his scathing attacks on the latter's inability to uphold the principles of the territorial constitution on which toryism must rest. This was expressed most devastatingly in his famous denunciation of Peel's career as a ‘great Appropriation Clause’ in his speech on the second reading of the repeal bill on 15 May, which roused the back benches to extraordinary fervour (ibid., 170). Later in the month he lied to the Commons in denying Peel's charge that he had sought office from him in 1841, but Peel was unable or unwilling to capitalize on this, a mark of his powerlessness to deal with Disraeli's invective. As the session continued, Disraeli had hopes of a coalition between protectionist tories and some whigs and Irish MPs in defence of a compromise tariff. But corn law repeal passed the Lords in late June. On the same night the leading protectionists, including Disraeli, voted with the opposition to defeat Peel's Irish Coercion Bill, on the grounds that the lack of necessity for it had been demonstrated by the long delay in promoting it. Peel resigned, and Disraeli's fame—for good and ill—was assured.

The background to Disraeli's political views

In the 1840s Disraeli wrote three major novels (Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred, 1847), worked on his biography of Lord George Bentinck (1852), and delivered many ambitious speeches. This output, together with his earlier political comment, helps to chart the progress of his ideas.

Disraeli had begun political life as a proud Romantic individualist with radical leanings, standing ‘for myself’ rather than any party (Ridley, 112). This was a sign of his youthful arrogance, but also a typical declaration against what radicals saw as whig factionalism and falseness. Gifted with an ability to expose the selfish and hypocritical underbelly of the glittering social and political world, he shared the views of those who saw the whigs as frauds who had arrogated the title of the popular party when they were in fact a ‘Venetian’ oligarchy. After he had adopted tory colours, Disraeli continued—especially in Sybil—to portray the whigs as a rapacious clique of great families, who had secured their hold on power by their canting claim to be protecting the civil and religious liberties of the people from attack in 1688–9. He asserted that popular liberties in fact rested on the territorial constitution—on the land, the church, and other interests whose vitality prevented central government despotism. The Venetian instincts of eighteenth-century whigs had crippled the country with heavy indirect taxes levied in order to fight unnecessary wars and to siphon off rewards for themselves. The one man who might have moralized whig misrule—the outsider–prophet Burke—was refused a cabinet place by these snobs, and in his vengeance turned his eloquence against them, thereby helping to keep them out of power for forty-five years. It was only the blunders of Pitt's heirs that gave the whigs the opportunity to mount an audacious coup d'état in 1830 and once again to restrict power to an aristocratic clique by claiming to follow libertarian sentiments. Their true intentions were seen in their centralizing initiatives of the 1830s with regard to the poor law, education, and policing, all of which Disraeli criticized. They also had to be opposed for their exclusiveness, their incapacity, and their willingness to consort with destructive allies, particularly O'Connell.

Here and on other subjects Disraeli derived his arguments from books—mainly from Burke and tory historians, and Carlyle and Germanic writers—and from the literary and religious interests of his father. But he assembled and developed his ideas in an inimitable confection, and with a degree of purpose rare among parliamentarians. He thought of himself as a prophet of deep insights who had arrived at his opinions by ‘reading and thought’ rather than having ‘had hereditary opinions carved out’ for him (Monypenny and Buckle, 2.371). As he commented with respect to Christ, all the great minds were formed in seclusion (Disraeli's Reminiscences, ed. H. M. Swartz and M. Swartz, 1975, 8).

Views on Jewishness and Englishness

For Disraeli historical and sociological awareness was necessary in order to govern men. In particular, ‘all is race’ (Disraeli, Bentinck, 331); the values of each race determined its past and prospects. Some races were superior; others were degraded (by interbreeding or luxury) and would be conquered. Conquest was a natural objective of races such as the Slavs. But Disraeli was most concerned with two other races: the Semites (especially the Jews) and the English. These were races that understood the essence of civilization: the Jewish values of ‘religion, property, and natural aristocracy’ (ibid., 497). ‘A civilised community must rest on a large realised capital of thought and sentiment; there must be a reserved fund of public morality to draw upon. ... Society has a soul as well as a body’ (Disraeli, Inaugural Address, 15). The alternative to government in tune with indigenous traditions was a resort to a ‘philosophic’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ basis—to abstract theories, such as ‘cosmopolitan fraternity’ and the equality of man, ‘pernicious’ doctrines that would ‘deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius of the world’ (Disraeli, Bentinck, 496). Republicanism and socialism involved a relapse into ‘primitive ... savagery’ (ibid., 509), though their vitality and appeal were all too comprehensible. One reason for their attraction was that men, who were ‘made to adore and obey’, had been failed by their political and religious leaders and left to ‘find a chieftain in [their] own passions’ (Coningsby, bk 4, chap. 13). A nation that had ‘lost its faith in religion is in a state of decadence’ (Selection from the Diaries of ... Derby, 97). Modern Europe had fallen victim to materialism: it had mistaken comfort for civilization (Tancred, bk 3, chap. 7). Disraeli drew two conclusions. A properly run society was necessarily élitist: ‘the Spirit of the Age is the very thing that a great man changes’ (Coningsby, bk 3, chap. 1). And it must rest on the national, not the cosmopolitan, principle.

It followed that England should venerate the Jews, who understood all this. They represented the ‘Semitic principle—all that is spiritual in our nature’ (Disraeli, Bentinck, 496), being descended from the Arabian peoples to whom divine truth had been revealed and who had founded the great religions. The Christian church in particular was completed Judaism, a ‘sacred corporation for the promulgation and maintenance in Europe of certain Asian principles ... of divine origin and of universal and eternal application’ (Coningsby, preface to 5th edn, 1849). Jesus and the Virgin Mary were Jews. ‘Half Christendom worships a Jewess and the other half a Jew. ... Which do you think should be the superior race; the worshipped or the worshippers?’ (Tancred, bk 3, chap. 4). The Roman church had been founded by a Hebrew when the English were ‘tattooed savages’ (ibid., bk 2, chap. 11), and the crusades, by bringing medieval Westerners to Jerusalem, had renewed Asia's spiritual hold on Europe. The Arabs, ‘Jews on horseback’, retained much of the spiritual sense, social cohesion, and harmony with nature that the West so badly needed to rediscover. The hero of Tancred goes to Jerusalem in an attempt to penetrate and draw spi