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Benjamin Disraeli
When Benjamin Disraeli (1804- 1881) determined that his rising
ambitions required a personal motto, he chose forti nihil difficile,
or "nothing is difficult to the strong." Strength of will, one
assumes--for a Jew in pre-Victorian England had barriers before him
that would have dissuaded most aspirants for status. Until 1829,
Roman Catholics were disenfranchised, and could not hold public
office or be involved in such professions as law. Universities were
also closed to them. For Disraeli, born Benjamin D'Israeli in
Bloomsbury, where his father was a dilettante man of letters, the
path was smoothed by the nonbelieving Isaac, who, cynically, had his
son converted, at twelve, to the Anglican persuasion, to open up
opportunities.
Always a romantic, Disraeli liked to believe that his ancestors were
cultured Jews from Golden Age Spain, but in reality his grandfather
had emigrated from Cento, in Italy near Ferrara, where he was a
seller of straw hats. The family, before that, had probably come from
Syria or Turkey. His recollections would sometimes claim Venice for
his family. If their origins had to be in Italy, he preferred the
most exotic of Italian places. He liked to think of himself as an
aristocrat, even if not of the Anglo-Saxon variety.
Technically, all England had to offer was open to Benjamin, but to Englishmen he was
always a Jew-an identification he courted. Although it was a career liability, he
refused to change either of his names but for excisin
g the apostrophe. While he might have gone to a public school and then a university,
he went instead to the law courts as an apprentice, then slipped into stock
speculation, and bankruptcy. To make money he tried to conco
ct a popular fiction, publishing, anonymously, in 1826, the satirical society novel
Vivian Grey. For its epigraph he lifted a line from The Merry Wives of Windsor, "Why,
then the world's mine oyster / Which with my sword
I'll open." The arrogance remained with him, but the book's initial success aborted
abruptly when his identity as a youth utterly out of the social loop was exposed.
Although he tried other novels, and would write fiction
, often nakedly autobiographical, all his life, he fell into severe depression, coming
out of it after he went, with a friend, on a Middle Eastern tour that included the
Holy Land, about which he wrote in Alroy (1831). Pa
radoxically, the melodramatic novel, heatedly overwritten, about a pre-Zionist
adventurer and martyr, David Alroy, glorified Disraeli's Jewish background just as he
was adventuring in another career, politics, at a time w
hen observant Jews were barred from Parliament. In his flamboyant style, which he
advertised also in his Byronic dress and open (and successful) womanizing, he was
announcing that there was no way the issue of his origins
would not come up directly rather than through innuendo if the candidate for the
House of Commons were named Benjamin Disraeli.
Undaunted by losses in campaigns for several seats, Disraeli tried again in 1837, the
year of Victoria's accession, and was elected as a Tory (Conservative). The party was
traditionally protectionist regarding agricultur
al products, however that drove up the price of bread for the poor, as Tories
represented the landed interests. Their powers then were being eroded by manufacturing
and mercantile interests, both in the Whiggish (Liberal)
hands of the burgeoning middle classes who stood to gain from freer trade and
electoral reform that would enfranchise the industrial cities. Disraeli promoted a
nostalgic and largely unrealistic Tory feudalism, a "Merrie
England" that revolved about attachment to the land through the institutions of
Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Church, and their noblesse oblige toward a peasantry he saw
as including the new industrial work force. A compuls
ive novelist, he dramatized his sentimental Toryism, called by others "Young England,"
through a trilogy of novels, Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred (1844-47) that also earned
for him desperately needed money. To pay his inc
reasing debts due to his election debts and his high lifestyle, he had already married
the eccentric, off-the-wall, Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis, widow of his late campaigning
partner, more than a dozen years his senior. She i
dolized him and he reciprocated her affection. Surprisingly, the marriage worked. But
he seemed always in debt.
Disraeli
Hulton Getty Picture Archive
The Tories would fragment on the issue of free trade, and Disraeli, a loyalist,
inherited some of the remaining prominence within the party. On becoming a minority
government in 1852, he would achieve cabinet office for
the first time, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The experience was brief, but it
whetted his appetite for power and position, which left him in a quandary as the
Commons debated, year after year, the issue of amending its
oaths requirement to permit Jews to sit. Several, including Lionel de Rothschild, one
of the world's most influential bankers, had run time and time again, rejected after
each election by their refusal to take a parliame
ntary oath on the Christian bible. Rothschild had already turned down a baronetcy from
Victoria, as only a barony would place him in the House of Lords, where he might defy
the oaths requirement in the upper house.
Despite his friendship with the Rothschild family, Disraeli was at first reticent
about speaking out. He had to worry about re- election. Finally he did so, several
years running, and the issue was finally decided in 185
8. Indirectly the end of the impasse improved Disraeli's chances for higher office. As
social and political bias decreased, his status went up.
Both Victoria and Albert had distrusted him as an ambitious upstart. Toward the end
of Albert's life he began to appreciate Disraeli's rare abilities, and after the
prince's death in 1861 "Dizzy" because an intimate of t
he reclusive queen. Several years later, in the ministry of the Earl of Derby,
Disraeli was again Chancellor of the Exchequer and his political heir apparent. With
legislative finesse he accomplished an unpredictable turn
about by pushing through Parliament a liberal election reform bill that was even more
liberal in extending the franchise than the opposition, suddenly forced to take a
stand on it, might have approved. (His theory was tha
t many of the new voters would vote Tory.) With Derby's retirement in 1868 because of
ill health, Disraeli reached what he called "the top of the greasy pole."
A general election the next year ended his ministry, but he returned in 1874 , after
Mary Anne's death (in 1872), remaining prime minister into 1880, a lengthy term marked
by administrative reforms, a new emphasis upon e
mpire-building that led to the purchase of a controlling interest in the new Suez
Canal in 1875 (with millions borrowed from the Rothschilds), and the addition to
Victoria's title of Empress of India. But new troubles in
the Balkans would bring his ministry down. After his elevation as Earl of
Beaconsfield, to move him into the House of Lords, and his triumph in settling Eastern
Mediterranean questions at the Congress of Berlin, new probl
ems erupted in the Balkan territories long part of the Ottoman Empire, and the Liberal
opposition led by W. E. Gladstone charged that Disraeli, to prop up a decadent Islamic
imperialism, was ignoring atrocities against Ch
ristians. New allegations including a dimension of anti-Semitism never far below the
surface in Victorian life surfaced against Disraeli. The muckraking weekly Truth
declared, absurdly, that "a tacit conspiracy has . . .
existed on the part of a considerable number of Anglo-Hebrews, to drag us into a war
on behalf of the Turks" because of "affinity of race and feeling between the Jews and
the Turks." It left no doubt that the prime minist
er, allegedly "the Asian Mystery," was a co-conspirator.
Benjamin Disraeli
National Portrait Gallery
Although Disraeli might have survived that, and the increasing demagogic campaign of
Gladstone, his health was failing, and his campaign in the general election of 1879
evidenced exhaustion. An economic depression also c
ost him votes, and finally his ministry. He had published a novel, Lothair, in 1870,
after his first defeat. In 1880 came his last completed novel, begun earlier, the
nostalgic autobiographical fantasy Endymion, set early
in the century. It was the tale of a handsome young man taken up by attractive and
amorous-and politically ambitious--older women, and propelled into high office. And in
the background, with religious identity left ambig
uous, is a banking family clearly the Rothschilds-his final debt to
his most steadfast of friends.
In his last months, in a house on Curzon Street, in Mayfair, the
ailing Earl of Beaconsfield began writing a new novel, Falconet,
about an ambitious, utterly hypocritical, politician clearly meant to
skewer his old adversary Gladstone. The suggestion that Victoria, who
adored Disraeli and whom he called "the Faery [Queen]," might visit
him in what he knew was his last illness (he was dying of renal
failure), was rejected with a quip. "No, it is better not," he said.
"She would only ask me to take a message to Albert." When he died on
April 19, 1881, at 76, the queen sent a wreath "from his grateful and
affectionate Sovereign and friend, Victoria R.I." In her change of
royal style he had provided the "I." Below was a quotation she had
chosen from Proverbs: "Kings love him that speaketh right."
End<{{{
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