Benjamin Disraeli by Adam Kirsch

You cannot do much better than a book by an elegant writer (Adam Kirsch), reviewed by perhaps the most distinguished UK lawyer today (Anthony Julius), about an important but not widely-understood historical figure (Benjamin Disraeli). 

 

Julius’ fascinating review (“Judaism’s Redefiner”) is in the New York Times Book Review today, and begins as follows:

 

Benjamin Disraeli was a novelist, a statesman and a professing, practicing Christian, but to understand him one also needs to know that he was born a Jew.  It was in the working out of the implications of this bare fact that his literary and political career, as well as his confessional affiliation, are to be understood.

 

Disraeli lived during a period in which anti-Semitism took a dangerous and ultimately disastrous turn:

Disraeli was born in 1804, more than half a century before Jews were permitted to sit in the British Parliament.  He died in 1881, just months before the first pogroms in Russia.  That is to say, his life spanned the final years of one kind of anti-Semitism and the first years of a much more dangerous kind.  The first kind sought to preserve the Jews in their pre-­emancipation condition, as far as was possible.  It resisted liberal efforts to bring Jews into civil society on equal terms; in politics it maintained Christian suspicions of Judaism.  It was not violent so much as exclusionary. . . . 

The second kind of anti-Semitism was quite different.  It was predicated on beliefs in the immense power of the Jews, their malignity, their responsibility for everything that was wrong about the modern world.  It was based, as Kirsch writes, “no longer on contempt but on fear and hatred.”  It was lethal in its ultimate object. . . . 

It was in relation to the first kind of anti-Semitism that Disraeli defined himself.  He sought to arrive at a self-definition that made him immune from being regarded as contemptible.  He invented a bogus pedigree for himself (out of Spain, from Venice), and he talked up whenever he could the intellectual and social distinctions of the Jews as a whole.  As part of this project, however, he inadvertently contributed to the emergence of the second kind of anti-Semitism. . . .

Julius calls Kirsch’s book elegantly written; the review deserves similar praise for its succinctly written treatment of the large issues raised by Disraeli's life.