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"Disraeli: The Chosen of History:
Uniting the Old Jerusalem and the New"
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Abstract –
George Saintsbury thought not only that Disraeli “founded a remarkable school of fiction,” but that his politics were as romantic as his fiction. The most romantic thing in Disraeli was the motivation of both his fiction and his politics, a motivation to be found in his Jewishness—his quite particular kind of Jewishness. For it was not the Jews that claimed Disraeli—Disraeli claimed the Jews. Baptized into the Church of England in what would have been the year of his Bar Mitzvah, Disraeli chose not to forget he was a Jew. And it was not simply a reaction to the “hostile consciousness of others,” as Sartre would interpret the sense of Jewishness. Rather the hostile consciousness of others was a reaction to his perverse claim to Jewishness.
The hostile consciousness of others can best be read in three unsigned articles, probably written by Goldwin Smith, the Liberal historian and polemicist, printed in consecutive numbers of the Fortnightly Review from April through June 1878. “The secret of Lord Beaconsfield's life,” Smith wrote, “lies in his Jewish blood. . . . Lord Beaconsfield is the most remarkable illustration of his own doctrine of the ascendancy of Hebrew genius in modern Europe. . . . Certainly a century and a quarter of residence in England on the part of his ancestors and himself has left little trace on the mind and character of Lord Beaconsfield. He is in almost every essential . . . a Jew.”
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