The Disraeli Enigma

A case study in the Jewish Great Game

In 1853, when the Crimean War broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the latter was saved by the United Kingdom and France. Twenty years later, Tsar Alexander II, as protector of the oppressed Serbian and Bulgarian Christians, went to war once more against the Ottomans. With the Russians at the gates of Constantinople/Istanbul, the Ottomans were forced to accept the creation of the autonomous principalities of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania, by the Treaty of San Stefano. The British were unhappy with this treaty, and together with Austria-Hungary, convened the Congress of Berlin (1878) which canceled it. Russian conquests were taken back, Armenia and Bulgaria were mostly returned to the Ottoman Empire, and the Balkans were fragmented into heterogeneous and conflicting states. This “balkanization” elicited the nationalist resentments that would spark the First World War.

The main objective of the Treaty of Berlin was to save what could be saved from a weakening Ottoman Empire in order to counter Russian pan-Slavic expansion. England, ever jealous of her naval supremacy, wanted to prevent Russia from getting closer to the Bosporus. The British obtained the right to use Cyprus as a naval base, while monitoring the Suez Canal. This was the beginning of Britain’s “Great Game” for colonial rule in Asia, and the containment of Russia, leading in particular to the creation of Afghanistan as a buffer state.

There are several ways to interpret this segment of history that carries the seed of all the tragedies of the twentieth century (“the Jewish century” according to Yuri Slezkine).[1] There are distinct viewpoints about the forces shaping history at this crucial time. But in the end, history is made by men, and it can be understood only if one identifies the main actors and their motives: you just cannot understand the Vietnam War without digging into Johnson’s or Kissinger’s mindset. One name stands out among the instigators of the Treaty of Berlin: Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), prime minister under Queen Victoria from 1868 to 1869, and again from 1874 to 1880. Disraeli was also the man who made the takeover of the Suez Canal by England possible in 1875, through funding from his friend Lionel de Rothschild, son of Nathan Mayer — an operation that consolidated the Rothschilds’ control over the Bank of England.

Disraeli is a very interesting case, because he was both a major British statesman during Britain’s global hegemony, and a novelist who used his fictional characters to voice his honest thoughts while maintaining a sort of “plausible deniability” (Sidonia speaks, not me!). We have therefore the unique opportunity of being able to read between the lines the man’s true motives in politics. Imagine if Kissinger had written novels with, as central character, a Jew who was driving the empire’s foreign and military policy, while being a close friend of the richest Jewish banker.

Disraeli has been called the true inventor of the British Empire, since it was he who had Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India by Parliament, with the Royal Titles Act of 1876 (the top picture is a cartoon depicting Disraeli as a peddler presenting the Queen with the imperial crown). Disraeli was, as said already, the main inspiration for the Congress of Berlin. On top of that, Disraeli was a forerunner of Zionism, who tried to insert the “restoration of Israel” into the agenda of the Berlin Congress, hoping to convince the sultan Abdul Hamid to concede Palestine as an autonomous province. The Sultan rejected the offer, which probably included the promise of financial support for his collapsing economy — as would Herzl’s offer in 1902, also rejected.

Zionism was Disraeli’s ancient dream: after a trip to the Middle East at the age of twenty-six, he published his first novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, and made his hero, an influential Jew of the Middle Ages, say: “My wish is a national existence which we have not. My wish is the Land of Promise and Jerusalem and the Temple, all we forfeited, all we have yearned after, all for which we have fought, our beauteous country, our holy creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs.”

Disraeli wrote these lines even before the beginnings of biblical archeology; it was not until 1841 that Edward Robinson published his Biblical Researches in Palestine. The first excavations of the Palestine Exploration Fund sponsored by Queen Victoria began in 1867. However, wealthy British Jews had taken an interest in Palestine long before. Disraeli’s interest was influenced by his neighbor and friend of forty years, Moses Montefiore, who married Judith Cohen, sister-in-law of Nathan Rothschild. After a trip to Palestine in 1827, Montefiore devoted his immense resources to helping his coreligionists in the Holy Land, by buying land and building housing.

Both Montefiore and Disraeli were of Sephardic origin. Disraeli came from a family of Portuguese Marranos who converted back to Judaism in Venice. His grandfather had moved to London in 1748. Benjamin was baptized at the age of thirteen, when his father, Isaac D’Israeli, converted to Anglican Christianity together with all his family. Isaac D’Israeli is the author of a book called The Genius of Judaism (titled in response to Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme), in which he glorifies the unique qualities of the Jewish people, but blames Talmudic rabbis for “sealing up the national mind of their people” and “corrupting the simplicity of their antique creed.” As for many other Jews of that time, conversion for D’Israeli was purely opportunistic: until the beginning of the nineteenth century, administrative careers remained closed to the Jews. A law of 1740 had authorized their naturalization, but it had provoked popular riots and was repealed in 1753. Many influential Jews, such as City banker Sampson Gideon, then opted for nominal conversion for their children.[2]

Around the same time as Disraeli, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) converted to Lutheranism (while one of his brothers converted to Catholicism to become an officer in Austria, and another to Orthodoxy to serve as a medical doctor in Russia). Heine conceived of baptism as the “entrance ticket to European civilization.” But he complained of being still regarded as a Jew by the Germans, and so preferred living in France, where he was regarded as a German. Just a few years after his conversion, his writings exhibited a very negative attitude toward Christianity, “a gloomy, sanguinary religion for criminals” that repressed sensuality. At the end of his life he regretted his baptism, which had brought him no benefit, and stated in his final book Romanzero: “I make no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned, because I have not left it.”[3] Just like for the Portuguese Marranos in the fifteenth century, baptism for nineteenth-century European Jews reinforced in them a non-religious, racial sense of Jewishness. Disraeli defined himself as “Anglican of Jewish race.”

For Hannah Arendt, Disraeli is a “race fanatic” who, in his first novel Alroy (1833), “evolved a plan for a Jewish Empire in which Jews would rule as a strictly separated class.” In his other novel Coningsby, he “unfolded a fantastic scheme according to which Jewish money dominates the rise and fall of courts and empires and rules supreme in diplomacy.” This idea “became the pivot of his political philosophy.”[4] This is a quite fantastic accusation, that most biographers of Disraeli would not accredit. It is probably right, however. But we must pay close attention to Disraeli’s own voice, expressed through Sidonia, the character that appears in three of his novels: Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847). In Sidonia’s words you can feel the resentment against the nation that he tried to assimilate into:

Can anything be more absurd than that a nation should apply to an individual to maintain its credit, its existence as an empire and its comfort as a people; and that individual one to whom its laws deny the proudest rights of citizenship, the privilege of sitting in its senate and of holding land; for though I have been rash enough to buy several estates, my own opinion is that by the existing law of England, an Englishman of Hebrew faith cannot possess the soil.

Unable to integrate into British aristocracy by land ownership, even when converted to the local religion, what should a Jew do, except ascend by the power of money? Like Heine, Disraeli felt the hypocrisy of Christians, who resented Jews for not being Christians, but continued to treat them as Jews when they converted, and indeed secretly preferred them to remain Jews.

According to Disraeli’s biographer Robert Blake, Sidonia is “a cross between Lionel de Rothschild and Disraeli himself.” He is descended from a noble family of Aragon, whose eminent members included an archbishop and a grand inquisitor, both secretly adhering to the Judaism of their fathers. Sidonia’s father, like Lionel de Rothschild’s father, “made a large fortune by military contracts, and supplying the commissariat of the different armies” during the Napoleonic wars. Then, having settled in London, he “staked all he was worth on the Waterloo loan; and the event made him one of the greatest capitalists in Europe.” From the age of seventeen, Sidonia attended the princely courts of his father’s debtors, and learned the arcana of power. “The secret history of the world was his pastime. His great pleasure was to contrast the hidden motive, with the public pretext, of transactions.” Disraeli himself, according to Robert Blake, “was addicted to conspiracy.”[5]

Sidonia is passionate about his race: “All is race — there is no other truth.” He refuses to marry a non-Jewess because, the narrator says, “No earthly consideration would ever induce him to impair that purity of race on which he prides himself.” By “race”, Disraeli meant blood kinship. “Language and religion do not make a race — there is only one thing which makes a race, and that is blood,” he has Count Sergius say in Endymion (1880), his last novel. And also:

No man will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key to history, and why history is often so confused is that it has been written by men who are ignorant of this principle and all the knowledge it involves... The Semites are unquestionably a great race, for among the few things in this world which appear to be certain, nothing is more sure than that they invented our alphabet. But the Semites now exercise a vast influence over affairs by their smallest though most peculiar family, the Jews. There is no race gifted with so much tenacity, and such skill in organisation. These qualities have given them an unprecedented hold over property and illimitable credit. As you advance in life, and get experience in affairs, the Jews will cross you everywhere. They have long been stealing into our secret diplomacy, which they have almost appropriated; in another quarter of a century they will claim their share of open government. (vol. II, p. 202-204)

Sidonia tells his protégé Coningsby, in Coningsby or the New Generation, that persecution by Christian nations could never crush the Jewish nation.

The fact is you cannot destroy a pure race of the Caucasian organization. It is a physiological fact; a simple law of nature, which has baffled Egyptian and Assyrian kings, Roman emperors, and Christian inquisitors. No penal laws, no physical tortures, can effect that a superior race should be absorbed in an inferior, or be destroyed by it. The mixed persecuting races disappear, the pure persecuted race remains. And at the moment, in spite of centuries, or tens of centuries, of degradation, the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe. I speak not of their laws, which you still obey; of their literature, with which your minds are saturated, but of the living Hebrew intellect. You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate.

Wherever he traveled, Sidonia added, he saw Jewish advisers behind monarchs and heads of state. “So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” In a nonfictional work (Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography, 1852), Disraeli wrote:

[Jews] are a living and the most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man. … the natural equality of man now in vogue, and taking the form of cosmopolitan fraternity, is a principle which, were it possible to act on it, would deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius of the world. … The native tendency of the Jewish race, who are justly proud of their blood, is against the doctrine of the equality of man.[6]

Disraeli is clearly on the same wavelength as Moses Hess, Herzl’s spiritual father, who after influencing Marx (another nominal convert), decided that “the race war was more important than class struggle” (Rome and Jerusalem, 1862). In a good example of dialectical political engineering, Hess continued to support Marx secretly, publishing at his request calumnies against Bakunin after the General Congress of the International in Basel (September 5–12, 1869), accusing Bakunin of being an agent provocateur of the Russian government and of working “in the interest of pan-Slavism.”[7] It is interesting to see another proto-Zionist like Disraeli deeply hostile to Russian interests.

What was Disraeli’s motivation behind the foreign policy he imparted to the British Empire? Did he believe that the manifest destiny of the British was to conquer the world? Or, remembering how, in Biblical times, Ezra and Nehemiah had exploited the Persians’ foreign policy, did he see the British Empire as an instrument in the Jewish nation’s superior destiny? In mooring the Suez Canal (dug by the French between 1859 and 1869) to British interests, did he simply seek to outdo the French, or was he laying the foundation for the future alliance between Israel and the Anglo-American Empire? For once the British possessed the Suez Canal, they had to defend it, and how better than with a friendly Jewish autonomous government nearby in Palestine? This would later be exactly Chaim Weizmann’s pitch to the British thirty years later: “Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England, in particular in respect to the Suez Canal.”[8] And when in 1956 the Israelis invaded the Sinai with British and French support, they did it by again promising Britain to return under her the control of the Canal that Nasser had nationalized.

Disraeli’s Russophobia, to which he converted Queen Victoria, and his defense of the Turks, whose massacres of the Serbs and Bulgarians were well known, gave rise to theories of a Jewish conspiracy. William Ewart Gladstone, a longtime opponent to Disraeli and himself prime minister several times (1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886, and 1892–1894), declared that Disraeli “was holding British foreign policy hostage to his Jewish sympathies, and that he was more interested in relieving the anguish of Jews in Russia and Turkey than in any British interests.” The newspaper The Truth of November 22, 1877, alluding to the intimacy of Disraeli with the Rothschilds suspected “a tacit conspiracy … on the part of a considerable number of Anglo-Hebrews, to drag us into a war on behalf of the Turks.” It was remembered, moreover, that in a speech to the House of Commons in 1847, Disraeli had demanded the admission of Jews to eligible functions, on the grounds that “the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe.”[9]

The Queen, like much of the British aristocracy, was already under the spell of a fashionable theory assigning an Israelite origin to the Anglo-Saxons. This theory had first appeared around Oliver Cromwell’s time, was revamped in 1840 by Pastor John Wilson with his Lectures on Ancient Israel and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe, and again in 1870 by Edward Hine in The English Nation Identified with the Lost Israel, in which we learn that the word “Saxon” is derived from “Isaac’s sons.” This ludicrous theory offered cheap biblical justification to British colonialism, and even to the genocide of colonized peoples (new Canaanites) by the British Empire (new Israel).[10] Queen Victoria was happy to believe that her noble lineage descended from King David, and had her sons circumcised, a custom that has continued to this day. There may be some truth in the British elite’s sense of their Jewishness, for during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many marriages had united rich Jewish families with the old destitute landed aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, “with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.”[11] But the Queen’s infatuation with Jewishness had also much to do with the influence of Disraeli, who once bragged about it to a friend in these terms: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”[12]

The Disraeli case is illuminating because the question it raises is the same as the question that divides geopolitical analysts today on the relationship between the United States and Israel: which one wags the other? Is Israel the bridgehead of the United States in the Middle East, or is the United States, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, the “stupid mule” of Israel? Answering this question for the century preceding the Second World War (when “Israel” meant International Jewry), helps answer the same question today, when the symbiotic relationship between Israel and the empire has grown considerably.

The answer depends on one’s point of view. The Zionists naturally have an interest in promoting the view that Israel serves Anglo-American interests, rather than the reverse. Disraeli argued in front of the British Parliament that a Jewish Palestine would be in the interest of British colonialism. But Jewish Zionists have always seen things from the other end of the telescope, and one can hardly believe that Disraeli did not secretly share their view. When the hero of his novel Tancred (1847), a Jew who has been promoted Lord just like Disraeli, glorifies the British Empire in these words: “We wish to conquer the world, led by angels, in order to bring man to happiness, under divine sovereignty,” who lies behind this ambiguous “we”? Is it the same double-meaning “we” as PNAC neocons used for drawing America into wars for the benefit of Israel?

When a British Jew such as Disraeli said “we” to the British, there was a strategic ambiguity. He stroke a patriotic chord with the Anglo-Saxon elite, who shared a common belief in the British Empire’s mission to civilize the world — people like Lord Salisbury, member of Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table that worked for a world government by the “British race.”[13] British imperialism and Zionist nationalism were born around the same time, as the twins Esau and Jacob, and have been intimately intertwined from their birth. But two considerations help understand their true relationship. First, the ideological roots of the British Empire do not go back beyond the seventeenth century, whereas those of Zionism go back more than two millennia. Secondly, the British Empire died after WWI, whereas Zionism took off. For these two reasons, the theory that Zionism is a by-product of British imperialism (let’s call it the Chomsky-theory) is unsustainable.

Understanding the true relationship between Zion and Albion in Disraeli’s time requires a correct appraisal of the power of the Rothschild dynasty over British policy. Without the Rothschilds, Great Britain would never have gained control of the Suez Canal, which was the cornerstone of the British Empire in the Middle East. The Rothschilds didn’t run for political office themselves, although they sometimes married into it: Lord Archibald Primrose, secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1886 and from 1892 to 1894, and prime minister in 1894-1895, was Mayer Amschel de Rothschild’s son-in-law.

It is noteworthy that Theodor Herzl envisioned the future Jewish state as an “aristocratic republic” with, at its head, “the first Prince Rothschild.” In a long tirade in his diary he exhorted the Rothschilds to redeem their evil souls by financing Zionism instead of wars:

I don’t know whether all governments already realize what an international menace your World House constitutes. Without you no wars can be waged, and if peace is to be concluded, people are all the more dependent on you. For the year 1895 the military expenses of the five Great Powers have been estimated at four billion francs, and their actual peacetime military strength at 2,800,000 men. And these military forces, which are unparalleled in history, you command financially, regardless of the conflicting desires of the nations. … And your accursed wealth is still growing. … But if you do go with us, … we shall take our first elected ruler from your House. That is the shining beacon which we shall place atop the finished Eiffel Tower of your fortune. In history it will seem as though that had been the object of the entire edifice.[14]

However, as Richard Wagner once said (Judaism in Music, 1850), the Rothschilds preferred to remain “the Jews of the Kings” rather than “the Kings of the Jews.”

If the time was not yet ripe for the creation of the Jewish state in Disraeli’s day, it was mostly because the Jews of Russia were no more attracted to Palestine than the Jews of Europe; they hardly knew where it was. Just recently emancipated by Tsar Alexander II, they aspired only to emigrate to Europe or the United States. It was only after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 (one month before Disraeli’s death) that the pogroms made some of them sensitive to Leon Pinsker’s proto-Zionist appeal, published in 1882: “We must reconcile ourselves once and for all to the idea that the other nations, by reason of their inherent natural antagonism, will forever reject us.”[15] It was also in 1881 that Baron Edmond de Rothschild, of the Paris branch, began buying land in Palestine and financing the installation of Jewish settlers, notably in Tel Aviv, under the auspices of his Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA). But most existing international Jewish organizations, such as B’nai B’rith (founded in New York in 1843) or the Alliance Israélite Universelle (founded in Paris in 1860), felt that Israel was doing just fine as a dispersed nation, and had no designs on Palestine.

This changed during the First World War, when an extremely efficient network was set up linking both sides of the Atlantic.[16] Theodor Herlz first concentrated his diplomatic efforts on Germany, but it was in England that things started to look promising (“The center of gravity has shifted to England,” he wrote in his diary in 1895), thanks in part to the recruiting of Israel Zangwill, who, according to Benzion Netanyahu, “was the first to speak in a direct manner about Zionism to the upper circles of British politics,” and to Lloyd George in particular, “a close acquaintance of Zangwill’s from the start of his Zionist activity to the end of his days.”[17] Recall that Zangwill was the successful author of The Melting Pot, a play extolling mixed marriages for Americans. No contradiction here, for “the mixed persecuting races disappear, the pure persecuted race remains”, as said Sidonia.

The importance of Disraeli’s geopolitical maneuvers is rarely acknowledged by historians of Zionists, because on the surface, it didn’t seem to have paved the way for the creation of the Jewish state. But it was, in fact, the invisible foundation that Herzl and Zangwill built upon. And that unseen continuity testifies to the amazing transgenerational tenacity of the Jewish people in advancing their millennia-old self-proclaimed destiny, generation after generation. Yes, it is truly admirable, although devastating for Western civilization, rendered clueless and emptied of its own sense of blood by two thousand years of Christianity. As Zionist author Jakob Klatzkin once wrote in the journal Der Jude, 1916:

We form in ourselves a closed juridical and business corporation. A strong wall built by us separates us from the people of the lands in which we live — and behind that wall is a Jewish State.[18]

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[1] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton University Press, 2004.

[2] Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos (1932), Meridian Books, 1959, p. 148.

[3] Quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, l. 4732–4877.

[4] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, vol. 1: Antisemitism, Meridian Books, 1958, pp. 309–310.

[5] Robert Blake, Disraeli (1966), Faber Finds, 2010, p. 202.

[6] Benjamin Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck, Archibald, 1852 (archive.org), p. 496.

[7] Read Bakunine’s answer in French, “Aux citoyens rédacteurs du Réveil,” on Wikisource.org.

[8] Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, Harper & Brothers, 1949, p. 192.

[9] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, pp. 579, 547.

[10] André Pichot, Aux origines des théories raciales, de la Bible à Darwin, Flammarion, 2008, pp. 124–143, 319.

[11] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, Constable & Co., 1922 (archive.org), p. 223.

[12] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, pp. 579, 547.

[13] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden (1949), Books In Focus, 1981.

[14] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1, pp. 163–170.

[15] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism, Balfour Books, 2012, kindle l. 761-775.

[16] Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, kindle l. 387-475.

[17] Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism, l. 2536-59.

[18] Quoted in Robert Edward Edmondson, The Jewish System Indicted by the Documentary Record, 1937 (archive.org), p. 15.