The prophets who spoke of the dispersion of the Jews as a penalty for their sins described a phenomenon which probably preceded the Captivity. Through Tyre the Hebrew race had a road open through which they could spread along the shores of the Mediterranean. There was a colony of them in Rome in the time of Cicero. In Carthage they were among a people who spoke their own language. It is likely that they accompanied the Carthaginians in their conquests and commercial enterprises, and were thus introduced into Spain, where a Jewish community undoubtedly existed in St. Paul’s time, and where it survived through all changes in the fortunes of the Peninsula. Under the Arabs the Jews of Spain preserved undisturbed their peculiar characteristics. As the crescent waned before the cross they intermarried with Christian families, and conformed outwardly with the established faith while they retained in secret their own ceremonies.
The Jewish people, says Isaac Disraeli in his ‘Genius of Judaism,’ are not a nation, for they consist of many nations. They are Spanish or Portuguese, German or Polish, and, like the chameleon, they reflect the colours of the spot they rest on. The people of Israel are like water running through vast countries, tinged in their course with all varieties of the soil where they deposit themselves. Every native Jew as a political being becomes distinct from other Jews. The Hebrew adopts the hostilities and the alliances of the land where he was born. He calls himself by the name of his country. Under all these political varieties the Jew of the Middle Ages endeavoured to preserve his inward peculiarities. In England, in France, in Germany, in Italy, he enjoyed for the sake of his wealth a fitful toleration, with intervals of furious persecution. From England he was expelled at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and his property was confiscated to the State. In crusading Spain he had not ventured to practise his creed in the open day, and thus escaped more easily. He was unmolested as long as he professed a nominal Christianity. He was wealthy, he was ingenious, he was enterprising. In his half-transparent disguise he intermarried with the proudest Castilian breeds. He took service under the State, and rose to the highest positions, even in the Church itself. A Jew who had not ceased to be a Jew in secret became Primate of Spain, and when the crowns of Castile and Aragon became united it was reckoned that there was scarcely a noble family in the two realms pure from intermixture of Jewish blood. His prosperity was the cause of his ruin. The kingdom of Granada fell at last before Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Church of Spain addressed itself, in gratitude to Providence, to the purifying of the Peninsula from the unholy presence of the wealthy unbeliever.
The Jews who were willing to break completely with their religious associations remained undisturbed. The Inquisition undertook the clearance of the rest, and set to work with characteristic vigour. Rank was no protection. The highest nobles were among the first who were called for examination before Torquemada’s tribunal. Tens of thousands of the ‘new Christians’ who were convicted of having practised the rites of their own religion after outward conformity with Christianity, were burnt at the stake as ‘relapsed.’ Those who could escape fled to other countries where a less violent bigotry would allow them a home. Venice was the least intolerant. Venice lived upon its commerce, and the Jews there, as always, were the shrewdest traders in the world. The Venetian aristocrats might treat them as social pariahs, rate them on the Rialto, and spit upon their gabardines, but they had ducats, and their ducats secured them the protection of the law.
THE DISRAELI FAMILY
Among those who thus sought and found the hospitality of the Adriatic republic at the end of the fifteenth century was a family allied with the house of Lara, and perhaps entitled to bear its name. They preferred, however, to break entirely their connection with the country which had cast them off. They called themselves simply D’Israeli, or Sons of Israel, a name, says Lord Beaconsfield, never borne before or since by any other family, in order that their race might be for ever recognised. At Venice they lived and throve, and made money for two hundred years. Towards the middle of the last century, when Venice was losing her commercial pre-eminence, they began to turn their eyes elsewhere. Very many of their countrymen were already doing well in Holland. England was again open to them. Jews were still under some disabilities there, but they were in no danger of being torn by horses in the streets under charge of eating children at their Passover. They could follow their business and enjoy the fruits of it; and the head of the Venetian house decided that his second son, Benjamin, ‘the child of his right hand,’ should try his fortune in London. The Disraelis retained something of their Spanish pride, and did not like to be confounded with the lower grades of Hebrews whom they found already established there. The young Benjamin was but eighteen when he came over; he took root and prospered, but he followed a line of his own and never cordially or intimately mixed with the Jewish community, and the tendency to alienation was increased by his marriage.
ISAAC DISRAELI
‘My grandfather,’ wrote Lord Beaconsfield, ‘was a man of ardent character, sanguine, courageous, speculative, and fortunate; with a temper which no disappointment could disturb and a brain full of resources.’ He made a fortune, he married a beautiful woman of the same religion as his own and whose family had suffered equally from persecution. The lady was ambitious of social distinction, and she resented upon her unfortunate race the slights and disappointments to which it exposed her. Her husband took it more easily. He was rich. He had a country house at Enfield, where he entertained his friends, played whist, and enjoyed himself, ‘notwithstanding a wife who never pardoned him his name.’ So successful he had been that he saw his way to founding a house which might have been a power in Europe. But the more splendid his position the more bitter would have been his wife’s feelings. He retired therefore early from the field, contented with the wealth which he had acquired. Perhaps his resolution was precipitated by the character of the son who was the only issue of his marriage. Isaac Disraeli was intended for the heir of business, and Isaac showed from the first a determined disinclination for business of any sort or kind. ‘Nature had disqualified the child from his cradle for the busy pursuits of men.’ ‘He grew up beneath a roof of worldly energy and enjoyment, indicating that he was of a different order from those with whom he lived.’ Neither his father nor his mother understood him. To one he was ‘an enigma,’ to the other ‘a provocation.’ His dreamy, wandering eyes were hopelessly unpractical. His mother was irritated because she could not rouse him into energy. He grew on ‘to the mournful period of boyhood, when eccentricities excite attention and command no sympathy.’ Mrs. Disraeli was exasperated when she ought to have been gentle. Her Isaac was the last drop in her cup of bitterness, and ‘only served to swell the aggregate of many humiliating particulars.’ She grew so embittered over her grievances that Lord Beaconsfield says ‘she lived till eighty without indulging a tender expression;’ and must have been an unpleasant figure in her grandson’s childish recollections. The father did his best to keep the peace, but had nothing to offer but good-natured commonplaces. Isaac at last ran away from home, and was brought back after being found lying on a tombstone in Hackney Churchyard. His father ‘embraced him, gave him a pony,’ and sent him to a day school, where he had temporary peace. But the reproaches and upbraidings recommenced when he returned in the evenings. To crown all, Isaac was delivered of a poem, and for the first time the head of the family was seriously alarmed. Hitherto he had supposed that boys would be boys, and their follies ought not to be too seriously noticed; but a poem was a more dangerous symptom; ‘the loss of his argosies could not have filled him with a more blank dismay.’
The too imaginative youth was despatched to a counting-house in Holland. His father went occasionally to see him, but left him for several years to drudge over ledgers without once coming home, in the hope that in this way, if in no other, the evil spirit might be exorcised. Had it been necessary for Isaac Disraeli to earn his own bread the experiment might have succeeded. His nature was gentle and amiable, and though he could not be driven he might have been led. But he knew that he was the only child of a wealthy parent. Why should he do violence to his disposition and make himself unnecessarily miserable? Instead of book-keeping he read Bayle and Voltaire. He was swept into Rousseauism and imagined himself another Emile. When recalled home at last the boy had become a young man. He had pictured to himself a passionate scene in which he was to fly into his mother’s arms, and their hearts were to rush together in tears of a recovered affection. ‘When he entered, his strange appearance, his gaunt figure, his excited manner, his long hair, and his unfashionable costume only filled her with a sentiment of tender aversion. She broke into derisive laughter, and noticing his intolerable garments reluctantly lent him her cheek.’ The result, of course, was a renewal of household misery. His father assured him that his parents desired only to make him happy, and proposed to establish him in business at Bordeaux. He replied that he had written another poem against commerce, ‘which was the corruption of man,’ and that he meant to publish it. What was to be done with such a lad? ‘With a home that ought to have been happy,’ says Lord Beaconsfield, ‘surrounded with more than comfort, with the most good-natured father in the world and an agreeable man, and with a mother whose strong intellect under ordinary circumstances might have been of great importance to him, my father, though himself of a very sweet disposition, was most unhappy.’ To keep him at home was worse than useless. He was sent abroad again, but on his own terms. He went to Paris, made literary acquaintance, studied in libraries, and remained till the eve of the Revolution amidst the intellectual and social excitement which preceded the general convulsion. But his better sense rebelled against the Rousseau enthusiasm. Paris ceasing to be a safe residence, he came home once more, recovered from the dangerous form of his disorder, ‘with some knowledge of the world and much of books.’
His aversion to the counting-house was, however, as pronounced as ever. Benjamin Disraeli resigned himself to the inevitable—wound up his affairs and retired, as has been said, upon the fortune which he had realised. Isaac, assured of independence, if not of great wealth, went his own way; published a satire, which the old man overlived without a catastrophe, and entered the literary world of London. Before he was thirty he brought out his ‘Curiosities of Literature,’ which stepped at once into popularity and gave him a name. He wrote verses which were pretty and graceful, verses which were read and remembered by Sir Walter Scott, and were at least better than his son’s. But he was too modest to overrate their value. He knew that poetry, unless it be the best of its kind, is better unproduced, and withdrew within the limits where he was conscious that he could excel. ‘The poetical temperament was not thrown away upon him. Because he was a poet he was a popular writer, and made belles-lettres charming to the multitude.... His destiny was to give his country a series of works illustrative of its literary and political history, full of new information and new views which time has ratified as just.’