[²] David Alroy, or Alrui (El David: Menahem ben Suleiman ibn Alruhi), born at Amadia in Kurdistan. He appeared as a pseudo-messiah about the year 1160.
A biographer of Disraeli remarks on this passage: “This (with its after-irony of ‘Alroy’s seizure by the Kourdish bandits’) may be compared with the satire in which Disraeli encountered Mr. [Charles Newdigate] Newdegate’s [M.P.] (1816–1887) appeals to ‘prophecy’:... They have survived the Pharaohs, they have survived the Cæsars, they have survived the Antonines and Seleucidæ, and I think they will survive the arguments of the right honourable member....” Mr. Morley tells that (1838–1918)[¹] Mr. Gladstone said that Disraeli asserted that only those nations that behaved well to the Jews prospered....[²]
[¹] Afterwards Viscount (1908–) Morley of Blackburn.
[²] Disraeli: A Study in Personality and Ideas, by Walter Sichel ... London, 1904, p. 223.
Disraeli loved the East, and particularly Palestine. Its picturesqueness, both in scenery and in history, fascinated him.
“Say what they like,” says Herbert in Venetia, “there is a spell in the shores of the Mediterranean Sea which no others can rival. Never was such a union of natural loveliness and magical associations! On these shores have risen all that interests us in the past—Egypt and Palestine, Greece, Rome and Carthage, Moorish Spain and feudal Italy. These shores have yielded us our religion, our arts, our literature and our laws. If all that we have gained from the shores of the Mediterranean was erased from the memory of man, we should be savages.”[¹]
[¹] Ibid. Note 1.
The great merit of Tancred (1847)[¹] lies in the description of Syria, and of life in the mountain and desert, in which it abounds. Tancred is a high-born youth dissatisfied with modern society, yearning for the restoration of true faith, and resolving to visit the land in which the Creator had conversed with man, as the only spot in which it is at all likely that enlightenment or inspiration will be vouchsafed to him. The story of his adventures is told with wonderful spiritual beauty. The author leads his reader to the desert, the cradle of the Arabs, from which they spread East and West, and come to be known as Moors in Spain, as Jews in Palestine. Nothing can be more interesting than his account of the manners and the men, neither of which are much changed since the days of the Patriarchs; nothing finer than the pictures of the rocks and towers of Jerusalem, or the grey forests of The Lebanon.
[¹] נס לגוים או טאנקרעד מאת בנימן דיזראעלי ... נעתק עברית מאת יהל״ל ... [יחודה לב לוין]
ווארשא ... שנת תרמ״ג לפ״ק ... 1883.
It was quite natural that the East should engage his attention. He believed in the glory of Great Britain’s imperial mission, and was interested to the bottom of his heart in the past history and future welfare of her venerable and still vigorous institutions. He was anxious to see the influence of Great Britain strong and decisive in the East. His policy on the Eastern question was constantly ascribed by his enemies to his “Semitic instincts,” which were supposed to taint his views of the relations between Turkey and all her Christian subjects. But they could know little of Beaconsfield who supposed that his Semitic instincts led him to any partiality. What guided him was his deep conception of Great Britain’s policy and highest interests, working in conjunction and in harmony with his feeling for the real East, for the Jews, the Semites, for Judaism in its idealism and Oriental beauty. The conditions were not yet ripe for practical progress in Zionism, but he was throughout an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist idea, and he worked for the future.