BENJAMIN DISRAELI belonged to a family who left Spain in the fifteenth century to avoid the horrors of the Inquisition. Upon their escape, in gratitude to the God of Jacob who had sustained them through unheard of trials, they adopted the name Disraeli, in order that their race might be forever recognized. Of such a family Benjamin Disraeli was a worthy representative. He never was ashamed of his race. On the contrary, he gloried in it, and lost no opportunity to put forth the claim of his people to be the true aristocracy of the earth. "Has not the Jew the oldest blood and the finest genius of the world?" he asks. And again, in one of his books (Tancred, 1847), he says, "The Jews are of the purest race; the chosen people; they are the aristocracy of nature."
It is Disraeli's Jewish characteristics that have bewildered and sometimes offended his critics. He has been charged with insincerity because he was so clever, and because he wrote with a kind of Oriental exuberance that was to him entirely natural and a part of his Jewish heritage. Gilfillan is the only critic, so far as I know, who has recognized that Disraeli's excellences, and his defects as well, were racial rather than individual. Speaking of his Oriental fancy and cleverness, Gilfillan says: "Disraeli has a fine fancy, soaring up at intervals into high imagination, and making him a genuine child of that nation from whom came forth the loftiest, richest, and most impassioned songs the earth has ever witnessed—the nation of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Solomon, and Job. He has little humor, but a vast deal of diamond-pointed wit."[E]
Disraeli's Wit: A Purely Jewish Product
DISRAELI'S wit, which made him so many enemies, is a purely Jewish product. It is satiric. Now satire was the form taken by Jewish wit in the Middle Ages as a result of the hard conditions under which the Jews lived. As one modern Jew has said, "The Jews seized the weapon of wit, since they were interdicted the use of every other weapon." With every door closed in hostility against them, there was little they could do but laugh with bitter irony at their fate, and with savage satire at their oppressors. With such an ancestry as this behind him, it is not to be wondered at that Disraeli's wit is scornful, and that he excelled in personal satire and invective. It was never, however, unprovoked. Disraeli never indulged in personal satire or invective except in his own defence. For example, his mockingly ironical reply to the attack of a member of the House of Commons named Roebuck, which was one of the most effective rejoinders Disraeli ever made, was in answer to a most virulent arraignment of his political motives. "I have always felt," he said, "that in this world you must bear a great deal, and that even in this indulgent, though dignified, assembly, where we endeavor so far as possible to carry on public affairs without any unnecessary acerbity—still we must occasionally submit to some things which the rules of this house do not permit. I could, no doubt, have vindicated my character; but that would only have made the honorable member from Bath speak once or twice more, and really I have never any wish to hear him. I have had the most corrupt motives imputed to me. But I know how true it is that a tree must produce its fruit—that a crab-tree will bring forth crab apples, and that a man of meagre and acid mind, who writes a pamphlet or makes a speech, must make a meagre and acid pamphlet or a poor and sour speech. Let things, then, take their course."
Disraeli's Fondness for Allegory
ANOTHER striking peculiarity of Disraeli was his fondness for veiled allusion. Nearly all of his most popular novels—and this was one of the main reasons for their phenomenal popularity—were thinly veiled representations of Disraeli's own contemporaries, who were easily recognizable by the reading public. Take, for instance, the admirable burlesque entitled Ixion in Heaven, where the author tells how Ixion, king of Thessaly, having fallen into disrepute on earth, was taken up into heaven by Jupiter and feasted by the gods. Here Jupiter is really George the Fourth and Apollo is the poet Byron. The latter's pose of gloomy misanthropy, as well as his habit of fasting to keep from growing fat, are admirably satirized in the following dialogue:
"You eat nothing, Apollo," said Ceres.
"Nor drink," said Neptune.
"To eat, to drink, what is it but to live; and what is life but death. . . . I refresh myself now only with soda-water and biscuits. Ganymede, bring some."
Now this fondness for veiled allusion is distinctly a Hebrew characteristic. The Arabs today have a saying, "as fond of a veiled allusion as a Hebrew." This has always been a Hebrew trait. I suppose no literature of any people consists so largely of allegory, in proportion to its bulk, as does the Hebrew. In proof of this assertion, one needs but to allude to the vogue in post-exilic Judaism of the Apocalypse, in which contemporary history was presented in the form of allegory, and to the Rabbinical fondness for the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. So it would not be difficult to show that not only these qualities I have mentioned, but all the qualities that made Disraeli admired or feared were his by virtue of his Jewish inheritance.