That historical interest he did feel deeply. One might almost say of him that he was a Christian because he was a Jew, for Christianity was to him the proper development of the ancient religion of Israel. “The Jews,” he observes in the Life of Lord George Bentinck, “represent the Semitic principle, all that is most spiritual in our nature.... It is deplorable that several millions of Jews still persist in believing only a part of their religion.”
Though it has been maintained that in the Dark and Middle Ages a considerable number of Gentiles found their way into Jewish communities and became Judaised.
The high average of intellectual power among the Jews need not be attributed to purity of race; it is sufficiently explained by their history. Nor is it clear that where two of the more advanced races are mixed by intermarriage, the product is inferior to either of the parent stocks. On the contrary, such a mixture, e.g. of Teutonic and Slavonic blood, or of Celtic and Teutonic, gives a result at least equal in capacity to either of the pure-blooded races which have been so commingled.
He had an intellectual arrogance, which made him dislike what may be called the Radical conception of human equality. In the Life of Lord George Bentinck he remarks, “The Jews are a living and the most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man.... All the tendencies of the Jewish race are conservative. Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy.”
On one occasion he went so far as to deny that he had asked Peel for office, relying on the fact that the letter which contained the request was marked “private,” so that Peel could not use it to disprove his statement (Letters of Sir Robert Peel, by C. S. Parker, vol. ii. p. 486; vol. iii. pp. 347, 348).