“Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?” asks William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “All poets believe that it does,” replies his imagined interlocutor, the prophet Isaiah, “& in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains.” Blake was one of this country’s foremost Romantic poets — so it is fitting that his Isaiah sounds like Benjamin Disraeli, the most Romantic prime minister we’ve ever had.
Despite his association with the Victorian era, Disraeli came of age during the Regency period. Born in 1804, he was steeped in Blake and Beethoven and all the other Romantics. Later, of course, he created the modern Conservative Party, yet he is arguably most famous now for being the only Jewish prime minister this country has had. Metaphorically, then, Disraeli did remove, or at least move, mountains. And as a Romantic, and a novelist to boot, he did so by using his imagination to self-fashion an identity that gave him the confidence, the “firm persuasion”, that a middle-class Jew needed to lead a resolutely Christian Tory party.
No book is better on this aspect of Disraeli than Adam Kirsch’s 2008 biography, which taught me two things. First, that a degree of self-mythologisation is probably necessary for most worldly success, and unequivocally fundamental to political success. Second, that this process is primarily an imaginative undertaking, which is why a contemporary American literary critic could write so illuminatingly about a 19th-century British prime minister.
Early on, Kirsch notes how formative the exotic, Romantic figure of Lord Byron was for the young Disraeli. After leaving his unremarkable London school, Disraeli tried out a career in law, but gave it up for reasons articulated by the protagonist of his first novel Vivian Grey, who muses (probably correctly) that “to be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man.” He then embarked on a Grand Tour, following Byron’s footsteps to Spain, Malta, Albania and Greece. His path was set: a Byronic life of Romantic action over bourgeois stability.
From the beginning, Disraeli’s imagination powered both his literary and political career. And it soon became obvious that letters alone would never satisfy him. As he wrote in his novel Contarini Fleming, “Would you rather have been Homer or Julius Caesar, Shakespeare or Napoleon? No one doubts.”
These words are spoken by Contarini’s father, but Disraeli was making the argument for himself. And this is the point. More than literary endeavours, his novels were the arena in which he worked his as yet incoherent theories — often contradictory and occasionally nonsensical — into a worldview that gave him the psychological basis for action. It is no coincidence that his greatest contribution to political thought, the development of One-Nation Conservatism, was articulated not in a political tract but in his novel Sybil.
The young Disraeli dabbled in get-rich-quick schemes that inevitably resulted in catastrophic debts that dogged him for decades. He also suffered a nervous breakdown that laid him up for two years. This period of Disraeli’s life again recalls Byron, who once wrote of “the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.” To make matters worse, Disraeli also suffered public humiliation when it was revealed that the anonymous “man of fashion” who authored Vivian Grey, supposedly an insider’s account of high society, was in fact 21 years old, middle-class and — perhaps worst of all for Victorian England — a Jew.
Through all of this, Disraeli still lacked a goal toward which he could channel his vast abilities, especially his imagination. Whether through books or politics, its lava had to erupt, or else he would continue to suffer earthquakes of the mind. Most powerfully cathartic for Disraeli, Kirsch argues, was confronting his Jewishness, which was both “the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine”. The adult Disraeli was technically not a Jew: following a minor row with Bevis Marks Synagogue, his father, the gentle and scholarly Isaac Disraeli, had Benjamin baptised into the Church of England at the age of 12. It was a fit of pique that changed history. The right to sit in Parliament still required an MP to take an oath “upon the true faith of a Christian” (and would until the 1858 Jews Relief Act some 20 years after Disraeli first became an MP).
Despite his baptism, Disraeli’s Jewishness remained the central, unignorable fact about him. With his “olive complexion and coal-black eyes, and the mighty dome of his forehead (no Christian temple, be sure),” one contemporary remarked, “I would as soon have thought of sitting down at table with Hamlet, or Lear, or the Wandering Jew.” (And when people weren’t remarking on his Jewishness, it was his Mediterranean background). It didn’t matter that Disraeli had been converted, his very name screamed Jew — and it would anyway have been unthinkable to deny what he was. As Kirsch observes, “self-contempt was alien to his nature.” Disraeli’s preferred formulation was to claim that while his religion was Christian, his race was Jewish.
Nonetheless, he remained caught between two models of Jewishness in the English mind: the bloodthirsty, avaricious Shylock, and the grubby street peddler. These quasi-medieval tropes persisted because most British people at this time would never even meet a Jew. The community numbered around only about 25,000, concentrated mainly in London, as well as in provincial cities like Liverpool and Manchester. It was dominated by a mostly Sephardic elite descended from families who had fled Iberia in the 16th and 17th centuries, alongside a smaller Ashkenazi population of Central and Eastern European origin. The Sephardic community into which Disraeli was born was privileged. Largely middle-class, it engaged in trade, finance, and the professions, and was socially integrated to a degree uncommon for Jews elsewhere in Europe.
But legal disabilities and social prejudice persisted. Disraeli’s response, with characteristic chutzpah, was to create a third model. He simply claimed that his Sephardic Jewish family traced its roots back to ancient Phoenician settlers in Iberia who predated even the Norman barons of 1066. No mere merchants, Spanish Jews were landowners, as proven by a decree from the Emperor Constantine. This founding myth of Jewish noble lineage would justify Disraeli’s eventual adoption of a heraldic coat of arms complete with “Tower of Castille” crest.
It was, of course, a pile of old hogwash. There is no evidence that the Disraelis even came from Spain. Kirsch notes that as far as is traceable, the family came from the town of Cento in the Papal States; further back, they likely hailed from the Middle East. But it didn’t matter. What mattered is that this fiction provided Disraeli with the psychological armour to withstand a life of ceaseless antisemitic attacks. In 1835, when the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell attacked Disraeli for his Jewish heritage in the House of Commons, Disraeli’s response was unhesitating. “Yes, I am a Jew,” he replied, “and while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
All the while, Disraeli the outsider became an acute observer of the British class system. So completely did he understand how ancestral pride drove the aristocratic establishment running the Tory Party that he was eventually able to lead it. Not that anyone could really begrudge him inventing a pedigree when everyone else was at it too. Disraeli described the process simply: make a pile in banking, buy a peerage and throw a “halo of imagination” over “a humble or obscure origin.” Like Orwell, he understood that the English aristocracy was never a purely hereditary class but one constantly replenished by parvenus.
Disraeli’s own “halo of imagination” was able to transmute his Jewishness from a potential source of shame into a source first of pride and then of nobility. So powerful were Disraeli’s dreams of Jewish prestige and power that, at one point, they included fictionalised fantasies of restoring Jewish sovereignty to Palestine. Kirsch places two of his novels, Alroy and Tancred, alongside George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the proto-Zionist canon. But these ideas remained fantasies. For Disraeli, as for Alroy, to become the “patriarch of a pastoral horde” in an Ottoman province was no substitute for leading the world’s great power. Like Blake, Disraeli would build Jerusalem here at home.
Disraeli characteristically outlined his fantasies of Jewish success through his fiction — personified in the form of Sidonia. An international eminence grise who moves between parliaments and royal courts, Sidonia knows everyone and makes everything happen, albeit behind the scenes. Impossibly intelligent, sophisticated, and, in true Romantic style, jaded, Sidonia appears as a secondary character in Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred.
As Kirsch observes, Disraeli intended Sidonia to be a “figure of great power and glamour.” But Disraeli’s wish fulfillment about domestic Jewish success was ultimately incontinent. As magnetic as he is, Sidonia is also an antisemitic stereotype: the unseen, controlling Jew whose tentacles are everywhere.
Great power and glamour were, though, what Disraeli wanted for his own life, and for this he had to reconcile his Jewishness with being a practising Christian, which required yet more imaginative sophistry. As ever, he worked it out first in his fiction. As an Anglican priest argues in the novel Sybil, “the second Testament is avowedly only a supplement… Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing”. The meaning, here, was clear. “I am the blank page between the Old Testament and the New,” Disraeli later asserted. Theologically suspect it may have been, but Kirsch explains how “psychologically necessary” it was for Disraeli to “pull off the delicate balancing act required of a Jew seeking to lead a Christian nation.”
And lead it he did. Serving as Prime Minister from February to December 1868, and again from 1874 to 1880, Disraeli was always willing to refashion himself for political purposes. In the 1840s, he made his name as the champion of the Tory landed interest against Sir Robert Peel’s repealing of the Corn Laws. Yet when he gained real power, in the 1850s, he quietly accepted free trade as irreversible, shelving attempts to restore tariffs in the name of political survival. In 1867, after years of warning that extending the vote would endanger the social order, he piloted the Second Reform Act through Parliament, dramatically expanding the electorate to working-class men. In this, he understood what Karl Marx never did: emancipate the working classes and they will often vote for conservatives.
“He understood what Karl Marx never did: emancipate the working classes and they will often vote for conservatives.”
And the engine for so much of this achievement? A pre-eminent Romantic passion: love of glory. As Disraeli told his constituents in an 1844 speech, “I love fame; I love public reputation; I love to live in the eyes of the country.”
Yet if Kirsch’s biography is partly compelling because Disraeli was an extraordinary man, his story also illuminates our national character. After all, this country has long bred Romantics. Consider Boris Johnson, the middle-class, Etonian scholarship boy and surely the most overt example of Disraelian self-creation in recent times. Where Disraeli had his novels to work out his politics, Johnson relied on the Classics, climbing his very own Cursus Honorum all the way to the top. If he seemed anachronistic, he knew it. He understood that this is not the 19th century. Britain is no longer the global hegemon, and the ambitions of a Disraeli would sound ridiculous today. So, instead, Johnson took his Romantic temperament, his pathological ambition, and subverted them through a P.G. Wodehouse-style schtick that made everyone laugh.
Conversely, Rory Stewart is a politician who took Disraelian self-fashioning too literally for contemporary tastes. Publicly fashioning himself through books — a solo walk across Afghanistan; governing an Iraqi province — Stewart explicitly used his writing as the imaginative ballast for his political career. “I had once dreamt,” he writes in his memoir, “of modelling myself on a classical hero.” Stewart told the world what a Romantic figure he was: and that was his undoing. Stewart did not, I suspect could not, leaven his self-image with self-deprecation. So while Johnson became PM, Stewart now spends his days getting patronised on a podcast.
The real problem, though, is when self-deception becomes unmoored from morality — and indeed reality. Just over eight years after I read Kirsch’s book, Donald Trump took office, and I saw that one, albeit extreme, conclusion of Disraeli’s self-fashioning had emerged in the near-pathological dishonesty and self-delusion of a man who credits Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power Of Positive Thinking with much of his success. “Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.” What’s striking about this (banal) quotation from Disraeli’s Coningsby is how much it sounds like the self-help guff that Trump imbibed, and which spurred him to become the world’s most powerful man.
How, in the end, do you reconcile “firm persuasion” with reality? Stewart’s problem wasn’t that he was deluded; both Trump and Disraeli illustrate that egregious self-delusion can drive colossal success. It’s rather that he couldn’t tailor this self-mythologisation, or self-delusion, to his circumstances, so different from the snobby, class-obsessed world of the Pax Britannica, where personal belief in individual greatness and destiny found its concomitant in Britain’s global primacy. For Kirsch, then, Disraeli was one of those rare humans “who imagine a life for themselves, and then actually bring it into being”. His statesmanship and his novelistic output are finally impossible to separate because both grew out of the profoundly Romantic conviction that the most important thing a man can create is himself. And that is why almost 200 years later history remembers him, just as it does Byron and Blake.
