Sejarah Zionisme, 1600-1918/Volume 1/Bab 27
CHAPTER XXVII.
EARL OF BEACONSFIELD
Christianity and Judaism—Disraeli’s character—Jewish features—Alroy—Tancred—The defence of Jewish rights—Oriental policy.
The most original combination of an Englishman and a Jew was Benjamin Disraeli (1804‒1887), Earl of Beaconsfield (1876), whom Zionists may claim as one of the greatest representatives of their movement. Was Lord Beaconsfield a Christian or a Jew? For Jews the question is satisfactorily answered by their instinct of sympathy. Lord Beaconsfield felt towards the members of his race as a Jew feels for his fellow-Jews. That being the test, Lord Beaconsfield proved himself a good Jew in that respect. In religious matters, however, Lord Beaconsfield was a Christian—and a Zionist.
He was purely Jewish by descent, and was the eldest son of Isaac D’Israeli (1766‒1848), the author of The Curiosities of Literature (1791), The Genius of Judaism (1833), etc., by his wife Miriam (Maria), a daughter of Naphtali (d. 1808) de Solomon Basevi of Verona, Italy. He was born in London on Friday, 21 December, 1804, and was initiated into the Abrahamic covenant on the following Friday, 26 Tebet, 5565, by David Abarbanel Lindo (1772‒1852). Isaac D’Israeli severed his connection finally with the Bevis Marks synagogue in March, 1817, and on the 31 July following, at the instigation it is said of Samuel Rogers (1763‒1855), the banker poet, the future Premier was baptised at the parish church of St. Andrew, Holborn. In his public conduct and pronouncements he proved undeniably that an Englishman, by birth a Jew, can be as much an Englishman as any descendant of Saxon, Norman, or Dane living in these islands, and can share with as warm a glow the common sentiment of patriotism that unites Englishmen round their ancient throne and institutions.
Disraeli was a living monument of the greatness of the Jewish race, of its capacity to produce individuals equal in mental stature to the loftiest among mankind. What he thought of his ancestral and of his adopted faith respectively may be gathered from the well-known words in one of his earlier writings: “Christianity is Judaism for the multitude,” a sentence which to his brethren in race is equivalent to saying: “Ye are the salt of the earth.” The perseverance and zeal which acknowledged no defeat and produced such extraordinary successes were essentially Jewish. The most superficial acquaintance with Jews is sufficient to reveal the fact that there is no Jewish trait more distinctive than this unconquerable determination. It is a heritage bequeathed to them by their ancestors. With the many different experiences of a race dispersed in every corner of the globe, without a home for nearly twenty centuries, hunted from country to country, carrying their lives in their hands, and bound to be on the alert for every emergency, it is not strange that the Jews display great resourcefulness.
The Disraeli family had been expelled by the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, in the fifteenth century, and found an asylum in Italy. Two centuries and a half later, Benjamin (1730‒1816) [de Isaac] Israeli of Cento, in Ferrara, Italy, grandfather of the Earl of Beaconsfield, settled in England. Thus the experience stored in the mind of a typical Jew like Beaconsfield represents more than a single trait of heredity; it is a combination of such traits. But what was most Jewish in him was his affection for the Holy Land. This pious feeling, which he shared with his race, became with him a tremendous power; it influenced his policy and caused him to consolidate England’s power in the East. He also constantly supported every movement towards Jewish emancipation.
As a historic figure he possesses a charm of his own, and romanticism pervades his whole career. Neither his birth nor the religion of his ancestors nor his own antecedents prevented him from conquering the prejudices which the aristocracy is wont to show towards a self-made man; for the English aristocracy possesses the wonderful quality that ensures the preservation of its strength—that if once it recognizes genius, far from opposing or avoiding it, it defends it, attracts it, and completely absorbs it. And so Disraeli, instead of becoming a fiery tribune of the masses, developed into an able and successful leader of the aristocracy. This man, whom his opponents had abused as a foreigner, so conducted himself as finally to become one of England’s most famous champions.
It was no common energy and perseverance that Benjamin Disraeli needed to climb to fame as he did. It was a continuous struggle for him, from the time when, hooted by the Whig majority in Parliament, he retorted that the day would come when they would hear him, to the time when the great Conservative Party chose him as its leader and he was acclaimed by all his countrymen. Without inheriting a fortune in this country—where wealth and birth had always been, if not altogether indispensable, at least a most important qualification for admission to public life—he was yet able to overcome obstacles that were then deemed insurmountable and to attain by sheer force of his own unconquerable will to a position that powers unfathomable seemed joined to prevent him from gaining. By race a Jew, he was at bottom a clear-sighted sceptic. With remarkable foresight he had been able to weigh the advantage which, from the point of view of a Cabinet Minister, he could gain from the position offered him by the Conservative party. No one foresaw more clearly than he the future in store for it. As a Jew he also knew well that it was impossible to prevent the Liberal evolution from being slowly accomplished in England. Instead of declaring war upon Liberalism he compromised with it, and, by means of concessions cleverly granted at the right moment, he contrived to concede only a portion of what public opinion demanded. His tendencies, however, were democratic, and in an age in which greed for material advancement was levelling all things to the lowest plane, he was able to rescue England from a grovelling servility to blatant commercialism, uplift her soul and rouse her to a recognition of the fact that ephemeral interests are not everything to a great people.
As Premier he showed Europe that “England was something more than a counting-house.” He obtained possession of the Suez Canal by the purchase of shares—a transaction in which he was assisted by the late Lord Rothschild (Appendix lviii).
He placed the Imperial Crown of India on his Sovereign’s head. Without firing a shot, he took possession of Cyprus (Appendix lix), and caused the might of British arms to be felt in every continent.
His genius, with its many interesting characteristics, was perceived long before his abilities in international statesmanship and diplomacy became known. But as a man of letters, no less than as a statesman, he was first of all a son of his race (Appendix lx) and a Zionist. His speeches and writings were never those of a renegade anxious to vilify the faith he had forsaken, or to condemn the ancestry from which he had sprung. There never was a Jew who wrote in more glowing terms of the greatness of the Jewish race. No Jew has borne more fervid testimony to the sublimity of the religion by which the Jewish people has been sustained through all persecutions. No one could have used more persuasive arguments, or adopted wiser measures to remove restrictions from which the Jews were suffering. He had a deeply-rooted respect and love for his ancient people and for its ancient land.
To restore the Jews to their rightful place in the esteem of the world, he wrote and spoke and toiled (Appendix lxi). For this he imperilled the prospects of his own career. For this he was content to expose himself to the scoffs and gibes of opponents who almost to his last hour never forgave him the “crime” of being a Jew. He held the firm belief that “the Lord still fights for Israel.” Unlike those degenerate sons of Israel, who are ever eager to conceal what should be a source of honour to them, he was never ashamed of his origin: and when taunted with being of common extraction he would maintain that his ancestors were already noble when those of the proudest aristocracy in the world were still barbarians, roaming helplessly about the woods.
Although he was educated in the bosom of the Christian Church, his heart never ceased to beat for the greatness and to feel for the sufferings of the Jewish nation, to which he belonged by the blood in his veins and the honoured name he bore. Wherever there was a struggle for the rights of Jews in matters that concerned their honour and well-being, wherever there was a fight for truth and uprightness, there we see him stand—a conqueror. While so many authors made it their business to depict the dark side of the Jewish character or history, he used his gifted pen to show the worthier traits of the Jewish character and the influence of the Jews in the world.
As a writer Lord Beaconsfield was essentially an Oriental. Even the tales in which he describes the clubs and drawing-rooms of London are like an Arabian Nights’ entertainment transplanted to St. James’. Over persons and scenes he casts an Oriental magnificence. His Oriental tales are, to our mind, the most natural that he wrote.
The wonderful tale of Alroy (1833)¹ is an Oriental romance founded on a Hebrew tradition concerning the Princes of the Captivity—rulers whom the Jews continued to elect from among the descendants of the House of David (2854‒2924 a.m.) even after their dispersion. Alroy is one of them,² who after a long interregnum possesses himself, by supernatural assistance, of a part of the sceptre of Solomon (ob. 2964), and establishes the Hebrew monarchy on the ruins of the new Caliphate of Bagdad. His life is short, and his reign much shorter. The tale is full of enthusiasm for the hopes of Israel. One little passage may be cited: “All was silent: alone the Hebrew prince stood, amid the regal creation of the Macedonian captains. Empires and dynasties flourish and pass away; the proud metropolis becomes a solitude, the conquering kingdom even a desert: but Israel still remains, still a descendant of the most ancient kings.”
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) Mr. Gladstone said that Disraeli asserted that only those nations that behaved well to the Jews prospered....
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
The great merit of Tancred (1847) 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.
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.