Disraeli was baptised as an Anglican in 1817 when he was twelve, but his Jewish descent made him a target for prejudice which was not confined to his political opponents, as Alistair Lexden explained in a letter published in the TLS: The Times Literary Supplement on September 30. He wrote in response to a review of a new study, Disraeli: The Novel Politician by David Cesarani.
Sir, Rosemary Ashton, in her review of David Cesarani’s Disraeli (September 23) refers to the “jibes and caricatures” which Disraeli endured. Many of his parliamentary colleagues delighted in them. In 1859 a Tory grandee wrote to the party leader, Lord Derby, denouncing “that nasty, oily, slimy Jew”; Derby read out the words to an appreciative audience at White’s. A leading backbencher, Sir Rainald Knightley, was still railing against “that hellish Jew” in the 1870s. The attacks might have been more muted if he had indeed been “unwilling to speak up” for the admission of Jews to Parliament. He could not keep silent on the matter. He shared his rich, upper middle-class father’s Enlightenment detestation of all religious prejudices (except those against Protestant dissenters whom he could not bear). “Where is your Christianity if you do not believe in their Judaism?”, he demanded in the Commons in 1847. When Lionel de Rothschild first took his seat in 1858, he ostentatiously shook Disraeli’s hand.
What, if anything, did this extraordinary man actually believe? His political disciple, Lord Stanley, referred in his diary on November 30, 1861 to Disraeli’s “open ridicule, in private, of all religions”. He may well have been teasing a stuffy young man. He never ceased reading and discussing both Christian and Jewish texts. In 1851 he said that in old age he hoped to write a life of Christ from the Jewish point of view. After carefully considering all the evidence, John Vincent concluded in his brilliant brief biography (1990) that “Disraeli was a Christian of peculiar perspective, not an apologist for Judaism”.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords