Benjamin Disraeli Deserves an Honorable Place among the Notable Figures of Jewish History https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2016/05/benjamin-disraeli-deserves-an-honorable-place-among-the-notable-figures-of-jewish-history/

May 9, 2016 | Gertrude Himmelfarb
About the author: Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922-2019) wrote extensively on intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on Victorian England. Her recent books include The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot and The People of the Book: Philo-Semitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill.

Examining the political and literary career of the Tory prime minister and parliamentarian, Gertrude Himmelfarb finds a powerful expression of Jewish pride, and a vision of Jewish-Christian harmony, in his works of fiction:

Though formally Anglican—his father had him baptized when he was twelve, before the rite of bar mitzvah—Disraeli identified himself, and was generally identified, as a Jew. He bore a conspicuously Jewish name, changing his father’s D’Israeli only by removing the apostrophe. He made no secret of his heritage in his speeches and writings, and flaunted it in his person, deliberately cultivating a Jewish appearance. And his novels dramatized a politics imbued with Judaism and a “New Crusade” that would restore Christianity to its Jewish origins. All of this in mid-Victorian England, when Jews were the villains of novels and the butt of satirists, when they could not even have a seat in Parliament let alone climb to “the top of the greasy pole,” as Disraeli put it. (Not one has since climbed it; there has been no Jewish prime minister in the nearly century-and-a-half since his death.)

Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/der-alte-jude/article/2002287