The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time by Michael Shapiro Page B

Beaconsfield, first Jewish prime minister of England, was a potent mixture of idealism and impassioned reason. One of the greatest exponents of the parliamentary system, Disraeli possessed a biting wit and fluency of tongue unmatched in democratic history. More books have been written about this fascinating and infuriating man than about any other British politician before Winston Churchill. While his great Liberal opponent William Gladstone remains to us forever caught up in the mores of the Victorian era, Disraeli seems timeless, a modern and ancient man who would have been equally comfortable debating Pericles or Margaret Thatcher.
    Gladstone ruled England on and off for over a dozen years, through four administrations. His archrival, Disraeli, served as the British leader for only a little over six years. However, Disraeli’s contributions to British and world history were as or more important than Gladstone’s. Surely Disraeli’s influence has lasted longer.
    Briefly filling out Lord Derby’s last term, Disraeli became prime minister in 1868, making little effect in the short time available. However, his second term, from 1874 to 1880, proved to be decisive years for the British Empire. A bold, some would say reckless, adventurer, Disraeli expanded British dominion over the Suez Canal and India. He passed legislation that reformed England and developed the founding principles of the Conservative (Tory) Party. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Disraeli acted as peacemaker, thwarting Russia’s colonial intentions in the Balkans while preserving his own. Through his popular novels, he made his political views widely known. Disraeli espoused strange racial ideas, stressing his own “pure” origins in the sands of the Middle East as somehow superior to those of “barbarian” Anglo-Saxons. He tried to reconcile a Jewish background with his Christian conversion. Disraeli asserted that Christianity was completed Judaism, a declaration that satisfied no one, angering most, but was for him, more than a rationalization. Familiar as a dandy when young, dubbed “Dizzy” by his friends (and worse by many enemies, including the malicious “Jew d’esprit”), Benjamin Disraeli was the most controversial politician in British history (again before Churchill) and an essential, civilizing force.
    The son of Isaac D’Israeli, an historian, essayist, and admirer of Moses Mendelssohn, Benjamin was of Italian Jewish descent. Reacting to a silly dispute with his Sephardic synagogue, Isaac had his children baptized into the Anglican faith when son Benjamin was thirteen, and brought up as Christians. But for this conversion, Disraeli would never have become in 1837 a member of Parliament and later prime minister. Indeed, Lionel de Rothschild (some say Disraeli’s true model for his fictional character, Sidonia), elected to Parliament in 1847, was denied entry to the House until 1858, for his refusal to utter the required oath “on the true faith of a Christian.”
    Disraeli’s early business undertakings were all failures (wild investments in South American mining shares and a daily newspaper). However, in 1826 he began to write under an anonymous name a series of novels, satirical in tone, on the contemporary political scene. The books were widely read but savagely criticized when the identity of their author was uncovered. He then suffered something of a nervous breakdown.
    With his sister’s fiancé, William Meredith, Disraeli left Britain in 1830 for a “Grand Tour” of the Mediterranean. The sixteen-month trip made a permanent impression on him. Disraeli was particularly taken with Jerusalem. He began to understand the relationship between his Jewish heritage and Christian assimilation. Indeed, this Middle Eastern journey inspired creation of the protagonist of his novel Alroy (1833). Set in an exotic twelfth-century milieu, the character, David Alroy, fails in his attempt to restore the Holy Land to Jewish dominion.