Benjamin Disraeli and the myth of Sephardi superiority

Abstract

On the day following Benjamin Disraeli's death, Lady Battersea (1843-1931), daughter of Sir Anthony de Rothschild (1810-1876), wrote to her husband that their late friend had been only loyal to Queen and country, but also to the race from which he sprung, adding that his racial instincts were religion and he was true to that religion until he drew last breath. ''1 Lady Battersea's observation that Disraeli's ideas about race were central to self-definition was consistent with contemporary interpretations of character and beliefs. Friend and foe alike routinely linked political behavior and thinking to ethnic background, to what Lady Battersea called his racial instincts. In the century following death, however, biographers, as well as historians and political scientists, hesitated to view racial concerns as central to identity and career, preferring to ignore them or at least minimize their importance. In biographical triptych Burke, Disraeli, and Churchill (1961), Stephen Graubard, for example, though prepared to acknowledge Disraeli's interest in race, confessed to not knowing what to make of it. It is difficult to understand, he admitted, why Disraeli charged Sidonia with another teaching mission to instruct Coningsby in the greatness of the Jewish race. With less hesitation, biographer Robert Blake dismissed Disraeli's Jewishness in favor of the Italian streak in character. If national or racial stereotypes were to be introduced at all, Blake believed, then the traits associated with the Mediterranean character were more dominant: pride, vanity, flamboyance, generosity, emotionalism, quarrelsomeness, extravagance, theatricality, an addiction to conspiracy, and a fondness for intrigue. Indeed, in Blake's view, Disraeli's financial ineptitude demonstrated the weakness of the Jewish element in makeup. 2