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Benjamin Disraeli, by Adam Kirsch. New York: Nextbook and Schocken, 2008. 258 pp. $21.00.
Adam Kirsch’s biography, Benjamin Disraeli, is a recent installment of the notable “Nextbook” collaboration with Schocken Press, a respected and frequently cutting-edge publisher in Jewish Studies. An attractively produced, trim volume, it richly deserves a wide readership. In many respects Kirsch’s biography is a superb contribution, providing an insightful and accessible interpretation of the Jewish dimensions of Disraeli—who continues to inspire immense interest. In addition to a pithy survey of Disraeli’s political career, Kirsch renders a unique and valuable service in providing a synopsis of Disraeli’s staggering literary output, most of which is unread (and undervalued) by the current generation of scholars and students.
Contarini Fleming (1832), according to Kirsch, “is not a great novel, [but] it is a vitally important document of Disraeli’s mind” (p. 79), even more so than his veiled autobiography, Vivian Grey (1826) (pp. 30, 48–51). Regarding The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), “it is Disraeli’s distinction between Jewish belief and Jewish solidarity, and his insistence that it is possible to have the latter without the former, that makes Alroy a significant proto-Zionist text” (p. 89). “Indirectly in Contarini Fleming and explicitly in Alroy, Disraeli reclaimed the imaginative freedom to define Jewishness, and himself as a Jew, on his own terms. In this sense, it was necessary for Disraeli to become a novelist before he could be a statesman, and his career as a statesman was a continuation of the work of self-invention that he began as a novelist” (p. 78).
Despite its merits and erudition, academics should be aware that this is not a scholarly book. There are no footnotes, sometimes making it difficult to follow up on Kirsch’s points. He does, however, attach a small section at the end “For Further Reading.” Here Kirsch acknowledges his indebtedness to the six-volume biography of Disraeli commenced by William Flavelle Moneypenny and finished by George Earle Buckle (published between 1910 and 1920), and Robert Blake’s Disraeli (1966). Although he cites Todd Endelman’s textbook on Anglo-Jewry as major source for background, Kirsch seems unaware of the anthology Endelman co-edited with Tony Kushner, Disraeli’s Jewishness (2002), which complements his own study. Indeed, Kirsch’s thesis is precisely a guiding thread of Endelman and Kushner: that “Disraeli's Jewishness was both the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine” (Kirsch, p. xxiii).
Perhaps more problematic than his ignorance or omission of the most relevant scholarly work is Kirsch’s statement that “Hannah Arendt devoted a largely hostile section of The Origins of Totalitarianism to [Disraeli’s] Jewish mythmaking . . .” (p. 246). Those familiar with Arendt’s work might find this disingenuous. A major thrust of Kirsch’s interpretation is that Disraeli “had to turn his Jewishness from a handicap into a mystique. He had to convince the world, and himself, that the Jews were a noble race, with a glorious past and a great future. He even had to turn anti-Semitic myths to his own account—to make people believe, if he was a wizard and conjurer, he would at least use his powers for England. As a result, Disraeli became one of the nineteenth century’s chief points of reference for thinking about Jews and Judaism. Jews and anti-Semites alike looked to Disraeli in constructing their own images of Jewish power” (pp. xxii–xxiii). Toward the conclusion, Kirsch avers: “Disraeli’s imagination of Jewishness did what he needed it to do” (p. 241). This is indeed a compelling argument—but essentially that of Hannah Arendt in “The Potent Wizard,” ten dense pages from which Kirsch professes to distance himself. “With a few slight changes,” Kirsch asserts, “you could easily turn the Sidonia scenes in [Disraeli’s novels] Coningsby and Tancred into an anti-Semitic tract to rival The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And, as a matter of fact, the most vicious anti-Semites of the late nineteenth century all reprised Disraeli’s ideas, sometimes giving him explicit credit” (p. 132). In light of this contradictory hijacking and glib dismissal of Arendt, one would expect greater intellectual honesty from Nextbook, which is attempting to bridge the chasm between academic Jewish Studies and the wider public.
Despite its authoritative tone, the book also suffers from rather soft historical footing. Kirsch remarks that Benjamin’s father, Isaac Disraeli, “like all Sephardic Jews in London, belonged to the Bevis Marks Synagogue” (p. 21). This reveals a poor grasp of the Anglo-Jewish scene such as detailed by Endelman and others, in which Sephardim were simultaneously among the economic elite and the lumpenproletariat, even the criminal class, that certainly would not have been welcomed warmly at the august Bevis Marks. A generation of scholarship has undermined the axiom, repeated by Kirsch, that the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, occurring mainly after Disraeli’s death, were “state-sponsored” (p. 135).
Kirsch immersed himself in the literature by and about Disraeli but did not seem to linger in Disraeli’s environment itself. For instance, he underestimates the presence and complexity of Jews in British popular culture—in particular, the extent to which Jews were prominent in boxing. Although Arendt and Blake did not mention that Disraeli was also trading off of an image of tough and manly Jews as personified by Daniel Mendoza—a contemporary of Isaac Disraeli—this certainly was part of the larger milieu in which Benjamin Disraeli operated. Although Benjamin Disraeli did not share Byron’s cult of physical fitness, which included Byron’s adulation of Mendoza, Disraeli “modeled his own image” on that of “the great man,” Byron (p. 44). One of the strengths of the book is its excellent introduction, which expounds on the fact that “in 1876, during Benjamin Disraeli’s second term as prime minister of England, two of England’s best novelists published books whose central characters were Jews” (p. ix). Had Kirsch dipped more into the contemporary broadsheets along with novels, however, his view would have been greatly enhanced.
It is evident that Kirsch is more a poet than historian. The writing is crisp and clear. “By the 1830s,” Kirsch writes, Disraeli “was regularly dodging bailiffs sent by his creditors to arrest him. His novel writing descended into hackwork, as he tried to keep afloat by writing book after book . . . . But if Disraeli’s recklessness saddled him with debts, his genius helped him to turn his debts into a kind of imaginative asset” (p. 40). “Now that he was in Parliament, the only things Disraeli needed to put his disreputable past behind him were money and a good marriage. In 1839 he got them both, in the person of Mary Anne Lewis. . . . It would be a beneficial transaction for both of them” (p. 101). As a gift, Adam Kirsch’s Disraeli would probably be more appreciated, and likely to be read, than most other non-fiction books one might give to an educated friend or relative with an interest in both English and Jewish history.
Michael Berkowitz
University College London
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