I would like to temper the characterization of Benjamin Disraeli
presented by Barry Doyle in his recent review of a Disraeli biography.
The inability to understand why the Conservative party could choose
an eccentric, middle-class, Anglicanized Jew for a leader, and the
allegation that Disraeli could never have had the country's best
interests in mind, echo the views of Disraeli's nineteenth-century
enemies who ostracized him on account of his religion. To say that the
religion of his birth had no political importance is to miss entirely
the Bulgarian Atrocities and subsequent agitation led by none other than
that great political egotist William Gladstone.
Gladstone's cohorts alleged that as a Jew, Disraeli was utterly callous
regarding the fate of massacred Christians; and it was an almost fatal
political episode for Disraeli. Thus his religion was hardly politically
"unimportant," even if we discount the extent to which his perceptions of
his own aristocratic background led him to high politics to begin with.
Furthermore, the Artisans' Dwellings Act, the Employers' Liability
Act, Victoria's having become Empress of India, the acquisition of the
Suez Canal, all occurred as a direct result of Disraeli's ministrations,
AND he managed to build up a great personal following as a result of his
great vision of England as an empire. The party of which he was the
tribune lives on. In contrast, Gladstone managed to kill his own party
through his one-track-mindedness. The question of who was the greater
political leader is at least much more open-ended than this review
would suggest.
++ Jamie Bronstein++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++ History Department "Vote yourself a farm."+
++ Stanford University -George Henry Evans++
++ disraeli@leland.stanford.edu+++++++++++++++++++++