The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (13 page)

U
nlike the wealthy banker Sidonia in his novels
Coningsby
and
Tancred,
Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of 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. Later, in his novel
Tancred,
Disraeli’s early Zionism would result in the often-quoted line that “a race that persists in celebrating their vintage although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards.”

When Meredith died of smallpox in Cairo, Disraeli cut short his extended vacation and returned to England. Due to his burgeoning literary fame and stylish reputation as a fop with a lively wit, he soon gained entry into fashionable society and the bedrooms of extravagant ladies of high birth. In 1831 he decided to enter politics and become in real life a hero of the same epic proportions as his fictional ones. Associated initially as a radical of questionable background (in other words, a Jew) and of immoral sexual habits, Disraeli was trounced repeatedly.

Learning from his failures, he allied himself with the Conservative party and was returned to Parliament in 1837. Disraeli consolidated his position in 1839 by marrying the respectable and rich widow (twelve years his senior) of a fellow former member. The brief support of the Tory leader, Sir Robert Peel, gave Disraeli added prominence as well as his developing talents as a master orator skilled at ripping his political enemies apart in cascades of brilliant argument. When Peel failed to name him to his cabinet, Disraeli countered by founding a group of young Tories bent on reforming the government. The “Young England” movement sought to change the party from a stuffy bunch of aristocrats concerned only with preserving the status quo to an organization more representative of the British people. Despite the escapist and rather romantic notions of his group, Disraeli tried to rally the common people about the crown led by aristocratic leaders enlightened by religious feeling. Even with all this nostalgic nonsense, Disraeli expanded his party’s political base and in effect brought the Tories into modern times.

When Lord Derby became prime minister in 1852, Disraeli became the leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He returned to power in the second (1858) and third (1866) Derby administrations, succeeding the party leader as PM in 1868. During Disraeli’s short first stay as prime minister in 1868, he expanded an already close friendship with Queen Victoria. The queen grew to despise the taciturn Gladstone, but almost fell in love with the charming Mr. Disraeli, whose every audience brought her pleasure and stimulus.

Ironically, Disraeli’s defeat in 1868 was largely due to the electoral reform bill extending the right to vote to the working classes, which he had vigorously supported and helped to carry. In 1874, however, the Conservatives won a clear mandate. Prime Minister Disraeli then embarked on a historic series of governmental innovations. With the able initiative of his home secretary R. A. Cross, Disraeli passed laws to clear the slums, improve public health and factory conditions, and regulate the sale of food and drugs. Much of this legislation was fifty years ahead of its time, establishing England as the most progressive government of the era and a model for other democracies.

Disraeli’s greatest concern as prime minister was his overwhelming desire to maintain Britain’s power in Europe. He viewed foreign policy as his most important duty and criticized Gladstone’s reaction to continental crises as unnecessarily pacifist. The Rothschilds, on Disraeli’s urging, provided the capital in 1875 for England to purchase shares in the Suez Canal from the khedive of Egypt. The shares became known as the “Key of India,” confirming British occupation of Egypt and control over a vital route to South Asia.

To commemorate expanding British dominion, Disraeli’s government declared Queen Victoria Empress of India. Her thanks to Disraeli was the granting of a peerage, making this Sephardic Jew the first earl of Beaconsfield.

Benjamin Disraeli from a painting by Sir Francis Grant.

From 1876 to 1878 his administration was preoccupied with international power politics. England and Russia had become rivals, playing with developing countries in the Mediterranean like pawns in a global chess game. Disraeli forced his upper hand when Russia, exhausted by its war effort against Turkey, was made to submit the terms of the peace to international mediation. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Disraeli met with Chancellor Bismarck, whose words
“Der altejude, das ist der Mann!”
(“The old Jew, that is some man!”) remain the most memorable from the conference. By the clear threat of British military power, the Ottoman Empire was preserved (to become forty years later an enemy of England) and the route to India secured from Russian hegemony.

Thereafter, petty wars in Afghanistan and South Africa dominated Tory foreign policy concerns. Viewed today, this colonial involvement in “Third World” countries was both civilizing and oppressive, subjugating unique cultures to the grave sameness of the British Commonwealth. After these foreign mishaps and troubles at home and the return to power of Gladstone in 1880, Disraeli moved houses, dominating Lords in his last year of life (and wrote the splendid semiautobiographical
Endymion,
his last completed novel).

T
he British poet W.H. Auden noted that Kafka was “the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs.” Born and raised in Prague, a Jew who spent most of his life working in what was to become Czechoslovakia, Kafka spoke and wrote only in German, the language of his oppressors. He felt perhaps more sensitively than any other writer in history that special separateness now known as alienation.

Kafka’s carefully crafted literary works have the clarity and ambiguity of dreams. His fiction is always easy to read, yet difficult to comprehend. In this “Kafkaesque” world, stories are told only from the protagonist’s point of view. Readers never have the comfort of a writer’s detachment. We see what happens in a story not safely from the outside, but from the inside out. This perspective makes Kafka’s tales terrifying real. This great author does not throw us into a stream of consciousness, not knowing where we are, but sure that what rushes about us is there, is true. Rather, Kafka insists we know where we are, in sharp, bright light, then blinds us from the truth in language that implies, makes us guess, traps us, imprisons us without hope of release.

Like his fellow German-speaking Bohemian the composer Gustav Mahler, Kafka was a prophet of the horrible events of the twentieth century.
The Penal Colony
and
The Trial,
written before the First World War, are remarkable predictions of Hitler and Stalin, show trials, totalitarianism (whether Nazi or Communist), brainwashing, the Final Solution. Indeed, Kafka’s beloved sister Ottla died in a concentration camp.

To hold back the most deeply felt truths, Kafka often engaged in masochistic fantasies. The prisoner in the penal colony is punished by the law he violated literally being imprinted in his flesh. Metaphor becomes metamorphosis when Gregor Samsa awakes one morning from “uneasy dreams” transformed into a massive insect. Gregor has become his own worst nightmare.

Kafka’s dream stories seem to recreate thought before its expression in words. A human bug unable to flip over in bed, faceless judges condemning the damned at trial, murky castles looming overhead, metaphors represented in powerful visions difficult to understand, but simple to feel—and fear.

Franz was the eldest of three girls and three boys. His two brothers died in infancy. Kafka’s father, Herman, supported the family with a dry goods business that flourished through the support of his wife Julie’s wealthy family of Prague brewers.

Herman was a rough, physically imposing man. Julie largely ignored Franz when he was young, consumed with helping Herman in his business. Her family, although successful businesspeople, were descendants of rabbis and scholars, wise men and religious cranks. Franz Kafka was their natural progeny. Always accompanying his sensitive artistic nature were deep-seated feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. He felt that his slight physique and failure to achieve any meaningful commercial success could not live up to his father’s imposing presence. When Franz grew up, his mother compensated for her earlier abandonment of him with smothering, overwhelming attention—too late for Franz. He did not have the strength to leave his parents until he was thirty-one or part from his “little mother Prague” until just before his death ten years later (only to return home to die).