Though formally Anglican—his father had him baptized when he was 12, before the rite of bar mitzvah—Disraeli identified himself, and was generally identified, as a Jew. He bore a conspicuously Jewish name, changing his father’s D’Israeli only by removing the apostrophe. He made no secret of his heritage in his speeches and writings, and flaunted it in his person, deliberately cultivating a Jewish appearance. And his novels dramatized a politics imbued with Judaism and a “New Crusade” that would restore Christianity to its Jewish origins. All of this in mid-Victorian England, when Jews were the villains of novels and the butt of satirists, when they could not even have a seat in Parliament let alone climb to “the top of the greasy pole,” as Disraeli put it. (Not one has since climbed it; there has been no Jewish prime minister in the nearly century-and-a-half since his death.)

While climbing that pole, Disraeli wrote no fewer than 15 novels, his first in 1826 at the age of 21 and his last the year before his death in 1881, with another, unfinished one published posthumously. His father, Isaac D’Israeli, a writer, scholar, and man-about-town (who never converted), once cautioned his son: “How will the Fictionist assort with the Politician?” But assort they did. In 1833 in a private journal, Disraeli implicitly responded to the familiar charge that the novels were frivolous, unrealistic fantasies. Vivian Grey, he said, “portrayed my active and real ambition”; The Wondrous Tale of Alroy “my ideal ambition”; Contarini Fleming “my poetic character.” The trilogy was “the secret history of my feelings.”

If those early novels, which predated his political career, reveal his private life, another trilogy, in the mid-forties, when he was firmly established in Parliament, are as revelatory of his public persona. Coningsby (1844), in effect his political testament, was an attack on the “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” characters (the followers of Prime Minister Robert Peel) who were reducing the Conservatives to a party of “Tory men and Whig measures” and a defense of the “New Generation” of the subtitle (the Young Englanders, led by Disraeli), who sought to preserve the venerable institutions of Crown and Church. Sybil, his social testament published the following year, was a commentary on “The Two Nations” of the subtitle, the ominous class divide between the poor and the rich, which could only be overcome by policies favoring the poor and re-creating the “one nation” of the old Tories.

Tancred, which completed the trilogy in 1847, was his spiritual and, one might say, Judaic testament. It is not surprising to find premonitions ofTancred in Coningsby, in which the “new generation” was called on to restore the historic relationship of church and state. Two years later, in the preface to a new edition of Coningsby, Disraeli looked to the church itself for the “renovation of the national spirit.” This, in turn, moved him to “ascend to the origin of the Christian Church”—to the “race which had founded Christianity.”

The Jews were looked upon in the middle ages as an accursed race, the enemies of God and man, the especial foes of Christianity. No one in those days paused to reflect that Christianity was founded by the Jews; that its Divine Author, in his human capacity, was a descendant of King David; that his doctrines avowedly were the completion, not the change, of Judaism. .  .  . The time had arrived when some attempt should be made to do justice to the race which had founded Christianity.

That “race” had appeared earlier in Coningsby in the person of Sidonia, the stranger who inspired the title character to undertake the difficult task of spiritual “renovation.” Sidonia, like Coningsby, is an aristocrat, but of a different order, a scion of that “unmixed race,” “the aristocracy of Nature.” Descended from the Nuevos Christianos, the Marranos of Spain and Portugal who secretly observed Jewish laws and rites, Sidonia had emigrated to England, where he could openly profess his faith. It is there he meets Coningsby, infecting him with the ideals that would transform English politics.

Sidonia reappears in Tancred, where he delivers the message: “All is race; there is no other truth.” Tancred (Lord Montacute) is also an aristocrat, the only son of a duke. Like Coningsby, he too is at odds with the political establishment. Repelled by the materialism and soullessness of his class, he refuses to enter Parliament, informing his father that he wants instead to make a pilgrimage to the “Holy Land,” the “sepulchre of my Saviour.” He hopes there to discover “what is Duty, and what is Faith? What ought I to Do and what ought I to Believe?” Upon the suggestion of a friend, he calls upon Sidonia, the Jewish banker, for advice: “I am born in an age and in a country divided between infidelity on one side and an anarchy of creeds on the other; with none competent to guide me, yet feeling that I must believe, for I hold that duty cannot exist without faith.” Was it unreasonable, he asks, to do what his ancestors would have done six centuries earlier? “It appears to me, Lord Montacute,” Sidonia replies, “that what you want is to penetrate the great Asian mystery.” It is that mission, the “New Crusade” of the subtitle, that Tancred enthusiastically undertakes.

From London to Jerusalem—it is another world and another time Tancred enters. Disraeli himself had made that voyage in 1831, ending up among “that sacred and romantic people from whom I derive by blood and name.” Now, in the person of Tancred, he repeats it. Walking from the garden of Gethsemane toward Bethany, he sees in its colorful past evidence of “a living, a yet breathing and existing city.” He also meets the woman who personifies that spirit. Fatigued by his walk, he falls asleep and awakens to find a young woman standing before him, richly garbed and bejeweled, her face “the perfection of oriental beauty.” Their conversation quickly establishes the fact that he is Christian and she Jewish. Exploring the similarities and differences of their faiths, the woman concludes that they have one thing in common. “We agree that half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew. .  .  . Which do you think should be the superior race, the worshipped or the worshippers?” Tancred is about to answer, but she has vanished. She is later identified as Eva Besso, the “Rose of Sharon,” the daughter of the Jewish banker to whom Sidonia had written a letter of introduction for Tancred.

Much of the rest of the book is an adventure tale in an exotic setting. The adventures are brought about by Eva’s foster-brother, Fakredeen, a clever and unscrupulous Syrian who is plotting to bring all of Palestine under his control. As a result of his intrigues, Tancred is taken prisoner, wounded, and finally released, all the while engaging with his captor in animated discourses about their respective faiths. At one point, Tancred confesses to himself the failure of his mission. His presence in the Holy Land, he had thought, would bring him into communion with the Holy Spirit. But in spite of his prayers, he had received no such sign, suggesting the desolate thought “that there is a qualification of blood as well as of locality necessary for this communion, and that the favored votary must not only kneel in the Holy Land but be of the holy race.” Was he an unwelcome visitor to this land, he wonders? Was it only morbid curiosity or aristocratic restlessness that had brought him here? He tries to reassure himself that he is not like the Indian-Brahmin touring a foreign country. It is as an Englishman that the Holy Land has a natural and intimate relation to him.

Vast as the obligations of the whole human family are to the Hebrew race, there is no portion of the modern populations so much indebted to them as the British people. .  .  . We are indebted to the Hebrew people for our knowledge of the true God and for the redemption from our sins. .  .  . I come to the land whose laws I obey, whose religion I profess, and I seek, upon its sacred soil, those sanctions which for ages were abundantly accorded.

In the final scene of the book, in the garden of Bethany where they had first met, Eva confirms his doubts. He had come, she tells him, seeking a “divine cause,” looking for “stars” and “angels” in this “peculiar and gifted land.” But it is now all mixed up with intrigue, schemes, and politics. “You may be, you are, free from all this, but your faith is not the same. You no longer believe in Arabia” (the contemporary term for Palestine). “Why, thou to me art Arabia,” he insists. “Talk not to me of leaving a divine cause; why, thou art my cause, and thou art most divine.” She persists: “There are those to whom I belong, and to whom you belong. .  .  . Fly, fly from me, son of Europe and of Christ!” Why should he fly, he protests? He is a Christian in the land of Christ. He will not leave until she agrees that “our united destinies shall advance the sovereign purpose of our lives.” If only she declares her love for him, he will sever the “world-worn bonds” that constrain them. That she cannot do. Her head falls upon his shoulder, he embraces her, but her cheek is cold, her hand lifeless. He sprinkles her with water from the fountain, she opens her eyes, sighs, and looks about her in bewilderment. At that moment noises are heard; people come trampling toward them, with shouts calling for Lord Montacute. The party appears. “The Duke and Duchess of Bellamont had arrived at Jerusalem.”

That last sentence of the book comes as a shock to the reader. What are the duke and duchess doing in Jerusalem, and what does their arrival signify for Tancred and his divine but perhaps lost cause? Does it mean that the established order is reasserting itself, fettering Tancred again with those “world-worn bonds”? Or have his parents, the most eminent of Englishmen, come to sympathize with his crusade, even accredit his cause? Some critics find this ambiguity a fatal flaw in the book. Disraeli himself never had second thoughts about it or its message. Thirty years later, as prime minister much involved with the “Eastern question” (a variant of the “Arabian” one), he told his friend Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, that Tancred was his favorite of his novels.

‘How will the Fictionist assort with the Politician?” his father had asked him. Very well, his son could have assured him. Six months after the publication of Tancred, Disraeli delivered a speech in Parliament echoing the novel—indeed, going even further in drawing out its political implications. Where William Gladstone and others argued in favor of the Jewish Disabilities Bill on the grounds of religious liberty, and others opposed it because that liberty violated the established religion, Disraeli insisted that it was precisely for religious reasons that Jews should be admitted to Parliament. “There is something more excellent than religious liberty—and that more excellent thing is religious truth.” And not only religious truth, but “religious truth taking the shape of religious conformity”—that is, a religion consonant with the established church.

Who are these persons professing the Jewish religion? They are persons who acknowledge the same God as the Christian people of this realm. They acknowledge the same divine revelation as yourselves. They are, humanly speaking, the authors of your religion. They are unquestionably those to whom you are indebted for no inconsiderable portion of your known religion, and for the whole of your divine knowledge.

Interrupted by cries of outrage, Disraeli (who would become prime minister twenty years later) went on to defend his position on moral as well as religious grounds. Surely, he argued, those who “profess the religion which every gentleman in this House professes—for every gentleman here does profess the Jewish religion, and believes in Moses and the Prophets. .  .  . Well, then I say that if religion is a security for righteous conduct, you have that security in the instance of the Jews who profess a true religion.” However degraded a Jew might have become as a result of centuries of persecution, he was “sustained by the divine law he obeys, and by the sublime morality he professes.” It is as Christians, therefore, and in a Christian assembly, that Parliament should welcome the Jews—those “who are of the religion in the bosom of which my Lord and Savior was born.”

Four years after that speech in the Commons, Disraeli took the occasion to repeat that theme in an unlikely context. In the midst of his biography of the recently deceased George Bentinck, his friend and ally in the Tory party, he gratuitously inserted a chapter entitled “The Jewish Question”—gratuitously, because Bentinck’s name does not even appear in that chapter, and his only connection with Judaism was his support of the Jewish emancipation bills (and then on the grounds of liberty that Disraeli had dismissed). That chapter is nothing less than a paean to “the Jewish race,” a race “sustained by a sublime religion,” which had survived the hatred and persecution of centuries. Surveying the accomplishments of Jews in every sphere of life, he concluded that “no existing race is so much entitled to the esteem and gratitude of society as the Hebrew.” So far from being guilty of the crucifixion, they could proudly claim Jesus, “born from the chosen house of the chosen people,” as one of them.

It was an odd and passionate digression in an otherwise prosaic biography of a politician (and non-Jew), all the more conspicuous because Disraeli had nothing to gain from it—indeed, everything to lose by it. He was at a point in his career when he had to present himself to his Tory constituency as a “sound man,” and there was already much about him that seemed to be unsound, in his name and person, his politics and novels. Tancred could be read as a fantasy, a jeu d’esprit—or “Jew d’esprit,” as was said. But his tributes to Jews and Judaism, in and out of Parliament, could not be so easily dismissed.

Decades later, in his second term as prime minister, Disraeli confronted one of the main crises of his career—not the “Jewish Question” but the “Eastern Question.” The growing aggressiveness of Russia and her victory in her war with Turkey, giving her control over the Dardanelles and Mediterranean, were of obvious concern to Britain and the rest of Europe. Against members of his own party, including the foreign secretary, who, as Disraeli told the queen, was “for doing nothing,” Disraeli took an even more aggressive tone, abroad and at home. In 1878 at the Congress of Berlin, he emerged as the dominant figure and combatant. By being bold and persistent, threatening to break up the congress and even declare war on Russia, he succeeded in reversing Russia’s gains and resolving the crisis in favor of Britain and Europe.

Disraeli returned home in triumph, to the plaudits of the queen and much of the nation. But perhaps his greatest tribute came not from an Englishman or a Jew but from the prime minister of Prussia. It was affectionately and admiringly—not cynically or derisively, as one might suspect—that Otto von Bismarck hailed him: “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.” Almost forty years later, Winston Churchill, whose own praise of “the Jewish race” almost rivals Disraeli’s, recalled “the Jew Prime Minister of England,” who, “true to his race and proud of his origin,” said on one memorable occasion: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.”

Yes, “the old Jew,” “the Jew Prime Minister,” deserves an honorary, indeed, honorable place among “Jewish Lives” and “The People of the Book.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author, most recently, of The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill.