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Reviewed by:
  • Disraeli’s Jewishness, and: Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory
  • Michael Ragussis (bio)
Disraeli’s Jewishness, edited by Todd M. Endelman and Tony Kushner; pp. xxiii + 265. London and Portland: Valentine Mitchell, 2002, £42.50, £18.50 paper, $59.50, $26.50 paper.
Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory, by Bernard Glassman; pp. xvi + 240. Lanham, MD, New York, and Oxford: University Press of America, 2003, $45.00, £36.00.

Disraeli's Jewishness is an anthology of seven essays that attempt to understand Benjamin Disraeli's life and work in terms of his Jewishness. This means accounting for the ways in which Disraeli defined himself as a Jew, and the ways in which others imagined and represented him as Jewish both during his lifetime and afterwards, when he became the subject of a series of twentieth-century reevaluations. In this way, a history of the vicissitudes of Disraeli's reputation often encodes an important chapter in the history of the representation of Jewishness in Britain as well as a history of the different, often competing, groups that exploited and reinvented his image for their own purposes.

The opening and closing essays, each by one of the two editors, frame the volume in terms of the overarching focus of the project. Todd M. Endelman's essay, "Benjamin Disraeli and the Myth of Sephardi Superiority," explores the idea that the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula were different from, and superior to, other Jews. Endelman provides a valuable history of this myth, from fifteenth-century Spain to early nineteenth- century Britain, and then shows the ways in which Disraeli used it, both in his novels and in his construction of his own identity. I would add this sharp irony: the Sephardic myth became interwoven with the idea of crypto-Judaism, so that Disraeli's strategy of inventing himself as a Sephardic Jew backfired when his critics characterized him as a secret Jew, a Jew masked as a Christian. And while Endelman is certainly right that the Sephardic myth reached Disraeli through his father, I would add that many kinds of literary representations of this myth were current in England in the nineteenth century—accounts that shaped and reshaped the traditional myth and that influenced Disraeli and others.

Tony Kushner's essay, "One of Us? Contesting Disraeli's Jewishness and Englishness in the Twentieth Century," is an important historical study of the changing representations of Disraeli's Jewishness, both inside and outside the Jewish community. It begins in the opening decades of the twentieth century, studying biographies (such as the eighth edition of the anti-Semitic biography by T. P. O'Connor) and plays (such as Louis Parker's Disraeli: A Play [1911], performed to different responses in Britain and the United States); it then positions Disraeli in the context of the Aliens Restriction Act of 1919 and the major studies of Disraeli produced in the 1920s, as well as the three films produced about him, most famously the Warner Brothers's 1929 film of Parker's play, which tellingly concludes with the motto, "the outsider has more loyalty and love for his [End Page 333] country than the native Englishman" (231); the essay then moves to the Nazi era, and ends with the postwar period, with what Kushner describes as the dangerous characterization of Disraeli as a multicultural hero. In the end, the essay notes four major historical views of Disraeli: "The essentialising tendencies of those who regarded him as the 'alien Jew,' the absence of reference to his Jewishness as in Blake's biography,...the defensiveness of much British Jewish writing on the subject" (246), and finally, the focus on Disraeli's own construction of himself as a Jew—of which Endelman's opening essay is a fine example.

The body of the volume contains essays by Nadia Valman, on the gender dimension of Disraeli's representation of Jewishness in his novels; Anthony S. Wohl, on cartoon depictions of Disraeli's Jewishness; Daniel R. Schwarz, on Disraeli's "Jewish" novels; R. W. Davis, on Disraeli, the Rothschilds, and the way in which anti-Semitism did or did not target them; and Edgar Feuchtwanger, on...

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