The Maccabaean

Many of us are fond of rehearsing the roll of illustrious Jews who have done great things in the world. Now that the _Treaty of Berlin is occupying the world’s attention it is being pointed out that a Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, premier of England under Queen Victoria, drew up and put through the adoption of the treaty. With a stroke he thereby restored the prestige which England had lost as an influence in European politics. Disräeli’s rise, in spite of great obstacles, to the most eminent public position in the modern world, his achievements in statesmanship and in literature, where he created the political novel, and his extremely interesting personality is all more or less familiar and make an absorbing story. Ambassador Bryce, Froude, the biographer of Carlyle, Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, and a number of minor men have written studies and biographies of Disraeli. They have written of him chiefly as a citizen of the world. It may be of interest to consider how much of a Jew he was. By birth and inheritance, in sympathy, character and imagination, he was Jewish. It may even be held that he was as much Jewish in religious beliefs as Christian, notwithstanding his baptism at the age of ten and his membership in the Church of England.

His ancestors were Sephardic Jews in Spain, bearing a patrician name when Torquemada and his inquisitors bore down upon them. Discarding their old name, the family stamped themselves defiantly before the world, D'Israeli, "of Israel," and went to Italy. There they flourished as financiers, and in the middle of the eighteenth century sent a member of the family to England. He, too, prospered as a financier, but his son Isaac broke the late

family tradition by turning scholar and literary man. He wrote the "Curiosities of Literature," and was the father of Benjamin Disraeli.

As a youth two things occupied Benja- min’s thoughts intensely and formed the woof and web of his dreams— he would be a great figure in his country’s affairs and he would make a pilgrimage to Palestine. He “wanted to behold that glowing land which was the cradle of his race.” He wrote, at twenty, the novel “Vivian Grey,” which immediately became the literary sensation of England and the European capitals. Instead of staying at home to be lionized he started out on a tour of the Mediterranean countries and the East. It was, however, bad health and a strong desire to visit certain foreign lands and not shy modesty which sent him abroad. In Palestine he seems to have come into his native atmosphere. His imagination for years absorbed with the story of the Jewish race seems to have been wrought up to a high pitch, now that he was in the old home of the Jews. The impressions he received at this time have left their effects permanently upon him and his writings, particularly some of his novels, show strong traces of his spiritual ferment at this period.

It must be fascinating to some Zionists to speculate on how near the Jewish state came to being established in Palestine at this point. The young man dreamed earnestly at this time of devoting his life to restoring to his people, as he felt them to be, their old home. He was all his life a dreamer on a national scope, but a dreamer who had also the power of making his dreams realities. That he became England's prime minister and a dominant