Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

Zionism did not yet exist as a political movement in 1833, but future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was already telling  a story in which the Jews attempted to reclaim Jerusalem in his novel  The Wondrous Tale of Alroy . Disraeli's hero was the historical David Alroy, a self-proclaimed Jewish messiah in the 12 th  century who won several military victories in an ultimately failed effort to win Jerusalem for the Jews before being murdered by adversaries. In one passage from the book, Alroy comes upon the ruins of a Jewish town in the desert. The narrator, voicing Alroy’s feelings, and perhaps Disraeli’s, marvels: “Empires and dynasties flourish and pass away; the proud metropolis becomes a solitude, the conquering kingdom even a desert; but Israel still remains, still a descendant of the most ancient kings breathed amid these royal ruins, and still the eternal sun could never rise without gilding the towers of living Jerusalem. “A word, a deed, a single day, a s...

Reflections by politicians on authors of literature and their works are not just trivia. They have a way in some cases of revealing almost more than political writings. Thus this article will glance at the remarks Woodrow Wilson's family and Benjamin Disraeli made about the novelist Honore de Balzac, about whom I wrote last month. After ruminating on Balzac  in my last post  because his political novels were a forerunner of Disraeli and the political novel, I thought I might look up what Woodrow Wilson, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone thought of him. Because the results were charming and interesting, I am pausing to share them. Only one document in the monumental 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson references Balzac, and it’s not by Woodrow. It is a letter to the future president by his young wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, an even more devoted reader of literature than Woodrow, who dabbled in fiction himself but largely specialized in works about government and history. I...