Review: Disraeli's "Alroy" prefigures modern Zionism. Did he see himself in the Messianic fantasy?

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 single man, and we might be a nation.”

The “single man” Alroy has in mind to restore the nation of Israel in the 12^th Century is himself. But did Disraeli have himself in mind in 1833? The modern state of Israel had not yet been born, and neither had Zionism, the movement to develop it. But the 28-year-old Disraeli, who said he conceived the idea for the novel when he was 22 and who started writing it in earnest while visiting Jerusalem and the Holy Lands in 1831, imagined in the book an adventure that we might now call Zionist. In Alroy, Disraeli creates a Romantic Jewish messiah that embodied a desire on his part to see Jerusalem reclaimed for the Jews.

I read the 2004 Routledge edition, which restores the original 1833 text and notes where it differs from later versions of the novel that were sanitized by Disraeli as he became a politician. That edition does not appear to have been reviewed before, which is a shame as it is the best way to experience Alroy, with its extensive endnotes and its informative introduction by Geoffrey Harvey.

What was Disraeli's "ideal ambition"? 

Disraeli specifically stated that the book was autobiographical, though he did so in a context that was cryptic, leaving the nature of its autobiography a mystery that scholars and critics have debated now for almost 200 years. 

“My works are the embodification of my feelings,” Disraeli wrote in a diary entry. “in [my first novel] Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition: In Alroy my ideal ambition.” It’s pretty clear what Disraeli meant about Vivian Grey, which is about the ambition (and overambition) toward a political career of the title character, Vivian Grey. Disraeli when he wrote it was dreaming of a political career of his own. But it’s less clear what he meant by “ideal ambition.”

“He did not elucidate what that ambition might be,” wrote Disraeli biographer Sarah Bradford. “The novel was conceived in 1829, the year in which, following the emancipation of the Catholics, an attempt was made to gain the same rights for the Jews, and published in 1833 when the idea was again mooted; one might, therefore, surmise that the idea of Jewish emancipation was the inspiration for the book.”

In fact, early-20th-Century Disraeli biographer William Monypenny wrote that returning the Holy Land to the Jews was the only possible explanation for the phrase “ideal ambition:”

“The thought may have passed through his mind that the true aim of the political ambition which was beginning to shape itself within him should be to win back the Holy Land for the chosen people and restore the sceptre to Judah. To any young Hebrew of genius such thoughts would naturally— nay, inevitably occur; and in no other way can Disraeli's own declaration that Alroy represented his 'ideal ambition' be construed.”

The movement of Zionism, always controversial, has of course only become more so in recent years. But the young Disraeli was one of its forerunners. A Jew by birth whose father had him convert to Anglicanism when he was 12 years old, Disraeli was something of an enigma on religious issues. Alroy was his only novel on explicitly Jewish themes, though he wrote extensively about Judaism in other novels as well. His heroes almost always end up Anglicans, though they may undergo significant religious searching before that conclusion. Privately Disraeli was prone to scorning all religions, as recorded by his friend Henry Stanley, the 15^th Earl of Derby.  In his diaries Stanley said Disraeli was “personally incapable of religious belief, yet holds (so far as I can judge, quite sincerely) that a nation which has lost its faith in religion is in a state of decadence.” And indeed one of Disraeli’s most oft-recurring themes was that the church was the foundation of English society. Stanley wondered how, given his personal beliefs, he could advocate for the union of church and state. In 1861 Stanely wrote: “How can I reconcile his open ridicule, in private, of all religions, with his preaching up of a new church-and-state agitation?”

Disraeli dreams of the Promised Land

We also know from Stanley that Disraeli dreamed out loud of returning Jerusalem to the Jews. Stanley records in his diary that Disraeli said as much in 1851, and that this was “the only instance in which he ever appeared to me to show signs of any higher emotion,” though “I have many times since seen him under the influence of irritation or pleasurable excitement.” Stanley wrote:

“The country, [Disraeli] said, had ample natural capabilities; all it wanted was labour, and protection for the labourer: the ownership of the soil might be bought from Turkey: money would be forthcoming: the Rothschilds and leading Hebrew capitalists would all help: the Turkish empire was falling into ruin the Turkish Govt would do anything for money: all that was necessary was to establish colonies, with rights over the soil, and security from ill treatment. The question of nationality might wait until these had taken hold. He added that these ideas were extensively entertained among the nation. A man who should carry them out would be the next Messiah, the true Saviour of his people. He saw only a single obstacle: arising from the existence of two races among the Hebrews, of whom one, those who settled along the shores of the Mediterranean, look down on the other, refusing even to associate with them.”

Paul Smith, who quotes this passage in his Disraeli: A Brief Life, tied it into an argument about the meaning of Disraeli’s mysterious phrase “ideal ambition”:

“If the novel embodied Disraeli's 'ideal ambition", as he said it did, it was seemingly to be an Alroy less compromised in his integrity as a Jew. The ideal might not be attainable, or relevant, in the conditions of English politics, but that it lingered, however abstractly, in Disraeli’s mind is suggested by his conversation with his young intimate Lord Stanley (the 24-year-old elder son of his party chief) in January 1851.”

Alternative interpretations

Not everyone, however, found it plausible that Disraeli’s ideal ambition was what would come to be known as Zionism. But if Disraeli's ideal ambition was not Zionist in nature, what else might he have meant? Several writers have offered alternative readings. In his introduction to a 1926 edition of Alroy, for example, Philip Guedalla wrote:

 “The author recognised in Alroy his 'ideal ambition.' This oracle is obscure, unless it is sufficient to detect a Jewish hero blessed, like Disraeli, with a devoted sister. For it is not easy to believe that he ever played, even in fancy, with the notion of a Jewish career. … In Alroy, for all its highly scented eloquence, the Jewish quality was distinctly tepid.”

The notion that Disraeli’s taking up what he perceived as Jewish interests would constitute a “Jewish career” is offensive. But the notion that Disraeli could not possibly have had this as a goal drove some scholars to find another explanation for the phrase “ideal ambition.” Richard Levine agrees with Guedalla and then states an alternative theory:

“Is it not possible to read the author's ideal ambition in these terms as a commitment to traditional principles and to the Hebraic past? And, by Disraeli's own qualification, the Hebraic past must also include Christian tradition. Furthermore, the diary entry in which he mentioned the ideal ambition reflected in Alroy was written in the same year that saw the publication of his Vindication of the English Constitution (1835). This is a Disraeli in his early thirties who is studiously engaged in a consideration of the past and who is also seriously intent on a political career. Yet he later looks back across the few years to Alroy and perceives his ideal ambition mirrored there. The commitment to tradition which permeates the Vindication might very well be part and parcel of Disraeli's reading of his ideal ambition in 1835.”

In fact, Harvey, in his excellent introduction to the Routledge edition, follows Levine on his logic:

“Alroy must be regarded as a seminal work in the evolution of Disraeli's political thought. The diary entry referring to this novel as an expression of his ideal ambition was written in the same year as his Vindication of the English Constitution (1835). At this point Disraeli was considering a political career and this text reveals the importance to him of the overriding concept of tradition.”

For Jane Ridley, author of Young Disraeli, this argument for tradition signals that the novel is a specifically conservative book, an early and important definition of Disraeli’s conservatism. She points out that it put Disraeli at odds with his own father, with whom he almost always agreed, and about whom he always wrote admiringly. Isaac D’Israeli wrote a book at about the same time as Alroy that argued Jews should assimilate into the broader culture.

“Alroy, in other words, is not a liberal text; far from it. It affirms the virtues of orthodoxy, and reveals Disraeli's rejection of Isaac's liberal humanism. Alroy also contradicts the liberalism of [the hero of his book] Contarini Fleming; it confirms Disraeli's essential Toryism, or rather his belief in such anti-liberal, Romantic values as race and faith. Nor is it fanciful to see Alroy as Disrael's ideal ambition. True, Disraeli did not see himself as a defender of Jewish orthodoxy, nor did he at this stage cherish Zionist ambitions to reconquer Jerusalem for the Jews. But the novel expressed Disraeli's dreams of achieving leadership and power in an alien English culture; it confirmed his new-found confidence about his race and his determination to conquer England as a Jew, rather than abandoning his Jewishness and becoming assimilated.”

John Vincent in his biography of Disraeli says that what Disraeli meant was that Alroy was devoted to action as opposed to thought. He quotes Alroy: “'Say what they like, man is made for action', is his doctrine—and perhaps the author's too, for Disraeli later wrote that Alroy represented his ideal ambition.’”

Embracing Judaism

William Kuhn, in his biography The Politics of Pleasure, agrees with Paul Smith’s assessment of the phrase “ideal ambition.” “Alroy [is] an idealized fantasy of what he might do with his life if he more completely embraced his Judaism,” Kuhn writes. There is textual support for Kuhn's interpretation in the final scene of the novel. The real David Alroy was likely assassinated by Persians. Disraeli’s Alroy is captured by Arabs and then given a choice: He can go free if he abandons Judaism. If he won’t, he will be tortured. Alroy refuses to renounce his Jewishness. He riles up his executioner and gets him to chop his head off before he can be tortured, thereby avoiding pain and sticking to his faith.

The moment is significant in part because Alroy had previously embraced what Ridley calls “latitudinarianism”—a tolerant view of other religions, particularly Islam. This toleration is however Alroy’s downfall. Disraeli associates Alroy's religious tolerance with the temptations of the rich, lively city of Bagdhad. We can tell Disraeli disapproves of the excesses of Baghdad because he has Alroy consume ortolans there. This songbird, a Victorian delicacy, is now banned in Europe. The bird was treated terribly, boiled alive in brandy, and eaten whole, often with a napkin over one’s head so that God could not see the decadent offense. Disreali mentioned the ortolan in almost every novel, almost always as a symbol of aristocratic decadence and overreach. (See the paragraph on ortolans in my review of Disraeli’s earlier novel The Young Duke.)  For Alroy, this decadence is also has religious significance. His period of indulgence comes after he wins military battles with an army of Jews, is declared King of the East, and then names himself the new Caliph. The Caliphate was what the Jews had been rebelling against when they won the victory for Alroy, so when he becomes Caliph several influential Jews oppose him. They end up winning a military victory against him, leading to his imprisonment.

This anti-latitudinarianism is a decidedly different take than his later (1847) novel Tancred. That book climaxes with the appearance of the Angel of Arabia telling the eponymous hero to preach the gospel of toleration:

“The equality of man can only be accomplished by the sovereignty of God. The longing for fraternity can never be satisfied but under the sway of a common father. The relations between Jehovah and his creatures can be neither too numerous nor too near. In the increased distance between God and man have grown up all those developments that have made life mournful. Cease, then, to seek in a vain philosophy the solution of the social problem that perplexes you. Announce the sublime and solacing doctrine of theocratic equality.”

Disraeli's influence on Zionism

Whatever the young Disraeli's exact meaning, his literary imagination left a legacy that would outlive him. After his death Disraeli ended up influential on the foundation of the movement of Zionism, and therefore the foundation of the state of Israel. Smith says the founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, before he became a famous advocate for the cause included Disraeli as the first in a series of profiles of proto-Zionists. And author Paul Johnson, writing in The New York Times on January 22, 1984, said Tancred had been one of the reasons British politicians elected to support returning Palestine to the Jews:

“The British are a very literary people. In those days, leading British politicians were well read and inclined to allow politics a literary dimension. Needless to say, few of the British involved had come across Herzl's Judenstaat. But all had read, and many knew intimately, the Old Testament. … Nearly all, too, had read two key novels that, on the British side at least, formed the true ideological background to the Declaration. These were Benjamin Disraeli's Tancred (1847) and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876). The first is the story of a Christian aristocrat who goes to the sleeping Orient to give it, as it were, the kiss of life. Disraeli was a proto-Zionist of a sort and his story formed an imaginative introduction to the cause for the British ruling class. But it was also misleading. Herbert Asquith, Lloyd George's predecessor as Prime Minister, a man inclined to sneer at Jews and certainly no friend of audacious experiments in nation-building, liked to quote the novel's most famous axiom: "All is race, there is no other truth," which by 1914 had become a dangerous proposition for any Jew to advance. Then, too, Disraeli held that the Christian and Moslem Arabs of Palestine were exactly the same race as the Jews; as he says in Tancred, ‘The Arabs are only Jews on horseback.’ The novel fostered this dangerous illusion among British statesmen. As Mr. Sanders makes clear, the one objection to a Zionist Palestine never seriously considered by the British Cabinet was the hostility of the Arabs.”

Disraeli certainly seemed to see the difference between Jews and Arabs in Alroy. But that novel is even more forward about the formation of a Jewish state than Tancred. His treatment of the subject is operatic. Like many operas his hero falls in love with a woman on the other side of the war in which he is fighting. In fact, during Disraeli’s lifetime an effort was made to turn the book into an opera, though apparently the attempt failed. The language of the novel is also operatic. Disraeli declared in a lengthy passage in the introduction that he would cut from later editions that he had innovated a new style of prose poetry. But the style is mostly an imitation of the King James Bible. Much of it feels like cut-rate Shakespeare, and it has been for over a century one of the main sources of derision for the novel, which Disraeli biographer Robert Blake called “profitable but unreadable” and of which Disraeli himself said “I have heard no complaints about the style except from the critics.” But Alroy tells a story that is gripping, a fast read, and worth revisiting. It has been called the first Jewish historical novel, and the amazing true tale the story is based on has rarely been adapted since.

Disraeli's foreign policy and the limits of ideal ambition

Disraeli did not spend his career fighting for a Jewish state. Indeed a keystone of his foreign policy was to prop up the Ottoman Empire, which even in his day could be seen clearly to be dying a slow death. His great rival, William Gladstone, abhorred this policy because he saw the Turks as brutal and backward, campaigning against Ottoman "atrocities" against Christians in Bulgaria. This ideological split between the two British prime ministers anticipated battles between liberal and conservative visions of foreign policy in the West that linger to this day. As Robert D. Kaplan noted in a 2013 Forbes article, "For Disraeli, both a cynic and a romantic, foreign policy was about naked national interests or it was nothing; for Gladstone, the arch-moralist, foreign policy was a humanitarian crusade or it was nothing. Sound familiar? Today's foreign policy community is often divided along similar lines." 

It is possible that Disraeli saw the reclamation of Israel for the Jews as an unrecognizable goal. But as Stanley's 1851 conversation showed, he was emotional about that goal. Disraeli did not provide a blueprint for what the new nation of Israel would look like, and he may not have envisioned anything like what came to be Israel, let alone the violence that came with its creation and maintenance. But he did imagine Israel reviving as a nation.