DizzyMaimon Schwarzschild

Adam Gopnick has an admiring, funny, very sharply-written piece on Disraeli in the New Yorker.  Here and there Gopnick tries, more or less implausibly, to enlist Disraeli against George W. Bush, but mostly the piece captures both Disraeli’s extraordinary personality, and the social and political context in Victorian England — in which Disraeli succeeded brilliantly, against all the odds.

Though Disraeli called himself a Christian, he was always unapologetically a Jew, name and nose together, and he turned the identity into another romance. For myself, I look upon the Church as the only Jewish institution that remains, he wrote blandly to a clergyman. (The clergyman s response is unknown.) Yet he knew how to adjust his Jewishness to his audience. He made up a story about the classy antecedents of the D Israelis that would appeal to readers of Walter Scott. His family had been expelled from Spain in 1492, he explained, and then fled to Venice, where it settled into generations of virtuous Rialto prosperity, before leaving one great island empire for another, propelled by word of Britain s liberal promise and growing power. In fact, as far as he knew, there was neither expulsion nor Rialto anywhere in his background; he came from a simple, mercantile family in northern Italy, which emigrated to England for the usual commercial reasons. But the fairy tale was shrewd: he grasped what kind of Jew would be fascinating to an English audience, and what kind merely Jewish.

Gopnick concludes:

Remote as he is from us and no one seems likely to relaunch a political movement through a vision of romantic country gentlemen acting on behalf of an enslaved proletariat there is still something immensely cheering about reading his story. He was a child of circumstances who made the best of them, and a genuine wit whose life shows how a liberal democracy can turn a poet of vision into a man of sense. He wrote to an aristocratic lady friend he was courting after his wife s death, My imagination did not desert me with my youth. I have always felt this a great misfortune. It would have involved me in calamities, had not nature bestowed on me, and in a large degree, another quality the sense of the ridiculous. His mixture of wild illusion and ironic insight allowed him to do what a mere realist could not: help a ruling class resign its right to rule without destroying its self-respect, or denying its illusions, most of which persist to this day. In poetry or politics, a Romantic with a sense of the ridiculous can do great things.

You’ll enjoy the whole thing.