E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
Blake Disraeli
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ISBN: 978-0-571-28755-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-28755-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Robert Blake (1916-2003) was the pre-eminent Tory historian of his day. In addition to his masterpiece, his biography of Disraeli, his books include Bonar Law: The Unknown Prime Minister, The Conservative Party from Peel to John Major and a volume in the Paladin History of England, (a series which he edited), The Decline of Power, 1915-1964. These and Disraeli's Grand Tour are all being reissued in Faber Finds.
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1
Benjamin Disraeli’s career was an extraordinary one; but there is no need to make it seem more extraordinary than it really was. His point of departure, though low by the standards of nineteenth-century Prime Ministers, was neither as humble nor as alien as some people have believed. It is possible to overestimate the obstacles in his way and underestimate the assets he possessed.
He was born in London on December 21, 1804, at his father’s house, 6 King’s Road, Bedford Row (later renamed 22 Theobald’s Road), near Gray’s Inn. He was the second child and eldest son of Isaac D’Israeli, author of the Curiosities of Literature, a volatile, kindly, sceptical literary man of comfortable private means and of Italian Sephardi1 Jewish origin. Benjamin’s mother was Maria (Miriam) Basevi, whose family was of the same origin and equally prosperous. He had an elder sister, Sarah, born in 1802, whose fiancé died tragically in 1831. She never married and devoted herself to her parents and her eldest brother. She died in 1859. Of his three younger brothers Naphtali was born and died in 1807, Ralph (Raphael) was born in 1809, James (Jacobus) in 1813. The last two became conscientious and dull public servants. James, a Commissioner of Excise, died in 1868 leaving no heirs. Ralph, who became Deputy Clerk of Parliament, outlived all the family, dying in 1898. His son inherited Benjamin’s Buckinghamshire estate and country house, Hughenden, near High Wycombe. With his death in 1936 the male line of the family became extinct.
Throughout his life Benjamin Disraeli was addicted to romance and careless about facts. His account of his ancestry, though wrong in almost every detail, is interesting both for the light that it throws and the influence that it had upon his character and beliefs. It appeared in 1849 as a memoir prefacing the collected works of his father, to whom he was devoted. Disraeli maintained that his father’s family had been expelled from Spain in the great exodus of 1492 and had settled in Venice, where they ‘dropped their Gothic surname and, grateful to the God of Jacob who had sustained them through unprecedented trials and guarded them through unheard-of perils, they assumed the name of Disraeli, a name never borne before or since by any other family in order that their race might be for ever recognised’. In Venice they flourished ‘as merchants for more than two centuries under the protection of the lion of S Mark’. Then towards the middle of the eighteenth century his great-grandfather sent the younger of his two sons, Benjamin, to England, ‘where the dynasty seemed at length established through the recent failure of Prince Charles Edward and where public opinion appeared definitively adverse to the persecution of creed and conscience’.2 The other son, so Disraeli alleged, remained in Venice as a banker and became a friend of Sir Horace Mann, the British envoy in Florence.
The learned researches of Dr Cecil Roth and the late Mr Lucien Wolf have revealed this account as largely mythical3. There is no evidence at all that the family came from Spain. The name, which was Israeli until the elder Benjamin changed it to D’Israeli, is neither unique nor Spanish nor Italian: the D’, which sounds like a nobiliary particle, is probably the Aramaic di used by the Sephardi Jews in their Synagogal names in place of the Hebrew ben, and meaning ‘son of’. The name Israeli is Arabic and was used by the Moors in Spain and the Levant to distinguish Jews holding public office or otherwise coming into contact with the non-Jewish population. The Spanish or Italian version would be Israelita, and it is most unlikely that a Jewish refugee escaping from the Spanish Inquisition to Venice would have advertised his Hebrew origin by adopting an Arabic name. Nor is the name unique even in the form of Disraeli, which was apparently adopted by Benjamin, the younger, very early in life.4 A Huguenot family of that name flourished in London for much of the eighteenth century, and died out in 1814 in the person of one Benjamin Disraeli, a rich Dublin moneylender who had no connexion whatever with his famous namesake.
The story of a Venetian ancestry is equally untrue. No record of the name appears in any Venetian records before 1821. The elder Benjamin, Disraeli’s grandfather who migrated to England, did, indeed, have two sisters who settled in Venice in middle age and kept a girls’ school in the ghetto, but there is no other connexion with Venice, and the elder brother who was alleged to be a banker and a friend of Sir Horace Mann seems to have been conjured up by Disraeli’s imagination. At all events his name is unknown to the Venetian archives and appears nowhere in the gigantic correspondence of Sir Horace Mann.
Disraeli could easily have ascertained from a glance at his own family papers that his grandfather came from Cento near Ferrara, which belonged to the Papal States. It is impossible to trace the family back beyond his great-grandfather, Isaac Israeli, of whom very little is known. He or his forebears probably came to Italy from the Levant. Isaac Israeli’s son, Benjamin, was born in 1730 and emigrated to England in 1748. His motive is unlikely to have been anything so profound as confidence in the Hanoverian dynasty or admiration of the English way of life; it was probably, in Mr Wolf’s words, ‘a humdrum but entirely creditable desire to find the best market for his knowledge of the straw bonnet trade’. In 1756 he married Rebecca Furtado, who died eight years later. It was this connexion which gave rise to the belief that Disraeli had some relationship with the grand Spanish family of Lara. Rebecca’s brother-in-law was one Aaron Lara, a prosperous London broker, and Disraeli himself enumerates among the leading Sephardi families flourishing in England in his grandfather’s time the Laras, ‘who were our Kinsmen’. In fact, this family of Lara was Portuguese and quite unconnected with the Spanish family of the same name. It is wrong to suggest, as some have, that Lara was the ‘gothic name’ which the D’Israelis originally bore. In any case, Disraeli had no blood relationship with his grandfather’s first wife. There was one daughter of this marriage, who subsequently emigrated to Italy and whose descendants are still there.
The following year Benjamin the elder married again. His second wife, Sarah Shiprut de Gabay Villa Real, was the youngest daughter of Isaac Shiprut, a rich city merchant, whose mother hailed, not from the famous Portuguese family of Villa Real, as the younger Benjamin believed, but from a family of the same name in Leghorn.5 The marriage brought Benjamin D’Israeli the elder both money and credit, and did much to re-establish his somewhat shaky finances. He became a stockbroker and left £35,000 when he died in 1816 – a comfortable fortune, but scarcely one that could ever have put him, as his grandson maintained, into the category of a potential Rothschild.
There was in Disraeli’s day, and long after, a notion that the Sephardi Jews were more ‘aristocratic’, whatever that may mean, than the Ashkenazi who came from central and eastern Europe. Disraeli was undoubtedly a Sephardi. There was also a belief that of the Sephardi the most aristocratic branch was the descendants of the Spanish or Portuguese Jews, whether those who professed their faith openly and were expelled in 1492, or the so-called Marranos or secret Jews who lived as nominal Christians adopting ‘gothic’ surnames, but were eventually forced to leave by the racialist persecution of the Inquisition. Disraeli never made it quite clear which of these branches he thought he belonged to. The point is not important, since there is no proof at all that he belonged to either. What matters is that he believed that his origins were highly aristocratic and the belief had no small effect on his political outlook and his political career.
He appears to have taken very little interest in his mother and to have disliked the Basevi family. But it is curious to notice that, by one of those ironies which so often attend human vanities, he had a far more picturesque and romantic descent through her than through his father. Here, indeed, he really might have claimed a genuine ancestor in one of the Jews who left Spain in the great exodus of 1492, and what is more a far more distinguished ancestor than he ever dared to invent for the Disraelis. Her father, Naphtali Basevi, had married another of his race, Rebecca Rieti. Rebecca’s mother came from a family called Aboab Cardoso. The Cardosos had been settled in England since the end of the seventeenth century – which gives Disraeli four generations of English-born ancestors, not merely one, as his enemies maintained. The Cardosos claimed, probably with justice, a direct lineal descent from Isaac Aboab, the last Gaon of Castille, who in 1492 led a contingent of 20,000 compatriots into Portugal, where he had obtained permission for a temporary stay from King John II. Disraeli would have made much of this if he had known the facts.
2
The elder Benjamin was a genial, friendly, conformist who remained to the end of his days a devout member of the Sephardi congregation at Bevis Marks in London. His wife, Sarah, was, however, a rebel. She hated the faith to which her ancestry caused her to belong. She was, her grandson says, ‘a demon’, and ‘so mortified...
