From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Disraeli hailed from a family of Marranos (crypto-Jews of Portuguese origin) converted back to Judaism in Venice. His grandfather had moved to London in 1748. Benjamin was baptized at the age of thirteen, when his father, Isaac D’Israeli, converted to Anglican Christianity together with all his family. Isaac D’Israeli is the author of a book called The Genius of Judaism (in response to Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity), in which he glorifies the unique qualities of the Jewish people, but blames Talmudic rabbis for “sealing up the national mind of their people” and “corrupting the simplicity of their antique creed.” As for many other Jews of the time, conversion for D’Israeli was above all opportunistic: until the beginning of the nineteenth century, administrative careers remained closed to the Jews. A law of 1740 had authorized their naturalization, but it had provoked popular riots and was repealed in 1753. Many influential Jews, such as City banker Sampson Gideon, then opted for nominal conversion for their children.226

  Benjamin Disraeli received baptism almost at the same time as Heinrich Heine. Like Heine, Disraeli embodied the contradictions and drama of assimilated Jews in the late nineteenth century, who aspired to assimilation to the point that they wanted to personify all the virtues and values of European nations, but whose conversion to an already devitalized Christianity could only be a source of disappointment. Such conversions were often followed by an even stronger, more tormented attachment to their Jewishness, felt as a racial rather than a religious identity: Disraeli defined himself as “Anglican of Jewish race.” For Hannah Arendt, Disraeli is a “race fanatic” who, in his first novel Alroy (1833), “evolved a plan for a Jewish Empire in which Jews would rule as a strictly separated class.” In his other novel Coningsby (1844), he “unfolded a fantastic scheme according to which Jewish money dominates the rise and fall of courts and empires and rules supreme in diplomacy.”

  This idea “became the pivot of his political philosophy.”227 The character Sidonia, who appears in Coningsby and in his two later novels, Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847), is a fictional avatar of his author, or rather, according to his biographer Robert Blake, “a cross between Lionel de Rothschild and Disraeli himself.”228 He is descended from a noble family of Aragon, whose eminent members included an archbishop and a grand inquisitor, who nevertheless secretly adhered to the Judaism of their ancestors. The father of Sidonia, like Nathan the father of Lionel de Rothschild, “made a large fortune by military contracts, and supplying the commissariat of the different armies” during the Napoleonic wars. Then, having settled in London, he “staked all he was worth on the Waterloo loan; and the event made him one of the greatest capitalists in Europe.”

  Sidonia attended at the age of seventeen the princely courts of which he was the creditor, and became an expert in the arcana of power. “The secret history of the world was his pastime. His great pleasure was to contrast the hidden motive, with the public pretext, of transactions.” To his protégé Coningsby, he confided that everywhere he traveled he saw, behind the monarchs and heads of state, Jewish advisers, and concluded: “So you see, my dear Coningsby, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Disraeli himself, according to Robert Blake, “was addicted to conspiracy.”

  Sidonia, like Disraeli, is passionate about his race: “The race is everything; There is no other truth.” He refuses to marry a non-Jewess because “No earthly consideration would ever induce him to impair that purity of race on which he prides himself.” The term “race” at the time had an imprecise meaning that sometimes extended to what is now called ethnicity. However, Disraeli insists in Endymion (1880), his last novel, on the idea that “language and religion do not make a race—there is only one thing that makes a race, and that is blood.” He also writes: “No man will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key of history.”

  In a nonfictional work (Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography, 1852), Disraeli wrote that Jews “are a living and the most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man. […] the natural equality of man now in vogue, and taking the form of cosmopolitan fraternity, is a principle which, were it possible to act on it, would deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius of the world. […] The native tendency of the Jewish race, who are justly proud of their blood, is against the doctrine of the equality of man.”229

  Disraeli is clearly on the same wavelength as Moses Hess. His Jewish supremacism was complicated by discrimination between Jews, since Sephardim and Ashkenazim were “two races among the Hebrews,” the first being “the superior race” (an idea already expressed by his father in his Genius of Judaism).230

  What was Disraeli’s motivation behind the foreign policy he imparted to the British Empire? Did he believe the fate of the British was to conquer the world? Or, remembering how Ezra and Nehemiah exploited Persian authority, did he see the British Empire as the instrument for the Jewish nation’s fulfillment of its destiny—in other words, as Zionism’s mule? In mooring the Suez Canal (dug between 1859 and 1869 by French Ferdinand de Lesseps) to British interests, does he simply seek to outdo the French, or is he laying the foundation for the future alliance between Israel and the Anglo-American Empire? Indeed, Disraeli could henceforth argue that a Jewish autonomous government in Palestine would be quite capable of defending British economic interests in the region. This would be Chaim Weizmann’s pitch to the British thirty years later: “Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England, in particular in respect to the Suez Canal.”231

  Thus, Disraeli is truly the one who, with the help of Lionel Rothschild, laid the first stone of the new Jewish state. When in 1956 Israel invaded the Sinai to take control of the canal, she did it by again promising Britain to return the control of the canal that had been nationalized by Nasser. And what of Disraeli’s Russophobia, to which, some say, he converted Queen Victoria? Is it imperial geostrategy, or the old Jewish enmity against the last Christian kingdom, where 70 percent of the world’s Jews (recently emancipated by Alexander II, but victims of recurrent pogroms) still lived?

  No one can answer these questions with certainty; perhaps Disraeli could not himself. His contemporaries, however, pondered them. Disraeli’s open hostility to Russia and his defense of the Turks, whose massacres of the Serbs and Bulgarians were well known, gave rise to theories of a Jewish conspiracy. William Ewart Gladstone, a longtime opponent of Disraeli and himself prime minister several times (1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886, and 1892–1894), declared that Disraeli “was holding British foreign policy hostage to his Jewish sympathies, and that he was more interested in relieving the anguish of Jews in Russia and Turkey than in any British interests.” The newspaper The Truth of November 22, 1877, alluding to the intimacy of Disraeli with the Rothschilds suspected “a tacit conspiracy […] on the part of a considerable number of Anglo-Hebrews, to drag us into a war on behalf of the Turks.” It was remembered, moreover, that in a speech in the Commons gallery in 1847, Disraeli had demanded the admission of Jews to eligible functions, on the grounds that “the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe.” Some complained about the influence of Disraeli on Queen Victoria— an influence he explained to a friend in these terms: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”232

  The queen, it must be said, was already, like much of the aristocracy, under the spell of a fashionable theory assigning an Israelite origin to the Anglo-Saxons. This theory appeared under Oliver Cromwell and was renewed in 1840 by Pastor John Wilson with his Lectures on Ancient Israel and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe. Edward Hine brought it back in 1870 in The English Nation Identified with the Lost Israel, where he derives the word “Saxon” from “Isaac’s sons.” This theory offered biblical justification to British colonialism, and even to the genocide of colonized peoples (new Canaanites) by t
he British Empire (new Israel).233 Happy to believe that her noble lineage descended from King David, the queen had her sons circumcised, a custom that has continued to this day. There was some truth in the British elite’s sense of their Jewishness, for during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many matrimonial unions had united rich Jewish families with the old destitute landed aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, “with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.”234

  The Disraeli case is illuminating because the questions raised about him are the same as those that arise today on the relationship between the United States and the Zionist network—questions that divide even the most respected observers. Which, of the Anglo-American Empire and international Jewry, steers the other? Is Israel the bridgehead of the United States in the Middle East, or is the United States, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once insinuated, the “mule” of Israel?235 Is the dog wagging its tail, or the tail wagging the dog? Answering this question for the half century preceding the First World War helps answer the same question in contemporary times, because the symbiotic relationship between Israel and the empire grew up during that period.

  The answer depends on one’s point of view. The Zionists naturally have an interest in promoting the view that Israel serves Anglo-American interests, rather than the reverse. Disraeli argued in front of the British Parliament that a Jewish Palestine would be in the interest of British colonialism. But this argument is deceptive. Jewish Zionists have always seen things from the other end of the telescope, and one can hardly believe that Disraeli did not secretly share their view. When the hero of his Tancred (1847), a Jew who has been promoted Lord Beaconsfield, glorifies the British Empire in these words: “We wish to conquer the world, led by angels, in order to bring man to happiness, under divine sovereignty,” who lies behind this ambiguous “we”?

  When a British Jew such as Disraeli says “we,” there is always a possible double sense. And the ambiguity is always strategic, for a large part of the Anglo-Saxon industrial, political, and cultural elite shared a common belief in the British Empire’s global mission to civilize the world. Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), who gave his name to two African countries, Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), was an ardent propagandist for world government by the “British race.” According to Carroll Quigley, in 1891 Rhodes founded a secret society devoted to this cause, which was later developed by his friend Lord Alfred Milner, and known since 1909 as the Round Table or the Rhodes-Milner Group. Lord Salisbury, minister of foreign affairs in the Disraeli cabinet (1878–1880), then prime minister in 1885, was a member of this secret society, according to Quigley, as was Lord Nathan Rothschild.236

  Many other connections could be evoked to illustrate that, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, British imperialism and Zionism have been intimately intertwined. As historical movements, they seem to have been born simultaneously, like the twins Esau and Jacob. But meta-historical reflection on this question must take into account two important facts: first, the roots of the British Empire do not go back beyond the seventeenth century, whereas those of Zionism go back more than two millennia; and secondly, the British Empire declined after the First World War, whereas Zionism was launched toward continuing success. For these two reasons, the thesis that Zionism is a by-product of British imperialism seems to me unsustainable.

  The question of the relationship between Albion and Zion is also related to that of the relationship between legal and occult power, and in particular the measure of the real power of the Rothschild dynasty over British policy. There is little question, for example, that without the Rothschilds, Great Britain would never have gained control of the Suez Canal, which was the cornerstone of the empire in the Middle East, and sealed its alliance with Zionism. The Rothschilds never sought political office, preferring the less visible but much greater financial power; there is no question that Disraeli’s power was really the Rothschilds’. Nevertheless, matrimonial alliances with the political elite could also be helpful: Lord Archibald Primrose, secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1886 and from 1892 to 1894, and prime minister in 1894–1895, was Mayer Amschel de Rothschild’s son-in-law.

  Concerning the relationship between the Rothschilds and Zionism, it is interesting to learn from Theodor Herzl’s diaries that the glorious founder of Zionism envisioned the future Jewish state as an “aristocratic republic” (“I am against democracy”) with, at its head, “the first Prince Rothschild.” Quoting from his long tirade exhorting the Rothschilds to redeem their evil power through the Zionist project: “I don’t know whether all governments already realize what an international menace your World House constitutes. Without you no wars can be waged, and if peace is to be concluded, people are all the more dependent on you. For the year 1895 the military expenses of the five Great Powers have been estimated at four billion francs, and their actual peacetime military strength at 2,800,000 men. And these military forces, which are unparalleled in history, you command financially, regardless of the conflicting desires of the nations. […] And your accursed wealth is still growing. Everywhere it increases more rapidly than the national wealth of the countries in which you reside. Therefore this increase takes place only at the expense of the national prosperity, even though you yourselves may be the most decent persons in the world. For that reason, the Jewish State from the outset will not tolerate your alarming wealth, which would stifle our economic and political freedom. […] But if you do go with us, we shall enrich you one last time more. And we shall make you big beyond the dreams of the modest founder of your House and even of his proudest grand-children. […] We shall make you big, because we shall take our first elected ruler from your House. That is the shining beacon which we shall place atop the finished Eiffel Tower of your fortune. In history it will seem as though that had been the object of the entire edifice.”237 As Richard Wagner once said (Judaism in Music, 1850), however, the Rothschilds preferred to remain “the Jews of the Kings” rather than “the Kings of the Jews”.

  The Gestation of Zionism

  Disraeli was not the inventor of Zionism. The idea of a return of the Jews to Palestine was already circulating before he came to power. An article in the London Times of August 17, 1840, shortly before the Crimean War, already suggested: “The minds of Jews have been earnestly directed towards Palestine, and that in anticipation of a reconstruction of the Jewish state many are prepared to avail themselves of the facilities which events may afford to return to the land of their fathers.” And: “It is for the Christian philanthropists and enlightened statesmen of Europe to consider whether this remarkable people does not present materials which, when collected and brought into fusion under national institutions might not be advantageously employed for the interests of civilization in the East.”238

  Nevertheless, it was Disraeli who gave the first concrete impulse to the historical movement that was to culminate, less than a century later, in the creation of Israel. Through his policy and his access to Rothschild money, Disraeli undoubtedly sowed the seeds of what later became the Zionist project of colonization of Palestine by the Jews. If it was too soon to make this project an openly avowed issue, this was primarily because the population destined to populate the new country was not yet available. Russian Jews were no more attracted to Palestine than European Jews; indeed, they hardly knew where it was. Emancipated since 1855 by Tsar Alexander II, who had given them free access to the university, Russian Jews aspired only to migrate to Europe and the United States. Pogroms, including the one in Odessa that lasted three days in 1871, did not convince them of the necessity to establish their own state. It was only after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 that the increased violence against them made some sensitive to the call of Leon Pinsker in his booklet Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to his People by a Russian Jew published in 1882. As a precursor of Herzl, Pins
ker called for “the national regeneration of the Jews,” “the creation of a Jewish nationality, of a people living upon its own soil, the auto-emancipation of the Jews; their return to the ranks of the nations by the acquisition of a Jewish homeland.”239

  It was also in 1881, the year of Disraeli’s death, that Baron Edmond de Rothschild, from the Parisian branch, started to buy land in Palestine and funded the installation of Jewish settlers, especially in Tel Aviv. More than twelve thousand acres of land were bought, and more than forty colonies were founded under the aegis of his Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA). His son James later continued this philanthropic investment. Yesterday hailed as “the Father of the Yishuv,” Edmond is honored on Israeli currency today.

  Furthermore, in his efforts to influence world affairs, proto-Zionist Disraeli did not yet have at his disposal a sufficiently tightly knit international network that would act in concert. The international Jewish organizations such as B’nai B’rith (Hebrew for “the sons of the Alliance”) founded in New York in 1843, or the Universal Israelite Alliance, founded in France in 1860 by Isaac Moses Aaron (also known as Adolphe) Crémieux, felt that Israel was doing very well as a diasporic nation. At this point they had no designs on Palestine.

  It was the Austro-Hungarian Jew Theodor Herzl who is regarded as the historical founder of Zionism, not only by his book The Jewish State (1896), but also by his indefatigable public relations work, which helped win a large number of influential Jewish personalities to the Zionist cause. Far more than a manifesto, his book is a program, almost a manual. Like Disraeli, Herzl first turned to the Ottoman Empire for help: “If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”240 Herzl approached Sultan Abdul Hamid with this offer through emissaries (as reported in his journal, June 9, 1896): “Let the Sultan give us that piece of land, and in return we shall set his house in order, straighten out his finances, and influence public opinion all over the world in his favor.” In other words, he promised to devote to the service of Ottoman Turkey the two Jewish weapons par excellence: the bank and the press. The Sultan categorically and repeatedly rejected all offers, saying, as reported in Herzl’s journal, June 19: “I cannot sell even a foot of land, for it does not belong to me, but to my people. […] Let the Jews save their billions. […] When my Empire is partitioned, they may get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse will be divided. I will not agree to vivisection.” As he had already done at the Berlin Congress, the Sultan opposed any Jewish mass immigration to Palestine. Four years later, after many more attempts, Herzl concluded (June 4, 1900): “At present I can see only one more plan: See to it that Turkey’s difficulties increase; wage a personal campaign against the Sultan, possibly seek contact with the exiled princes and the Young Turks; and, at the same time, by intensifying Jewish Socialist activities stir up the desire among the European governments to exert pressure on Turkey to take in the Jews.”241 Yet Herzl still managed to obtain a personal audience with the Sultan in May 1901.