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Disraeli: A Biography by Stanley WeintraubReview by: Anthony S. WohlThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 293-294Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/206628 .

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REVIEWS | 293

Disraeli: A Biography. By Stanley Weintraub (New York, Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1993) 717 pp. $30.00

When Lord Blake's Disraeli (London, 1966) appeared, it was widely praised as the best personal and political biography of a British prime minister to date. It was followed by Richard Davis's sensitive Disraeli (London, 1976), Sarah Bradford's intimate Disraeli (New York, 1982) and E. J. Feuchtwanger's and Richard Shannon's detailed political stud- ies, Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party (Oxford, 1968) and The Age of Disraeli, 1868-1881 (London, I990). One may well ask, Why yet another biography?1 Weintraub's justification is that he "examines major documents and data hitherto unknown or unused and employs the perspectives of medicine, sexuality, and other biographical lenses which help get to the roots of behavior" (xiii).

The result is a biography that provides many fresh and perceptive insights, rather than a radically new interpretation. His speculation that Disraeli, while married, sired two illegitimate children is, as he says, "plausible without being conclusive" (436). The use of an American "lens"-the observations of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others- and a medical "lens" to show that Disraeli's doctor administered depres- sants (digitalis) during his long and bewildering depression are innovative and valuable.

To Weintraub, Disraeli's life is "an adventure" (xiv), one that he enters sympathetically and dynamically and evokes through the use of cinematic techniques. He opens, dramatically, not in 1804 with Disraeli's birth, but in 1837 with his successful election, at the fifth attempt, to Parliament, and Disraeli's ancestry and youth are treated almost as extended flashbacks. Similarly, rather than confining Disraeli's novels to the usual discrete chapters, Weintraub imaginatively integrates them- almost as docudramas-into the narrative, and he successfully takes risks with both time and character. In illuminating time-warp parallels we move between Disraeli's views on poverty and Undershaft's in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (1907). Disraeli rubs shoulders with George Canning, Oscar Wilde, and James Whistler, and Weintraub pulls off a wonderful conflation between the Jewish anti-Semitism of Sarah, Disraeli's grandmother, and of Leonora in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (London, 1876).

Rather like Disraeli, Weintraub is at his best in the town and country houses of the great governing nobility. He superbly recreates, with all the sparkle of Disraeli's "silver fork" novels, this vital facet of Victorian political life. His analyses of Disraeli's political philosophies and party maneuverings, however, are considerably weaker. Only after

I Especially since two extended essays have recently been published, John Vincent's brilliant Disraeli (Oxford, I990) and John Walton's suggestive Disraeli (London, I990), both miracles of compression and concise analysis.

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294 ANTHONY S. WOHL

500 pages or so do we arrive at Disraeli's great ministry of I874-I880, and then we are rushed through its remarkable social legislation in a scant two pages. Perhaps, Weintraub was (understandably) exhausted, as was Disraeli himself at this stage.

Several scholars have examined Disraeli's "Jewishness."2 What dis- tinguishes Weintraub's biography is its use of letters and pamphlets to indicate the public and private anti-Semitism directed at Disraeli when he was prime minister and after some forty years of service to his nation (Blake devotes only three sentences to the anti-Semitism of the I87os). Finally, a biography of Disraeli with "Anti-Semitism" a prominent category in the index! Weintraub performs a valuable service in pointing the finger at Victorian anti-Semitism, and he is refreshingly forthright in his appraisal of Punch, which a stung Disraeli criticized for being "malevolent with[out] being playful" (219).

Anti-Semitism is, however, more a sporadically recurrent theme than an organizing principle of the book, and Weintraub fails to incor- porate recent psychological, sociological, and historical research to sug- gest how "prejudice propelled" (xii) and energized Disraeli's career (he cites none of the works in footnote 2). He offers no definition of anti-Semitism or analysis of the place of minorities in a liberal society. Without these broader frameworks-theoretical and historical-it is impossible to gauge the depth and extent of the prejudices Disraeli faced, their political strength and potential, or the vulnerability of Anglo-Jewry some twenty years after they achieved political emancipation in 1858.

Weintraub's empathic biography brilliantly evokes Disraeli's charm and belief in himself and the social circles in which he moved. It informs as it entertains with a variety of detail-such as the close relationship between Disraeli and the Rothschilds-and it is free from fashionable postmodernist cynicism. It is, however, uneven, and one leaves this work as many of his contemporaries left Disraeli, enchanted by the epigrammatic wit and startled by broad speculative flashes, and yet wondering if there might not possibly be something rather more politi- cally substantial than has been revealed.

Anthony S. Wohl Vassar College

2 Todd M. Endelman, "Disraeli as Jew,"Jewish Chronicle Literary Supplement, VII (December 23, I966); idem, "Disraeli's Jewishness Reconsidered," Modern Judaism, V (1985), 109-I23; Philip Rieff, "Disraeli: the Chosen of History," Commentary, XIII (1952), 22-23; Isaiah Berlin, "Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the Search for Identity," Transactions of theJewish Historical

Society of England, XXII (1968-69), I-20; Benjamin Jaffe, "A Reassessment of Benjamin Disraeli's Jewish Aspects," ibid., XXVII (I982), 115-123; Harold Fisch, "Disraeli's Hebraic

Compulsions," in H. J. Zimmels, J. Rabbinowitz, and I. Finestein, (eds.), Essays Presented to

Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (London, I967), 81-94; Paul Smith, "Disraeli's Politics," Transactions of the Royal Historical Bulletin, XXXVII (1987), 65-85; Abraham Gilam, "Benjamin Disraeli and Jewish Identity," Wiener Library Bulletin, XXXIII

(1980), 2-8; David L. Dinkin, "The Racial and Political Ideas of Benjamin Disraeli," unpub. M.Sc. thesis (Univ. of Bristol, 1981).

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