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A.N.Wilson: When It Finally Occurred to Me that Disraeli Was a Racist

A.N. Wilson, in the London Daily Telegraph (2-7-05):

... One of the delights of writing my book The Victorians was to revisit the novels of Disraeli. I had read Coningsby and Tancred in my youth, but Lothair, a very funny one, was a discovery for me. I enjoyed them as examples of high camp, with their extravagant descriptions of dinners, clothes, great houses. I also enjoyed the many good jokes, and in Lothair the amusing caricature of Cardinal Manning. The "ideas" in Disraeli's books about One-Nation Toryism and so forth rather passed me by. It was only when I came to write a continuation of The Victorians, and to consider the Victorian legacy in the 20th century, that I began to re-examine my feelings about Disraeli's intellectual legacy.

It is hardly surprising, after the nightmare that the Third Reich visited upon the world, that our generation has decided to teach its children that racial prejudice is just about the worst sin imaginable. Short of being a paedophile, it is hard to think of anything our generation considers more evil than to be a racist. It is something of a shock, therefore, to be made to realise that Disraeli was not merely casually racist, but determinedly and influentially so.

Disraeli, by making Queen Victoria into the "Empress of India", made an unabashed declaration that some races were superior to others, and therefore entitled to absorb them into their imperial sway. It was only when reading about, and trying to make up my mind about, the tail-end of the Empire that the extent of what we would call racism in Disraeli became apparent to me. "All is race," he wrote in Tancred. You could dismiss that as something said in fiction. In Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography, his life of a friend and ally, however, Disraeli does not place his ideology in the mouths of political characters. "What would be the consequences for the great Anglo-Saxon republic for example," he asks, "were its citizens to secede from their sound principle of reserve, and mingle with their negro and coloured populations? In the course of time, they would become so deteriorated that their states would probably be reconquered and regained by the aborigines whom they have expelled and who would then be their superiors. But though nature will never ultimately permit this theory of natural equality to be practised, the preaching of this dogma has already caused much mischief and may cause more. The native tendency of the Jewish race, who are justly proud of their blood, is against the doctrine of the equality of man."

I think I'd always read this, if not quite as a joke, then as something approaching a joke. Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography makes it clear that Disraeli was in deadly earnest. "The Jews are a superior race," he writes, "and shall never be destroyed or absorbed by an inferior." Also: "The Jews are a living and most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man. A principle which, if it were possible to act on it, would deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius of the world."

These words of Disraeli's were picked up and quoted extensively by that disastrous figure Houston Stewart Chamberlain, cousin of Neville and son-in-law of Richard Wagner, whose choruses of praise for the superiority of the Teutonic races in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (written in German) were regarded as infallible by the National Socialists. "Let Disraeli teach us," Chamberlain wrote, "that the whole significance of Judaism lies in its purity of race, that this alone gives it power and duration." How quickly, within one generation, Disraeli's ideas could be turned, murderously, against the Jews themselves.