The social destinies of average Jews were determined by their eternal lack of decision. And society certainly did not compel them to make up their minds, for it was precisely this ambiguity of situation and character that made the relationship with Jews attractive. The majority of assimilated Jews thus lived in a twilight of favor and misfortune and knew with certainty only that both success and failure were inextricably connected with the fact that they were Jews. For them the Jewish question had lost, once and for all, all political significance; but it haunted their private lives and influenced their personal decisions all the more tyrannically. The adage, “a man in the street and a Jew at home,” was bitterly realized: political problems were distorted to the point of pure perversion when Jews tried to solve them by means of inner experience and private emotions; private life was poisoned to the point of inhumanity—for example in the question of mixed marriages—when the heavy burden of unsolved problems of public significance was crammed into that private existence which is much better ruled by the unpredictable laws of passion than by considered policies.

  It was by no means easy not to resemble the “Jew in general” and yet remain a Jew; to pretend not to be like Jews and still show with sufficient clarity that one was Jewish. The average Jew, neither a parvenu nor a “conscious pariah” (Bernard Lazare), could only stress an empty sense of difference which continued to be interpreted, in all its possible psychological aspects and variations from innate strangeness to social alienation. As long as the world was somewhat peaceful, this attitude did not work out badly and for generations even became a modus vivendi. Concentration on an artificially complicated inner life helped Jews to respond to the unreasonable demands of society, to be strange and exciting, to develop a certain immediacy of self-expression and presentation which were originally the attributes of the actor and the virtuoso, people whom society has always half denied and half admired. Assimilated Jews, half proud and half ashamed of their Jewishness, clearly were in this category.

  The process by which bourgeois society developed out of the ruins of its revolutionary traditions and memories added the black ghost of boredom to economic saturation and general indifference to political questions. Jews became people with whom one hoped to while away some time. The less one thought of them as equals, the more attractive and entertaining they became. Bourgeois society, in its search for entertainment and its passionate interest in the individual, insofar as he differed from the norm that is man, discovered the attraction of everything that could be supposed to be mysteriously wicked or secretly vicious. And precisely this feverish preference opened the doors of society to Jews; for within the framework of this society, Jewishness, after having been distorted into a psychological quality, could easily be perverted into a vice. The Enlightenment’s genuine tolerance and curiosity for everything human was being replaced by a morbid lust for the exotic, abnormal, and different as such. Several types in society, one after the other, represented the exotic, the anomalous, the different, but none of them was in the least connected with political questions. Thus only the role of Jews in this decaying society could assume a stature that transcended the narrow limits of a society affair.

  Before we follow the strange ways which led the “exception Jews,” famous and notorious strangers, into the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain in fin-de-siècle France, we must recall the only great man whom the elaborate self-deception of the “exception Jews” ever produced. It seems that every commonplace idea gets one chance in at least one individual to attain what used to be called historical greatness. The great man of the “exception Jews” was Benjamin Disraeli.

  II: The Potent Wizard29

  BENJAMIN DISRAELI, whose chief interest in life was the career of Lord Beaconsfield, was distinguished by two things: first, the gift of the gods which we moderns banally call luck, and which other periods revered as a goddess named Fortune, and second, more intimately and more wondrously connected with Fortune than one may be able to explain, the great carefree innocence of mind and imagination which makes it impossible to classify the man as a careerist, though he never thought seriously of anything except his career. His innocence made him recognize how foolish it would be to feel déclassé and how much more exciting it would be for himself and for others, how much more useful for his career, to accentuate the fact that he was a Jew “by dressing differently, combing his hair oddly, and by queer manners of expression and verbiage.”30 He cared for admission to high and highest society more passionately and shamelessly than any other Jewish intellectual did; but he was the only one of them who discovered the secret of how to preserve luck, that natural miracle of pariahdom, and who knew from the beginning that one never should bow down in order to “move up from high to higher.”

  He played the game of politics like an actor in a theatrical performance, except that he played his part so well that he was convinced by his own make-believe. His life and his career read like a fairy-tale, in which he appeared as the prince—offering the blue flower of the romantics, now the primrose of imperialist England, to his princess, the Queen of England. The British colonial enterprise was the fairyland upon which the sun never sets and its capital the mysterious Asiatic Delhi whence the prince wanted to escape with his princess from foggy prosaic London. This may have been foolish and childish; but when a wife writes to her husband as Lady Beaconsfield wrote to hers: “You know you married me for money, and I know that if you had to do it again you would do it for love,”31 one is silenced before a happiness that seemed to be against all the rules. Here was one who started out to sell his soul to the devil, but the devil did not want the soul and the gods gave him all the happiness of this earth.

  Disraeli came from an entirely assimilated family; his father, an enlightened gentleman, baptized the son because he wanted him to have the opportunities of ordinary mortals. He had few connections with Jewish society and knew nothing of Jewish religion or customs. Jewishness, from the beginning, was a fact of origin which he was at liberty to embellish, unhindered by actual knowledge. The result was that somehow he looked at this fact much in the same way as a Gentile would have looked at it. He realized much more clearly than other Jews that being a Jew could be as much an opportunity as a handicap. And since, unlike his simple and modest father, he wanted nothing less than to become an ordinary mortal and nothing more than “to distinguish himself above all his contemporaries,” 32 he began to shape his “olive complexion and coal-black eyes” until he with “the mighty dome of his forehead—no Christian temple, to be sure—(was) unlike any living creature one has met.”33 He knew instinctively that everything depended upon the “division between him and mere mortals,” upon an accentuation of his lucky “strangeness.”

  All this demonstrates a unique understanding of society and its rules. Significantly, it was Disraeli who said, “What is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few”34—perhaps the most profound insight into the very principle by which the slow and insidious decline of nineteenth-century society into the depth of mob and underworld morality took place. Since he knew this rule, he knew also that Jews would have no better chances anywhere than in circles which pretended to be exclusive and to discriminate against them; for inasmuch as these circles of the few, together with the multitude, thought of Jewishness as a crime, this “crime” could be transformed at any moment into an attractive “vice.” Disraeli’s display of exoticism, strangeness, mysteriousness, magic, and power drawn from secret sources, was aimed correctly at this disposition in society. And it was his virtuosity at the social game which made him choose the Conservative Party, won him a seat in Parliament, the post of Prime Minister, and, last xbut not least, the lasting admiration of society and the friendship of a Queen.

  One of the reasons for his success was the sincerity of his play. The impression he made on his more unbiased contemporaries was a curious mixture of acting and “absolute sincerity and unreserve.” 35 This could only be achieved by a genuine innocence that was partly due to an upbringing from which all specific Jewish influence had been excluded.36 But Disraeli’s good conscience was also due to his having been born an Englishman. England did not know Jewish masses and Jewish poverty, as she had admitted them centuries after their expulsion in the Middle Ages; the Portuguese Jews who settled in England in the eighteenth century were wealthy and educated. Not until the end of the nineteenth century, when the pogroms in Russia initiated the modem Jewish emigrations, did Jewish poverty enter London, and along with it the difference between the Jewish masses and their well-to-do brethren. In Disraeli’s time the Jewish question, in its Continental form, was quite unknown, because only Jews welcome to the state lived in England. In other words, the English “exception Jews” were not so aware of being exceptions as their Continental brothers were. When Disraeli scorned the “pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of men,” 37 he consciously followed in the footsteps of Burke who had “preferred the rights of an Englishman to the Rights of Man,” but ignored the actual situation in which privileges for the few had been substituted for rights for all. He was so ignorant of the real conditions among the Jewish people, and so convinced of “the influence of the Jewish race upon modern communities,” that he frankly demanded that the Jews “receive all that honour and favour from the northern and western races, which, in civilized and refined nations, should be the lot of those who charm the public taste and elevate the public feeling.”38 Since political influence of Jews in England centered around the English branch of the Rothschilds, he felt very proud about the Rothschilds’ help in defeating Napoleon and did not see any reason why he should not be outspoken in his political opinions as a Jew.39 As a baptized Jew, he was of course never an official spokesman for any Jewish community, but it remains true that he was the only Jew of his kind and his century who tried as well as he knew to represent the Jewish people politically.

  Disraeli, who never denied that “the fundamental fact about (him) was that he was a Jew,”40 had an admiration for all things Jewish that was matched only by his ignorance of them. The mixture of pride and ignorance in these matters, however, was characteristic of all the newly assimilated Jews. The great difference is that Disraeli knew even a little less of Jewish past and present and therefore dared to speak out openly what others betrayed in the half-conscious twilight of behavior patterns dictated by fear and arrogance.

  The political result of Disraeli’s ability to gauge Jewish possibilities by the political aspirations of a normal people was more serious; he almost automatically produced the entire set of theories about Jewish influence and organization that we usually find in the more vicious forms of antisemitism. First of all, he actually thought of himself as the “chosen man of the chosen race.”41 What better proof was there than his own career; a Jew without name and riches, helped only by a few Jewish bankers, was carried to the position of the first man in England; one of the less liked men of Parliament became Prime Minister and earned genuine popularity among those who for a long time had “regarded him as a charlatan and treated him as a pariah.”42 Political success never satisfied him. It was more difficult and more important to be admitted to London’s society than to conquer the House of Commons, and it was certainly a greater triumph to be elected a member of Grillion’s dining club—“a select coterie of which it has been customary to make rising politicians of both parties, but from which the socially objectionable are rigorously excluded” 43—than to be Her Majesty’s Minister. The delightfully unexpected climax of all these sweet triumphs was the sincere friendship of the Queen, for if the monarchy in England had lost most of its political prerogatives in a strictly controlled, constitutional nation-state, it had won and retained undisputed primacy in English society. In measuring the greatness of Disraeli’s triumph, one should remember that Lord Robert Cecil, one of his eminent colleagues in the Conservative Party, could still, around 1850, justify a particularly bitter attack by stating that he was only “plainly speaking out what every one is saying of Disraeli in private and no one will say in public.”44 Disraeli’s greatest victory was that finally nobody said in private what would not have flattered and pleased him if it had been said in public. It was precisely this unique rise to genuine popularity which Disraeli had achieved through a policy of seeing only the advantages, and preaching only the privileges, of being born a Jew.

  Part of Disraeli’s good fortune is the fact that he always fitted his time, and that consequently his numerous biographers understood him more completely than is the case with most great men. He was a living embodiment of ambition, that powerful passion which had developed in a century seemingly not allowing for any distinctions and differences. Carlyle, at any rate, who interpreted the whole world’s history according to a nineteenth-century ideal of the hero, was clearly in the wrong when he refused a title from Disraeli’s hands.45 No other man among his contemporaries corresponded to Carlyle’s heroes as well as Disraeli, with his concept of greatness as such, emptied of all specific achievements; no other man fulfilled so exactly the demands of the late nineteenth century for genius in the flesh as this charlatan who took his role seriously and acted the great part of the Great Man with genuine naïveté and an overwhelming display of fantastic tricks and entertaining artistry. Politicians fell in love with the charlatan who transformed boring business transactions into dreams with an oriental flavor; and when society sensed an aroma of black magic in Disraeli’s shrewd dealings, the “potent wizard” had actually won the heart of his time.

  Disraeli’s ambition to distinguish himself from other mortals and his longing for aristocratic society were typical of the middle classes of his time and country. Neither political reasons nor economic motives, but the impetus of his social ambition, made him join the Conservative Party and follow a policy that would always “select the Whigs for hostility and the Radicals for alliance.”46 In no European country did the middle classes ever achieve enough self-respect to reconcile their intelligentsia with their social status, so that aristocracy could continue to determine the social scale when it had already lost all political significance. The unhappy German philistine discovered his “innate personality” in his desperate struggle against caste arrogance, which had grown out of the decline of nobility and the necessity to protect aristocratic titles against bourgeois money. Vague blood theories and strict control of marriages are rather recent phenomena in the history of European aristocracy. Disraeli knew much better than the German Philistines what was required to meet the demands of aristocracy. All attempts of the bourgeoisie to attain social status failed to convince aristocratic arrogance because they reckoned with individuals and lacked the most important element of caste conceit, the pride in privilege without individual effort and merit, simply by virtue of birth. The “innate personality” could never deny that its development demanded education and special effort of the individual. When Disraeli “summoned up a pride of race to confront a pride of caste,”47 he knew that the social status of the Jews, whatever else might be said of it, at least depended solely on the fact of birth and not on achievement.

  Disraeli went even a step further. He knew that the aristocracy, which year after year had to see quite a number of rich middle-class men buy titles, was haunted by very serious doubts of its own value. He therefore defeated them at their game by using his rather trite and popular imagination to describe fearlessly how the Englishmen “came from a parvenu and hybrid race, while he himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe,” how “the life of a British peer (was) mainly regulated by Arabian laws and Syrian customs,” how ”a Jewess is the queen of heaven“ or that ”the flower of the Jewish race is even now sitting on the right hand of the Lord God of Sabaoth.” 48 And when he finally wrote that ”there is no longer in fact an aristocracy in England, for the superiority of the animal man is an essential quality of aristocracy,” 49 he had in fact touched the weakest point of modem aristocratic race theories, which were later to be the point of departure for bourgeois and upstart race opinions.

  Judaism, and belonging to the Jewish people, degenerated into a simple fact of birth only among assimilated Jewry. Originally it had meant a specific religion, a specific nationality, the sharing of specific memories and specific hopes, and, even among the privileged Jews, it meant at least still sharing specific economic advantages. Secularization and assimilation of the Jewish intelligentsia had changed self-consciousness and self-interpretation in such a way that nothing was left of the old memories and hopes but the awareness of belonging to a chosen people. Disraeli, though certainly not the only “exception Jew” to believe in his own chosenness without believing in Him who chooses and rejects, was the only one who produced a fullblown race doctrine out of this empty concept of a historic mission. He was ready to assert that the Semitic principle “represents all that is spiritual in our nature,” that “the vicissitudes of history find their main solution—all is race,” which is “the key to history” regardless of “language and religion,” for “there is only one thing which makes a race and that is blood” and there is only one aristocracy, the “aristocracy of nature” which consists of “an unmixed race of a first-rate organization.” 50