Der Alte Jude at Berlin: The Enigmatic Life of Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli remains one of the most intriguing figures of Victorian era statecraft. Born into an Italian Jewish family of Sephardic background that, by his own later account, traced its roots through Spain and Venice, he entered the Church of England through baptism at age 12 after his father quarreled with the Bevis Marks synagogue. He was baptized at St Andrew’s in Holborn on July 31, 1817, though his father never converted. That baptism cleared the way for a parliamentary career. He was elected in 1837, two decades before the Jews Relief Act of 1858 let Jews omit the words “upon the true Faith of a Christian” from the oath.

Yet baptism never erased his origin from his personal consciousness or his public persona. Instead of adopting the discreet posture typical of Victorian assimilation, Disraeli transformed his Jewish heritage into an aristocratic badge of honor and a foundational pillar of his philosophical outlook.

Throughout his parliamentary career and romantic novels, he mounted an unapologetic defense of Jewish historical pre-eminence while simultaneously constructing a sweeping British imperial strategy that redrew the map of Europe and the Near East. In Separation and Its Discontents, Kevin MacDonald highlighted Disraeli’s unapologetic defense of his Jewish ancestry:

“Benjamin Disraeli, although baptized, developed views on the importance of racial purity and the superiority of Jewish heredity in such works as Coningsby or the New Generation (1844), Tancred or the New Crusade (1847), and the nonfictional Lord George Ben Tink, a political biography.”

His novels served as a main outlet for his theories of history and race. In Coningsby and Tancred he introduced Sidonia, a fabulously wealthy Jewish financier, and Disraeli writes of him that “He was a man without affections.” Scholars treat Sidonia as Disraeli’s alter ego, and in Tancred he declares, “All is race; there is no other truth.”

In Coningsby, Sidonia says, “The mixed persecuting races disappear; the pure persecuted race remains.” The idea, as the Jewish Encyclopedia puts it, is that no persecution could destroy an unmixed and splendidly organized race. Sidonia also tells Coningsby, “The Jews, Coningsby, are essentially Tories,” a remark in Book IV, Chapter XV, where he also claims Jews hold high places in European governments and stand behind revolutionary movements.

Disraeli used Sidonia to depict a world of international finance, diplomacy and hidden influence. In that same chapter Sidonia says the world “is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” To the young aristocrats of Young England, Sidonia offered a call to look forward, telling Coningsby that “The age of ruins is past” and pointing him toward the national character. Disraeli also maintained that Christianity completed Judaism instead of negating it. In the preface to Coningsby he wrote that Christ’s doctrines were “the completion, not the change, of Judaism,” and Sidonia is described as holding “that faith that the Apostles professed before they followed their Master,” as the Spectator noted in 1844. In his political biography Lord George Bentinck, published in 1852, Disraeli repeated the Sidonia argument in his own voice. He also wrote that men of Jewish race headed the provisional governments formed in 1848 and that Jews had “unfortunately” linked themselves with the secret societies.

This intense imaginative engagement with Jewish survival and redemption led several commentators to treat Disraeli as a herald of national restoration. In Alroy, a twelfth-century Jewish rebel demands “a national existence” and “the Land of Promise,” and critic Adam Kirsch called the book “a significant proto-Zionist text.” In Tancred, a young English aristocrat travels east to “penetrate the great Asian mystery,” the mission Sidonia urges on him. During the Feast of Tabernacles, Tancred spends Sukkot with a Jewish family in the Holy Land, and the narrator asks the reader to picture a child of Israel in “the dingy suburb or the squalid quarter of some bleak northern town” who must still celebrate “the vintage of purple Palestine.”

The published journals of Edward Henry Stanley, later the 15th Earl of Derby, suggest the fascination was not purely poetic. Stanley recorded in his diary that Disraeli spoke “with great apparent earnestness on the subject of restoring the Jews to their own land,” and that “the ownership of the soil might be bought from Turkey” with help from “the Rothschilds and leading Hebrew capitalists.” Stanley added that Disraeli “never recurred to it again” and that he had “heard of no practical step taken or attempted to be taken by him in the matter.”

When Disraeli led the government from 1874, this vivid romanticism yielded to realpolitik. His overarching objective became imperial consolidation, designed to protect maritime lifelines to British India and deter rival continental empires. Disraeli grasped the strategic value of the eastern route. On November 25, 1875, his government signed an agreement to buy Khedive Ismail’s 176,602 shares in the Suez Canal Company for £4,000,000. He financed the purchase with an advance from the London banking house of Rothschild, which paid the money in installments between December 1875 and January 1876. In 1876 he pushed the Royal Titles Act through Parliament, and the Queen announced her new title, Empress of India, on April 28, 1876. It was proclaimed in India at the Delhi Durbar on January 1, 1877.

The central pillar of his Mediterranean strategy involved checking Imperial Russia. Russian domination of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits threatened British naval dominance in the Mediterranean and the overland approaches to India. To counter Russian encroachment, Disraeli adopted an assertive policy of propping up the ailing Ottoman Empire as a regional buffer. In 1876, after the Bulgarian uprising and the Ottoman reprisals, he told the Commons that he doubted the reports of torture and, as historian Mark Rathbone describes it, contemptuously dismissed the accounts as “coffee-house babble.” Tsar Alexander II declared war on the Ottoman Empire on April 24, 1877, and by January 1878 Russian forces had reached San Stefano, within sight of Constantinople. In February 1878 Disraeli’s government sent the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet through the Dardanelles over Ottoman protest, and Admiral Hornby anchored in the Sea of Marmara. By late April the government was also moving Indian troops to Malta, showing a willingness to risk war to check Russian advances.

Disraeli reached the climax of his diplomatic career at the Congress of Berlin, which met from June 13 to July 13, 1878. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who presided over the Congress and held considerable admiration for the British leader, reportedly said of him, “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann,” or “The old Jew, he is the man.” Disraeli pressed Britain’s case against the lopsided Treaty of San Stefano, and his threats to leave the talks helped force the division of the enlarged Bulgaria into three parts. Only the northern principality gained autonomy, and it stayed under Russian influence. Britain had already secured the right to occupy and administer Cyprus through the secret Cyprus Convention of June 4, 1878, 9 days before the Congress opened. The Sultan maintained sovereignty over the island. Disraeli returned to London proclaiming “peace with honour,” a phrase that became shorthand for the settlement.

The same Congress took up the status of Jews in the Balkans. Romania’s 1866 constitution had barred non-Christians from citizenship. French delegate William Waddington first demanded religious equality as a condition of Serbian independence on June 28, 1878, then demanded the same for Romania. Article 43 of the Treaty of Berlin recognized Romanian independence subject to the conditions in Articles 44 and 45, and Article 44 barred religious difference as grounds for excluding anyone from civil and political rights or public office. Romania answered in 1879 by revising Article 7 of its constitution so that Jews could seek citizenship, but only one-by-one; only 85 Jews gained it between 1879 and 1900.

Disraeli left a strategic legacy built around Russia and the Straits. He feared that a hostile Russian presence in the Dardanelles and the eastern Mediterranean would sever British communications with Asia, and he made cooperation with the Ottoman rulers of Anatolia and the Straits a pillar of his policy. His posture toward Berlin mixed wary cooperation with efforts to loosen the Three Emperors’ League, and it rested on the analysis he gave the Commons in his 1871 speech. He described the war between France and Germany as a revolution greater than the French Revolution and warned that “The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.”

Echoes of that logic appear in Britain’s relationship with Turkey today. Turkey controls the Turkish Straits under the Montreux Convention, and in 2022 it closed them to the warships of countries at war, which limits Russia’s ability to bring ships from other fleets into the Black Sea. When Turkey agreed in October 2025 to buy 20 Eurofighter Typhoon jets, UK Defense Secretary John Healey called it “the gatekeeper to the Black Sea.” The two governments followed with a Typhoon support agreement in March 2026.

Disraeli serves as a testament to the fact that an ethnic ethos cannot be washed away by the waters of baptism. He remained a Jew in his biological and spiritual commitment through and through, directing his enormous influence toward the host nation he purported to lead only if it also furthered the protection and advancement of his own people as well. This is the persistent reality of the Jewish experience. Regardless of their religious label, there is a fundamental biological predilection to pursue a racial strategy that inevitably prioritizes their group interests above the welfare of Gentile societies. Because this strategy remains consistent whether it manifests in domestic politics or geopolitical maneuvering, such influence must always be regarded with the utmost suspicion.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.