The defining subject of David Cesarani's posthumous Disraeli, commissioned by Yale University Press for its Jewish Lives series, is Disraeli's Jewishness, a much-trodden field. Cesarani begins by asking, “Does Benjamin Disraeli deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives?”(1). The reader must wait until near midpoint in the book for a clear statement of that central issue: Disraeli needed—as do his biographers—a “solution to his dual identity as a Jew and a Christian” (259). Cesarani is at pains to scale back the excessive Jewishness with which Disraeli has been endowed by biographers and historians, itself a response to the non-Jewish Disraeli that had prevailed in earlier decades.

Cesarani argues that Disraeli's words or actions identifying him with Jews or Judaism were late, ignorant, intermittent, and superficial. In making the case, his text sometimes reads more like a prosecuting attorney's brief than a historical inquiry; he also depends on the argument from silence or ignores evidence. For instance, Disraeli wrote from Spain of Washington Irving, his father's friend and author of The Conquest of Granada, which he is avidly reading and recommends to his father because “I am wandering among [its] scenes”; Disraeli could not have missed those paragraphs that portray the forced conversion of the Spanish Jews and persecution of the “pseudo-Christians” (crypto-Jews), yet Cesarani questions whether “he was aware of [Granada's Jewish past] at all” (45). Moreover, the fact that Disraeli did not actually write his sister the several pages that “I could write” on his sojourn in Jerusalem, “the most delightful of all our travels,” is invoked as evidence of indifference (48). On a similar track, Cesarani describes Disraeli's 1833 Alroy as a “farrago” of pseudo-scholarship that Disraeli, dabbling in Kabbalah and making a mishmash of Jewish history, possibly intended as a joke (57)—this despite the novel's historical preface and voluminous notes, as well as the common understanding that Alroy is the most autobiographical and most Jewish of his early works. The pattern of raising the evidence that is most easily dismissed continues: Cesarani reports that Daniel O'Connell's was the first instance in parliamentary politics in which Disraeli was attacked as a Jew, but while Disraeli was furiously bent on fighting a duel, he did not take the anti-Semitic fusillade “seriously at all” (69). In pleading to Robert Peel for office in his whining letter lamenting the “hate and malice” he has endured, Cesarani insists, Disraeli was reacting not to antisemitism but to his reputation as untrustworthy (91).

One of Disraeli's first votes in Parliament was cast against Jewish emancipation. He supported emancipation only once (in a famous speech in the 1847 debate), for on the many occasions when it came before Parliament from 1837 to 1858, he did not speak at all or spoke against it, and sometimes voted for, sometimes against it. The likelihood that Disraeli's political standing would be jeopardized by supporting emancipation, Cesarani leaves unaddressed (it wrecked Lord George Bentinck's party leadership). Disraeli's lodestar was “ambition,” for which Jewish affinities were a handicap. Cesarani uniformly interprets instances of restraint as signs of apathy (80–81).

In the play on words in his subtitle, Cesarani appears to promise extensive revision of our understanding of Disraeli's career through the novels. Yet he observes that “the novels are neither autobiography nor blueprint for a life yet to be lived” (5)—true enough. In the end, Cesarani does not explore the relationship of Disraeli's politics and fiction, and he adds little to the scholarship on that topic. Although he cites it several times, he does not adequately reckon with Robert O'Kell's masterful Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (2013), which illuminates Disraeli's career without taking the fiction literally.

In dealing with Jewish themes in Disraeli's fictional trilogy of the 1840s, Cesarani resorts to such words as “gallimaufry” and “miasma,” acknowledging no more than that Tancred, Disraeli's protagonist, recognizes “the Hebrew faith [as] the fons et origo of Christianity” (105). But this idea is much more importantly developed in the trilogy than Cesarani allows—seriously, knowledgeably, and perceptively. Matthew Arnold, most notably, was profoundly influenced by the trilogy in formulating his concepts of Hebraism and Hellenism. A kind of rivalrous dialogue went on between the two writers through the mid-1870s, which included Disraeli's Lothair, with its warning against Nazi-like Aryanism to which Hellenism could degenerate, and Arnold's acknowledgment in Literature and Dogma that three-quarters of life is conduct, thus paraphrasing Disraeli's exposition of “the Semitic principle.” This history is spelled out luminously by Michael Ragussis in Figures of Conversion (1995), another work of relevant scholarship that Cesarani cites but fails to mine.

Cesarani gives the impression that Disraeli was the boss, for example, that he decided to dissolve Parliament and hold a general election or that he formulated the party's tactics in opposing Palmerston's government; this is to carry on that Disraeli-centric historiography that leaves out Lord Derby, the subject of The Forgotten Prime Minister (2007–8), Angus Hawkins's magisterial two-volume work. By contrast, for Cesarani to say that Disraeli was “hired” to lead the Tories in the Commons and for twenty years was Derby's “court Jew” misconstrues the relationship of party chief to deputy: Disraeli gained and held his place by his political skill and debating power. To sum up Disraeli's political career as “the last court Jew” (225–36) is a misconception: those builders of the early-modern absolutist state were entrepreneurs and administrators of great wealth who functioned as financial experts and suppliers of credit; typically, they were members of the Jewish community, in fact its protectors, and aspired to lead it. None of this fits Disraeli's profile.

Cesarani reiterates a familiar indictment: Disraeli's “All is race” ideology, which made the Jews the superior race that ruled the world “from behind the scenes,” and his addiction to conspiracy operating through Jewish-led secret societies, provided a battery of lethal weapons to anti-Semites. According to Cesarani, Disraeli was the first to portray Jewish wealth and power as a tremendous global force—united, invincible, hostile—and, citing Hannah Arendt as corroboration, he “almost single-handedly invented the lexicon of modern racial anti-Semitism” (235). However, no serious historian of anti-Semitism would accept such a judgment; indeed, twentieth-century genocidists would have committed their crimes with or without the sanction of Disraelian racism.

This volume fails to advance our understanding of Disraeli's Jewishness past Stanley Weintraub's Disraeli (1993). In light of his authoritative works on the Holocaust and Anglo-Jewry, and his tragic death at age 58, one regrets that David Cesarani does not do Disraeli justice.