Excerpt

. . . Disraeli’s Russophobia, to which he converted Queen Victoria, and his defense of the Turks, whose massacres of the Serbs and Bulgarians were well known, gave rise to theories of a Jewish conspiracy. William Ewart Gladstone, a longtime opponent to Disraeli and himself prime minister several times (1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886, and 1892–1894), declared that Disraeli “was holding British foreign policy hostage to his Jewish sympathies, and that he was more interested in relieving the anguish of Jews in Russia and Turkey than in any British interests.” The newspaper The Truth of November 22, 1877, alluding to the intimacy of Disraeli with the Rothschilds suspected “a tacit conspiracy … on the part of a considerable number of Anglo-Hebrews, to drag us into a war on behalf of the Turks.” It was remembered, moreover, that in a speech to the House of Commons in 1847, Disraeli had demanded the admission of Jews to eligible functions, on the grounds that “the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe.”[9]

The Queen, like much of the British aristocracy, was already under the spell of a fashionable theory assigning an Israelite origin to the Anglo-Saxons. This theory had first appeared around Oliver Cromwell’s time, was revamped in 1840 by Pastor John Wilson with his Lectures on Ancient Israel and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe, and again in 1870 by Edward Hine in The English Nation Identified with the Lost Israel, in which we learn that the word “Saxon” is derived from “Isaac’s sons.” This ludicrous theory offered cheap biblical justification to British colonialism, and even to the genocide of colonized peoples (new Canaanites) by the British Empire (new Israel).[10] Queen Victoria was happy to believe that her noble lineage descended from King David, and had her sons circumcised, a custom that has continued to this day. There may be some truth in the British elite’s sense of their Jewishness, for during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many marriages had united rich Jewish families with the old destitute landed aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, “with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.”[11] But the Queen’s infatuation with Jewishness had also much to do with the influence of Disraeli, who once bragged about it to a friend in these terms: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”[12]

The Disraeli case is illuminating because the question it raises is the same as the question that divides geopolitical analysts today on the relationship between the United States and Israel: which one wags the other? Is Israel the bridgehead of the United States in the Middle East, or is the United States, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, the “stupid mule” of Israel? Answering this question for the century preceding the Second World War (when “Israel” meant International Jewry), helps answer the same question today, when the symbiotic relationship between Israel and the empire has grown considerably.

Disraeli’s Russophobia, to which he converted Queen Victoria, and his defense of the Turks, whose massacres of the Serbs and Bulgarians were well known, gave rise to theories of a Jewish conspiracy. William Ewart Gladstone, a longtime opponent to Disraeli and himself prime minister several times (1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886, and 1892–1894), declared that Disraeli “was holding British foreign policy hostage to his Jewish sympathies, and that he was more interested in relieving the anguish of Jews in Russia and Turkey than in any British interests.” The newspaper The Truth of November 22, 1877, alluding to the intimacy of Disraeli with the Rothschilds suspected “a tacit conspiracy … on the part of a considerable number of Anglo-Hebrews, to drag us into a war on behalf of the Turks.” It was remembered, moreover, that in a speech to the House of Commons in 1847, Disraeli had demanded the admission of Jews to eligible functions, on the grounds that “the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe.”[9]

The Queen, like much of the British aristocracy, was already under the spell of a fashionable theory assigning an Israelite origin to the Anglo-Saxons. This theory had first appeared around Oliver Cromwell’s time, was revamped in 1840 by Pastor John Wilson with his Lectures on Ancient Israel and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe, and again in 1870 by Edward Hine in The English Nation Identified with the Lost Israel, in which we learn that the word “Saxon” is derived from “Isaac’s sons.” This ludicrous theory offered cheap biblical justification to British colonialism, and even to the genocide of colonized peoples (new Canaanites) by the British Empire (new Israel).[10] Queen Victoria was happy to believe that her noble lineage descended from King David, and had her sons circumcised, a custom that has continued to this day. There may be some truth in the British elite’s sense of their Jewishness, for during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many marriages had united rich Jewish families with the old destitute landed aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, “with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.”[11] But the Queen’s infatuation with Jewishness had also much to do with the influence of Disraeli, who once bragged about it to a friend in these terms: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”[12]

The Disraeli case is illuminating because the question it raises is the same as the question that divides geopolitical analysts today on the relationship between the United States and Israel: which one wags the other? Is Israel the bridgehead of the United States in the Middle East, or is the United States, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, the “stupid mule” of Israel? Answering this question for the century preceding the Second World War (when “Israel” meant International Jewry), helps answer the same question today, when the symbiotic relationship between Israel and the empire has grown considerably.

The answer depends on one’s point of view. The Zionists naturally have an interest in promoting the view that Israel serves Anglo-American interests, rather than the reverse. Disraeli argued in front of the British Parliament that a Jewish Palestine would be in the interest of British colonialism. But Jewish Zionists have always seen things from the other end of the telescope, and one can hardly believe that Disraeli did not secretly share their view. When the hero of his novel Tancred (1847), a Jew who has been promoted Lord just like Disraeli, glorifies the British Empire in these words: “We wish to conquer the world, led by angels, in order to bring man to happiness, under divine sovereignty,” who lies behind this ambiguous “we”? Is it the same double-meaning “we” as PNAC neocons used for drawing America into wars for the benefit of Israel?

When a British Jew such as Disraeli said “we” to the British, there was a strategic ambiguity. He stroke a patriotic chord with the Anglo-Saxon elite, who shared a common belief in the British Empire’s mission to civilize the world — people like Lord Salisbury, member of Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table that worked for a world government by the “British race.”[13] British imperialism and Zionist nationalism were born around the same time, as the twins Esau and Jacob, and have been intimately intertwined from their birth. But two considerations help understand their true relationship. First, the ideological roots of the British Empire do not go back beyond the seventeenth century, whereas those of Zionism go back more than two millennia. Secondly, the British Empire died after WWI, whereas Zionism took off. For these two reasons, the theory that Zionism is a by-product of British imperialism (let’s call it the Chomsky-theory) is unsustainable.

Understanding the true relationship between Zion and Albion in Disraeli’s time requires a correct appraisal of the power of the Rothschild dynasty over British policy. Without the Rothschilds, Great Britain would never have gained control of the Suez Canal, which was the cornerstone of the British Empire in the Middle East. The Rothschilds didn’t run for political office themselves, although they sometimes married into it: Lord Archibald Primrose, secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1886 and from 1892 to 1894, and prime minister in 1894-1895, was Mayer Amschel de Rothschild’s son-in-law.

It is noteworthy that Theodor Herzl envisioned the future Jewish state as an “aristocratic republic” with, at its head, “the first Prince Rothschild.” In a long tirade in his diary he exhorted the Rothschilds to redeem their evil souls by financing Zionism instead of wars:

I don’t know whether all governments already realize what an international menace your World House constitutes. Without you no wars can be waged, and if peace is to be concluded, people are all the more dependent on you. For the year 1895 the military expenses of the five Great Powers have been estimated at four billion francs, and their actual peacetime military strength at 2,800,000 men. And these military forces, which are unparalleled in history, you command financially, regardless of the conflicting desires of the nations. … And your accursed wealth is still growing. … But if you do go with us, … we shall take our first elected ruler from your House. That is the shining beacon which we shall place atop the finished Eiffel Tower of your fortune. In history it will seem as though that had been the object of the entire edifice.[14]

However, as Richard Wagner once said (Judaism in Music, 1850), the Rothschilds preferred to remain “the Jews of the Kings” rather than “the Kings of the Jews.”

If the time was not yet ripe for the creation of the Jewish state in Disraeli’s day, it was mostly because the Jews of Russia were no more attracted to Palestine than the Jews of Europe; they hardly knew where it was. Just recently emancipated by Tsar Alexander II, they aspired only to emigrate to Europe or the United States. It was only after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 (one month before Disraeli’s death) that the pogroms made some of them sensitive to Leon Pinsker’s proto-Zionist appeal, published in 1882: “We must reconcile ourselves once and for all to the idea that the other nations, by reason of their inherent natural antagonIsm will forever reject us.”[15] It was also in 1881 that Baron Edmond de Rothschild, of the Paris branch, began buying land in Palestine and financing the installation of Jewish settlers, notably in Tel Aviv, under the auspices of his Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA). But most existing international Jewish organizations, such as B’nai B’rith (founded in New York in 1843) or the Alliance Israélite Universelle (founded in Paris in 1860), felt that Israel was doing just fine as a dispersed nation, and had no designs on Palestine.

This changed during the First World War, when an extremely efficient network was set up linking both sides of the Atlantic.[16] Theodor Herlz first concentrated his diplomatic efforts on Germany, but it was in England that things started to look promising (“The center of gravity has shifted to England,” he wrote in his diary in 1895), thanks in part to the recruiting of Israel Zangwill, who, according to Benzion Netanyahu, “was the first to speak in a direct manner about Zionism to the upper circles of British politics,” and to Lloyd George in particular, “a close acquaintance of Zangwill’s from the start of his Zionist activity to the end of his days.”[17] Recall that Zangwill was the successful author of The Melting Pot, a play extolling mixed marriages for Americans. No contradiction here, for “the mixed persecuting races disappear, the pure persecuted race remains”, as said Sidonia.

Notes:

[10] André Pichot, Aux origines des théories raciales, de la Bible à Darwin, Flammarion, 2008, pp. 124–143, 319.

[11] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, Constable & Co., 1922 (archive.org), p. 223.

[12] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, pp. 579, 547.

[13] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden (1949), Books In Focus, 1981.

[14] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1 , pp. 163–170.

[15] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism, Balfour Books, 2012 ,kindle l. 761-775.

[16] Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, kindle l. 387-475.

[17] Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism, l. 2536-59.

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