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“Ben JuJu”: Representations of Disraeli's Jewishness in the victorian political cartoon

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Notes

  1. In a work of almost 800 pages Lord Blake, for example, devoted only three short sentences to the anti-Semitism of this period; see Robert Blake,Disraeli (New York, 1967), 604–605. Both R. T. Shannon in hisGladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (1963) and Colin Holmes in his very importantAnti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (1979) and “Goldwin Smith (1823–1910). A ‘Liberal’ Antisemite,”Patterns of Prejudice 6/5 (September–October, 1972), drew attention to the anti-Semitic strains of the period, but do not focus on either the depth of passion levelled against Disraeli at this time or the language of the diatribes. The same applies to recent biographies of Disraeli, among them Sarah Bradford,Disraeli (1985), John R. Vincent,Disraeli (Oxford, 1990), and John K. Walton,Disraeli (1990). Even specialized studies of his Jewishness do not deal with the latter period. See M. Edelman, “Disraeli as Jew,”Jewish Chronicle Literary Supplement 7 (December 23, 1966); P. Rieff, “Disraeli: the Chosen of History,”Commentary 13/1 (January, 1952); Sir Isaiah Berlin, “Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the Search for Identity,”Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 22 (1968–69); B. Jaffe, “A Reassessment of Benjamin Disraeli's Jewish Aspects,”Transaction of the Jewish Historical Society of England 27 (1982), and P. Smith, “Disraeli's Politics,”Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 37 (1987). An especially sensitive treatment of Disraeli is R.W. Davis,Disraeli (1976). See also Ann P. Saab, “Disraeli, Judaism, and the Eastern Question,”International History Review, 10/4 (November, 1988) which contains a brief but perceptive discussion.

  2. Stanley Weintraub,Disraeli. A Biography (New York, 1993); David Feldman,Englishmen and Jews. Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT, 1994); Michael Ragussis,Figures of Conversion. The “Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC, 1995), which appeared after the Southampton Conference. Especially pertinent to Disraeli are the latter's chapters 5 and 6: “Israel in England; English Culture and the ‘Hebrew Premier’” and “Moses in Egypt. The Secret Jew in England.”

  3. Indeed, for the first time it became a matter of vital importance to English Jews in general, for their standing as citizens was now closely interwoven with the way Disraeli was portrayed as a Jew in the popular press. The anti-Semitism directed at Disraeli after 1874 was far more virulent and potentially more dangerous than the earlier heckling, old clothes and bacon variety he encountered during his political apprenticeship. John Plumb asserts, in his introduction to Richard Davis'sDisraeli, that “Disraeli's success took place in an established, deeply status-conscious society, that was by and largeunthinkingly anti-Semitic”; see John Plumb introduction to Davis,Disraeli, xii. (my emphasis). But what had hitherto been possibly unthinking and sporadic, now became systematic and sustained, and, for a variety of reasons, more threatening to Anglo-Jewry in general. Ragussis (Figures of Conversion, 175) puts it very well: “What began in the 1830s as scattered anti-Semitic remarks aimed at him [Disraeli] by the crowds in his early electioneering became in the 1870s a kind of national scrutiny of his Jewishness — a scrutiny that erupted into a kind of anti-Semitic attack led by some of the most prominent intellectuals and politicians of the time and anchored in the charge that Disraeli was a crypto-Jew.”

  4. W. R. W. Stephens,The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (1895), 2 vols. and theBryce Papers, passim. The Rev. Greville Chester in theSheffield Independent in September, 1876, quoted in theJewish Chronicle (8 September 1876): 363. For this variety of epithets with the ring of Shakespeare or Marlow to them, see James Ashworth,Imperial Ben. A Jew d'Esprit (1879), 56, 76, 78. In 1868 Salisbury had called Disraeli, “the Jew” and “Jew adventurer”; see Hatfield Mss. 3M/DD, Salisbury to G.M. Sandford, 1 May 1868, quoted in Bradford,Disraeli, 281.

  5. Richard Burton,Lord Beaconsfield. A Sketch (1882), 6. Anon,Beaconsfield. A Mock-Heroic Poem and Political Satire (1878), 23. Disraeli conveniently personified policy during the Eastern Crisis.

  6. For a definition of caricature as “an emblematic drawing,” see Edward Luci-Smith,The Art of Caricature (1981), 9.

  7. We should not underestimate the influence of these journals on, or their reflection of, public opinion. In 1878 theSpectator calledPunch “the mirror of the popular mind” and commented that “it teaches us both the strengths and the limitations of popular ridicule”;Spectator (August 14, 1878): 1061.

  8. Alvar Ellegard, “The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain⋯”,Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 3 (September, 1971): 13, 20–21; and Alvin Sullivan (ed.),British Literary Magazines, vol 3,The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (1983), 505. For Thackeray's jibe see ibid., 135. According to the publishers,Fun “was outwardly to look as likePunch as legally possible”; Sir Francis Burnand,Records and Reminiscences Personal and General (1904), 1, 405.

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  9. Ernst Kris,Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York, 1952), 183. “⋯adult comic invention” helps the id overcome the super-ego. “The ego, acting in the service of the pleasure principle” enables us to “satisfy instinctual demands.” In their “The Principles of Caricature,”The British Journal of Medical Psychology 27, pts 3 and 4 (1938): 338, Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich argue that “caricature is a psychological mechanism rather than a form of art,” for it employs “primitive structures” to ridicule and inflict pain on its victims. “Caricature means freedom, but freedom to be primitive” (341) and “clinical psychology indicates that pictures play on a different part of our minds,” one that is “deeply-rooted, more primitive” (339). The “suggestibility” factor of cartoons is also stressed by Kris: “In psychological terminology, suggestibility refers to conditions not fully under the control of the adult ego”; see his, “The ‘Danger’ of Propaganda,” in Lottie M. Newman (ed.),Selected Papers of Ernst Kris (New Haven, CT: 1975), 412.

  10. For the expressibility of prejudice see Howard J. Ehrlich,The Social Psychology of Prejudice (New York, 1973), 12. Lawrence Levine (in his review of Mel Watkins,On the Real Side. Laughing, Lying and Signifying⋯, New York [Sunday]Times [February 27, 1994], Book Review section: 1) puts it very well: Humor is a fundamental part of our daily lives, and, as Freud and others have observed, we often use it to elude external and internal censors. Humor allows us to discuss virtually everything, no matter how taboo. Subjects like incest, sexual performance, prejudice, class feeling, even intense anger toward those on whom we are emotionally or materially dependent, can be expressed openly and freely once they become part of humorous expression.

  11. Richard Godfrey,English Caricature, 1620 to the Present (1984), 7. It is important to note the empowering qualities of ridicule as “a kind of rhetoric; it prepares the way for action. Before the Jew could be made a scapegoat in Germany, he had first to be made ridiculous. Before Christ was crucified, he was mocked”; Robert E. Elliott,The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ, 1960), 85.

  12. Kris,Psychoanalytic Explorations, 178. In its grotesque, ludicrous, and debunking aspects caricature is “definitely negative”; Lawrence Streicher, “On a Theory of Political Caricature,”Comparative Studies in Society and History, 9/4 (July, 1967): 431. Streicher adds (438) that “Caricature may be observed as a guide for the aggressor. Caricatures are negative definitions, stereotypes, which are aimed at dramatizing aggressive tendencies through the definition of targets, the collective integration of “private” feelings into public sentiments of “self-defense” and the training of hatred and debunking techniques.” For a remarkable example of the cartoon literally unmasking, see Forain's vicious cartoon, “Allegoire — L'Affaire Dreyfus,” for the anti-Semitic journal,PSST, portraying a German army officer unmasking Zola to reveal the Jew (or sympathizer) beneath; reproduced in C. R. Ashbee,Caricature (New York, 1928), illustration 73, facing 95.

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  13. Cf. Kris and Gombrich, “The Principles of Caricature.” InCodlingsby (1847), his satire on Disraeli'sConingsby (1844), Thackeray asserted that “half the Hebrew's life is a disguise,” and Ragussis adds that this “idea reached its apogee in Trollope's novels, where anti-Semitism takes the form of the constant suspicion of masked Jewish identity”; Ragussis,Figures of Conversion, 180.

  14. Caricatures can unmask by creating an overlay or mask of their own. The created mask of the caricature may represent “the crude distinctions, the deviations from the norm, which mark a person off from others”; E. Gombrich, “The Mask and the Face: the Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and Art,” in E. Gombrich,The Image and the Eye. Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 113.

  15. For an important study of the interest in theconversos in Victorian England' see Michael Ragussis, “The Birth of a Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and the ‘Secret Race,’”Critical Inquiry, 20/3 (Spring 1994). I am indebted to Professor Mel Wiebe, of the Disraeli Project at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, for bringing this article to my attention. Ragussis argues that the image of theconversos was very much a part of Victorian historical and fictional literature — indeed, a prominent part of English nationalistic writing and self-definition. Enlightened, liberal England, pluralistic, rational, and progressive, defined itself against the tyranny and fanaticism of the Spanish Inquisition. Ragussis argues that Victorian historians and novelists were hardly calling for a truly pluralistic society when they portrayed the agony and plight of theconversos. For the good Jew was one who (or at least one whose, generally lovely, daughter) converted to Christianity! It was possible, while not going so far, of course, as to praise or exonerate the Inquisition, nevertheless to argue that theconversos, driven by tribal and superstitious forces, constituted a “secret race,” one which would never assimilate, one which, further, harbored ancient sentiments of “chosen-ness,” of independence and domination. If, on the one hand, theconversos was pitied as a victim of Catholic intolerance, he was, on the other, held to be an example of “Jewish hypocrisy and opportunism”; Ragussis,Figures of Conversion, 156. Ragussis's brilliant study, based mainly, but not exclusively, on literary sources, sees “certain continuities between fifteenth-century Spain and nineteenth-century England” in “the way the terms of inquisitorial Spain” reemerge in the attack on Disraeli (210).

  16. Malcolm MacColl, “Lord Beaconsfield,”Contemporary Review 39 (June, 1881): 1002. What most infuriated MacColl was Disraeli's argument that Judaism was but incomplete Christianity (1001). MacColl had served as Chaplain in St. Petersburg and had visited Eastern Europe with Liddon (see below). In 1884 he became Canon of Ripon.

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  17. That Disraeli supported Turkish domination of the Balkans at a time when Jews in both France (through the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in 1860) and England (through the Anglo-Jewish Association, founded in 1871) were exposing the persecution of Jews by the Balkan Christians only seemed to confirm these fears. Anglo-Jewry was surprised that their concern about the persecution of Jews overseas could be interpreted as a want of patriotism. See Israel Finestein, “Jewish Emancipationists and Victorian England: Self-Imposed Limits to Assimilation,” in Jonathan Frankel and Steven Zipperstein (eds.),Assimilation and Community (Cambridge, 1992), 42.

  18. In a statement that was made public, Gladstone argued “I deeply deplore the manner in which what I may call Judaic sympathies, beyond as well as within the circle of professed Judaism [a reference perhaps to Disraeli among others?], are now acting in the question of the East”; quoted in Agatha Ramm (ed.),The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1876–1886 (Oxford, 1962), 1, 28. See also John Vincent (ed.),The Derby Diaries, 1869–1878, Camden Fifth Series, 4 (1994), entry for October 13, 1876, 333. Gladstone said that these “Judaic feelings [were] the deepest, and truest, now his wife has gone, in his whole mind.” For Gladstone's use of “crypto-Jew”, see Berlin, “Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the Search for Identity,” 13. Gladstone to his friend, Arthur Gordon, September 1876, quoted in John Morley,The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (New York, 1904), vol 2, 552. See also Bradford,Disraeli, 472. Gladstone told Halifax that the real motivation behind Disraeli's Eastern diplomacy “was his Judaism”; Richard Millman,Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875–1878 (Oxford, 1979), quoted, 524 n. 63, Halifax to Bryce.

  19. Arthur Sketchley,Mrs. Brown on ‘Dizzy’ (1874), 55. It is in this context and in the context of Trollope's Lopez (possibly a “secret Jew”) in hisThe Prime Minister, rather than George Eliot's antithetical sympatheticDaniel Deronda (both published in 1876), that we should interpret the cartoons of Disraeli. In Trollope'sIs He Popenjoy? (1878), the Dean of Brotherton roundly declares that no “good is ever done by converting a Jew,” clearly a reference to Disraeli, with whom Trollope was obsessed. See Bryan Cheyette,Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society. Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge, 1993).

  20. For “perception time,” which was quicker for cartoons than for photos, line drawings from photos, or shaded drawings, see T. Ryan and C. Schwartz, “Speed of Perception as a Function of Mode of Representation,”American Journal of Psychology 69 (1956), quoted by Julia Hochberg, “The Representation of Things and People,” in E.H. Gombrich, Julia Hochberg and Max Block (eds.),Art, Perception, and Reality (Baltimore, 1972): 74.

  21. Elliott,The Power of Satire, 85. Max Beerbohm, “Punch,” More (1922), 15–16. Gombrich and Kris argue that caricature appeared relatively late in Western art because earlier it was feared to have too much power and so to be too dangerous to employ; Cf. E. H. Gombrich and E. Kris,Caricature (Harmondsworth, 1940), 15.

  22. Amy Cruse,The Victorians and their Reading (Boston, 1935), 394, quoted in Jerold Savory and Patricia Marks,The Smiling Muse. Victoriana in the Comic Press (Philadelphia, 1985), 17.

  23. Fun 5 (16 March 1867): 9.

  24. Fun 31 (18 February 1880): 67. The cartoon was reproduced inFun's One Hundred Cartoons from the Pages of Fun (1880), 99. I analyze this cartoon below. As all those with the initials GT, it is the work of Gordon Thomson, about whom I have been able to discover very little beyond the fact that he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878 (Christopher Wood,The Dictionary of Victorian Painters [Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1978], 472) and that he was a civil servant (Simon Houfe,The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, 1800–1914 [Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1978], 478). Remarkably, for so important and prolific a cartoonist, he is not included in Julia Cornelissen and Katherine Rainbirch (eds.),The Illustrators. The British Art of Illustration (1993). According to the publishers ofFun, “there was a wide difference of opinion” on Thomson's artistry, [George and Edward Dalziel],The Brothers Dalziel. A Record (1901), 308. I would like to record my gratitude to the staff of the National Art Library at the V&A for their patience and help.

  25. One can understand why the High Church Ritualists, with their friendly attitude towards the Russian Orthodox Church and of course their bitter hatred of Disraeli's stand on Ritualism (which was shared by Nonconformists who saw it as unwarrantable state interference in religion), would be highly critical of Disraeli and perhaps, by extension, of Jews, but the strictly theological attitude (as opposed to the broader religious and political attitudes discussed in this essay) of the Nonconformists, who had so recently worked vigorously for Jewish Emancipation, is more difficult to explain. David Feldman, inEnglishmen and Jews, has argued that a critical change occurred in Protestant attitudes towards Judaism. From feelings of kinship and empathy towards the people of the Old Testament, several Protestant thinkers now argued that Judaism, as practiced in England and elsewhere, was hopelessly mired in superstition, that it defied reason, was unenlightened, and was in the grip of the medieval rabbinic mind. Contrast, rather than kinship, was now stressed. Cf. Feldman,Englishmen and Jews, chapter 2, 48–71. Clearly one can see echoes of old anti-Catholic prejudices in this new emphasis on reason versus superstition, progress versus the domination of priests.

  26. “These monopolist usurers” is how one MP described them; Sir J. G. Tollemache Sinclair,A Defence of Russia and the Christians of Turkey (1877), 113. Sinclair was MP for Caithness between 1810 and 1885. For the transference of allegiance from the Liberal to the Conservative party during and immediately after the Eastern Question, see Geoffrey Alderman,Modern British Jewry (Oxford, 1992), 99 ff. The most blatant anti-Semitic attack on the “secret Jew” subverting English traditions came from the pen of Trollope, most notablyThe Eustace Diamonds (1873),Phineas Redux (1874),The Way We Live Now (1875) andThe Prime Minister (1876); see Ragussis,Figures of Conversion, 238 ff.: “In novel after novel in the 1870s we find Trollope representing the threat of a Judaized England” (240). See also Cheyette's close analysis,Constructions of “The Jew,” especially 23–54.

  27. Viscount J. Bryce,Race Sentiment as a Factor in History (1915), 12. “The Trinity” of course should be substituted for “the gods of the heathen.”

  28. See my conclusion below. Richard S. Levy,Antisemitism in the Modern World. An Anthology of Texts (Lexington, MA., 1991), 2–3. Gavin Langmuir,Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990), 315, 338, 341.

  29. Mine is necessarily a truncated account. For a fascinating analysis of the nation-wide protest movement which was organized against Disraeli's handling of the Eastern Crisis, see Ann Pottinger Saab,Reluctant Icon. Gladstone, Bulgaria, and the Working Classes, 1856–1878 (Cambridge, MA., 1991). The fullest account of the diplomacy of the Eastern Question is Richard Millman's splendidBritain and the Eastern Question, 1875–1878; see also Agatha Ramm,Sir Robert Morier. Envoy and Ambassador in the Age of Imperialism, 1876–1893 (Oxford, 1973), esp. 51, and R. T. Shannon,The Age of Disraeli, 1868–1881: The Rise of Tory Democracy (New York, 1992), esp. 268–307.

  30. Disraeli told the House on 10 July 1876 that he did not believe that the Turks used torture since they were “an historical people,” “who generally, I believe, terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner;” TheSpectator (15 July 1876), rightly predicted that this “mal-à-propos levity” would alienate England — “England will be all aflame if we are to shield a Power which restores order by the wholesale use of massacre, outrages, and the sale of children into slavery,” 881. In hisStudies in Contemporary Biography (1903), 32, James Bryce wrote of Disraeli that “No act of his life ever so much offended English opinion as the airy fashion in which he tossed aside the news of the Bulgarian massacres of 1876.” In his revised version of this essay forCentury Magazine 23/1 (March, 1882), he changed “offended” to “repelled,” and “news” to “tales,” 737. During the summer of 1876 Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey.

  31. Morley,The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, II, 551.

  32. W. T. Stead (ed.),The M.P. for Russia. Reminiscences and Correspondence of Madame Olga Novikoff, 2 vols. (1909), vol 1, 293. As Winston Churchill slyly remarked, Gladstone had the “gift of rousing moral indignation both in himself and in the electorate”; Sir Winston Churchill, quoted in Peter Stansky,Gladstone. A Progress in Politics (New York, 1979), 3. Colin Matthew demonstrates that Gladstone's attitude towards the Eastern Question was, as one might expect from Gladstone, complex and multi-layered and he was by no means an out and out Russophile. The Eastern Question divided High Churchmen and destroyed any chance of a concord between the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox churches. “The inner force of Gladstone's pamphlet was always religious, and these failures of ecumenism must be borne in mind as the more political aspects of the Eastern Question are examined”; cf. H. C. G. Matthew,Gladstone, 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995), 11, 13. To this one must add Gladstone's own evolution: “Between July and September 1876, Gladstone experienced a conversion of Evangelical intensity,” ibid., 30. To Disraeli and the Tories, the agitation, whipped up by Gladstone's “Bulgarian Atrocities” pamphlet, was a classic example of Gladstonian political self-interest masquerading as morality, and of Gladstonian madness and hypocrisy. See Disraeli's dark references, a week after Gladstone's pamphlet appeared, to the world gone mad “as it does periodically,”Disraeli Papers, Box 69, B/XVI/B/1, letter to his secretary, Montagu (“Monty”) Corry, 13 September 1876, and Corry's response that they had entered “a moment of national madness,” Box 69, B/XVI/B/9, 19 September 1876. Thomas Bowles, the editor ofVanity Fair, called the agitation led by Gladstone “lynch law in foreign affairs”;Vanity Fair (30 September 1876): 201, quoted in John B. Osborne, “The JournalVanity Fair in later Victorian Politics,”The Journal of Rutgers University Libraries, 42/2 (December, 1980): 83. Bowles was as critical of Disraeli as he was of Gladstone.

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  33. For Stead, seeGladstone Papers, Add. Mss., 44303, ccxviiii, letter of August 26, 1876. Stead rushed to congratulate Gladstone on his “noble pamphlet” and for having “once more taken your proper place as the spokesman of the national conscience.” For Morley, see hisThe Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. 2, 555. While Stead talked in terms of conscience, Freeman saw the Eastern Question in terms of national sin and penitence — most of the Liberals, he argued, had repented for their sins (having failed to insist on support for the Eastern Christians at the outset of the crisis), but “The Conservative party, save for a few righteous men⋯ refused to repent”; cf. E. A. Freeman, “The Election and the Eastern Question,”Contemporary Review 37 (June, 1880): 960.

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  34. Anon. [“An English Liberal”],The Indignation Meetings of the Liberals and the Conduct of Affairs in the East (1876), 2. Information about the Bulgarian atrocities first trickled in to England on May 4, 1876: by 19 May there was absolutely no doubt about the ferocity with which the Turks had suppressed the rebellion and throughout June the papers were full of it.Disraeli Papers, Box 67, B/xvi/A/11a. A. J. P. Taylor goes so far as to say that the “Bulgarian Horrors of 1876⋯ aroused the greatest storm over foreign policy in our history”; A. J. P. Taylor,The Trouble Makers. Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (1957), 74. The massacres constituted, Taylor (ibid.) writes, “the political crime of the century.” Interestingly, many who supported Governor Eyre during his trial for having put down the Jamaica Revolt with unnecessary violence, and who were, accordingly, associated with “law and order” within the Empire — Carlyle, Froude, Tennyson, Ruskin — joined the Nonconformist ranks in opposition to Turkey. The Ritualists and Positivists were both pro-Russia. Diplomacy can make for strange bed-fellows. See Taylor, 76, 78. For the view that both Disraeli and Gladstone had their eyes firmly focused on party cohesion and party politics in general during the Eastern Crisis, see Marvin Swartz,The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Gladstone and Disraeli (New York, 1985), esp. ch. 2, and Shannon,The Age of Disraeli. For a vigorous defence of Disraeli's policies, see Alfred Austen'sTory Horrors! Or the Question of the Hour. A Letter to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M. P. (1876). In the opinion of William Smith, editor of theQuarterly Review and the author of “The Eastern Question and the Government,”Quarterly Review, CXLII, CCLXXXIV (October, 1876): 291, Gladstone's view of the Turk was similar to James Mackintosh's characterization of Henry VIII who “perhaps approached as nearly to the ideal standard of perfect wickedness as the infirmities of human nature will allow.”

  35. Richard Millman in what is the best diplomatic history of the Eastern Crisis, comments on Disraeli's pragmatism: he was, he says, “prepared for any Ottoman sacrifice consistent with British prestige” and he concludes, after 450 closely reasoned pages, “Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, a Russian occupation of Constantinople would have been a serious blow to British prestige in the Near East, India, Europe and London.” Millman,Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875–1878, 454, 455. Disraeli's bellicose stance, and the jingoism it aroused, has sometimes been called Palmerstonian, but Hugh Cunningham has argued that Palmerstone's concept of patriotism and his active policy were associated with the liberties of downtrodden European peoples and so both Disraeli's patriotism and policy were very different; Hugh Cunningham, “The Language of Patriotism,”History Workshop 12 (1981), 22ff. For Gladstone's less than enthusiastic views on India and his opposition to imperial expansion in general, see Matthew,Gladstone, 1875–1898, 23–24.

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  36. Judy 21 (1877): 14–15, 9 May 1877.

  37. Rev. T. Ashcroft,The Turko-Servian War; its Prominent Features and Probable Results (1876), 3. Ashcroft denounced Turkey as “lustful” and “a cesspool of depravity, the vilest that ever reeked beneath the sun,” 20–2: he was of course confident that “Christianity, with its spirit of liberty, truth, and love, must conquer,” 3.

  38. Edward Jenkins,The Shadow on the Cross (1876), title page.

  39. Their diatribes were so openly racist in expression that it is remarkable that Edward Said does not incorporate them in hisOrientalism (New York, 1978). Typical of the anti-Islam sentiment of the day was theChurch Review (16 Sept. 1876): “As regards the Eastern Churches, their members are Christians, &, therefore, possess the capacities of progress and improvement which are inseparable from Christianity. As to Mahommedanism, it is in morals and in religion, in things material and in things civil, in commerce and in letters, as regards this world and as regards the next, a curse, and possesses within itself an ineffaceable veto upon ever being anything else.” Among other things the Turks were an “effeminate” people — certainly one of the most condemnatory and dismissive things the Victorians could say about any people. Yet many Liberals preferred Islam to Russian Orthodoxy as did the diplomatic corps out there. J. P. Parry, in hisDemocracy and Religion. Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986), stresses this and indicates that for some Victorians Islam, with its morality, philanthropy towards the poor, ban on drinking and gambling, and hatred of idolatory, was “a less developed form of Protestantism,” 124. One should note that it was an age of highly charged, emotional rhetoric: thus a correspondent to theNonconformist (8 August 1876) could characterize the “Russo-Greek” church as “a blasphemous creed,” the “church of Beelzebub,” a “dark and abominable idolatry,” “an invention of hell and Satan, to draw men in perdition, a league with death, and a covenant with everlasting damnation”; see also Burton,Lord Beaconsfield, 11.

  40. Anon. [“An English Liberal”],The Indignation Meetings of the Liberals and the Conduct of Affairs in the East, 4 and 9–10. The Turks represented “moral filth,” ibid., 10. Interestingly, to “An English Liberal,” the Russian was a barbarian also; ibid., 14–17. For a typical statement of Turkish decline versus British advance, see E. A. Freeman, “Medieval and Modern Greece,”Historical Essays (1879), 318. To Freeman the East was “stationary, arbitrary, polygamous, and Mahometan,”History and Conquests of the Saracens, 4, quoted in Clinton Bennett,Victorian Images of Islam (1992), 79.

  41. Public Opinion (9 September 1876): 327.

  42. Goldwin Smith, “England's Abandonment of the Protectorate of Turkey,”Contemporary Review 31 (February, 1878): 615. For a superb analysis of Goldwin Smith's anti-Semitism see Gerald Tulchinsky, “Goldwin Smith: Victorian Canadian Antisemite,” in Alan Davies, (ed.),Antisemitism in Canada. History and Interpretation (Waterloo, 1992).

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  43. Dr. Baxter Langlet at a protest meeting in Woolwich,Daily News (4 September 1876). In his pamphlet Gladstone had called for the expulsion of the Turks, “bag and baggage” from Europe, but retreated before considerable public protest and argued that he had meant the government and not the people themselves. “What a man is Gladstone!” wrote Disraeli to Monty Corry. “What a scoundrel! He publishes a pamphlet urging the expulsion on ethnological grounds of the Turks from Europe; an inferior and debased race — but then, becoming alive almost immediately to the folly” he claims he meant only the Turkish ministers. Disraeli wryly added that he was sure Gladstone would like the expulsion of ministers, but not Turkish!Disraeli Papers, Box 69, B/XVI/B/1, 13 September 1876. For the way “bag and baggage” was lifted out of context and divorced from its “surrounding qualifications,” see Matthew,Gladstone, 1875–1898, 28.

  44. It is clear that Nonconformist Liberal radicalism did not hesitate to stereotype or damn wholesale, or heap contempt on whole cultures. Liberalism was shot through with a keen sense of sin and moral outrage and thus could damn and condemn without a sense of illogic or betrayal of liberal ideology.

  45. To Freeman, Disraeli, like Palmerston before him, was “the champion of evil,” while Gladstone “stood forth as the champion of good.” E. A. Freeman, “Anthony Trollope,”Macmillan's Magazine, XLVII (January, 1883): 240. Freeman regarded the Eastern Question as, in essence, “Anti-Christ against Christianity,” cf. “The English People in Relation to the Eastern Question,”Fortnightly Review 29 (February, 1877): 507.

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  46. “English Mahommedans,”Spectator (9 September 1876): 1122. See also the statement of the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, “It is inevitable that some account should be taken of the fact that the disaffected subjects of Turkey are Christians. There are many persons in this country — others as well as Jews — to whom this fact is a reason for lending their sympathies to the Turks,”The Religious Aspect of the Eastern Question (Eastern Question Association Papers No. 2, 1877), 3.

  47. Jean-Paul Sartre,Portrait of the Anti-Semite, Erik de Mauny trans. (1948), 33ff; 14.

  48. “When prejudice is part of a culture, it can shift its direction from one group to another”; Arnold Rose, “The Roots of Prejudice,” in Unesco,Race and Science (New York, 1969), 407.

  49. Echo (16 August 1879);Spectator (6 November 1880): 1404.

  50. Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler,The Jew as Ally of the Muslim. Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism (South Bend, Indiana, 1986).

  51. Sinclair,A Defence of Russia and the Christians of Turkey, 113. Sinclair warned that England would have to turn for war loans to “these monopolist usurers⋯” He then informed his readers “what sort of people the Jews really are” by monochromatically sketching their history from earliest times to the present — a history of nothing but cruelty, blood-lust, usury, deception, savagery, and the usual sexual immorality with which an “out-group” or “other” is stigmatized. “Can it be wondered then,” Sinclair concluded, “that there is a gulf which can never be bridged between the Jew and Christian.” Having established, to his satisfaction, that “Jews are not, and never have been, worthy of our esteem and regard, and that they are the eternal and implacable enemies of the Christian,” it followed that, “it would be madness to follow their advice to go to war with Russia, but wisdom always to take the opposite course to that which they recommend”; 124, 131.

  52. Smith,Contemporary Review, 31 (February, 1878): 617.

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  53. E. A. Freeman, “The Relation of the English People to the War,”Contemporary Review, 30 (August, 1877): 494–5.

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  54. E. A. Freeman,The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877), xix, xx. “It is no use mincing matters⋯ The danger is no imaginary one. Every one must have marked that the one subject on which Lord Beaconsfield, through his whole career, has been in earnest, has been whatever has touched his own people. A mocker about everything else, he has been thoroughly serious in this” (xviii–xix). According to theDictionary of National Biography, “The actual intemperance of his [Freeman's] language” on the Eastern Question “resulted in his not being invited to stand for a constituency in the 1880 General Election” despite the “services which he rendered” to the Liberals in this period;DNB, Supplement, II, 249. Probably it was his infamous “Perish India” cry rather than his campaign against Disraeli that made him an unattractive candidate. TheJewish Chronicle, commenting on Freeman'sThe Ottoman Power, pointed out the irony that while “Gladstone and his followers are probably, unconsciously to themselves, so far carried away by the Christianity which they profess in common with the Bulgarians, as to be ready to sacrifice to it the interests of their own country,” they attack the Jews “in semi-menacing language,” for putting religion over national interest;Jewish Chronicle (10 August 1877): 8. In the same article theJewish Chronicle drew attention to the “religious antipathy” in the Liberal ranks towards Jews and considered it a “deep-seated and wide-spread malady.” This antipathy, it thought, would have assumed a far more outspoken form but “the religious and moral atmosphere of England is at this moment not favourable to a vigorous life for it.” The phrase, “at this moment” suggests the fears of the Anglo-Jewish community.

  55. Quoted in Mme. Olga Novikoff,The M. P. For Russia. Reminiscences and Correspondence of Madame Olga Novikoff, W. T. Stead (ed.), 2 vols. (1901), vol 1, 364. For this quotation and also those from Freeman, above, see also Feldman,Englishmen and Jews, 100, 101.

  56. Church Times (25 August 1876).

  57. William Crosbie,The Beaconsfield Policy. An Address (1879), 14 (my emphasis). This was an address given to the Victoria Street Chapel Literary Society in Derby and to the Zion Church Young Men's Society in Sheffield, both in December, 1878. Crosbie drew the conclusion that Disraeli's quest for Empire was simply “a vulgar parody of the ancient Jewish dream.”

  58. To John Boyd Kinnear,The Mind of England on the Eastern Question (1877), 14, “One voice only in all England, and that the voice of one not an Englishman by blood, was raised⋯ to plead for their [the Turks'] maintenance in power.” Kinnear was closer to the mark when he argued (ibid.) that only Disraeli spoke in public “to palliate the Turkish acts [the massacre of Bulgarians]⋯” According to Freeman only Disraeli stood between good men and their consciences and perhaps ultimate salvation: many Conservatives, he argued, “were quite ready to repent [for their foreign policy], if Lord Beaconsfield would have let them”; Freeman,Contemporary Review 37 (June, 1880): 960. For “Gladstone's personalization of government policy in the 1876–8 period when Disraeli was held largely responsible,” see Matthew,Gladstone, 1875–1898, 54–55. Gladstone did not widen the scope of his attack until 1878. This personification of a complex diplomatic situation is captured in Robert Browning's response to the famous lines: We don't want to fight But by Jingo if we do The head I'd like to punch Is Beaconsfield, the Jew Patrick Waddington,From “The Russian Fugitive” to “The Ballad of Bulgarie. ” Episodes in English Literary Attitudes to Russia from Wordsworth to Swinburne (Oxford, 1994), quoted 149.

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  59. Fun 6 (3 September 1864): 249; 4 (1 December 1866): 123, and 2 (5 July 1862): 155, respectively. One could argue that a conspiratorial Dizzy is about to resort to tactics that are hardly cricket — but it is the captain, Derby, who is putting him up to it! Disraeli was also portrayed as a batsman with a remarkably straight bat in the pages of the comic journal,Will-O'-the-Wisp 1 (19 September 1868): 17. He is the “native that cannot be bowled out,” the fearless batsman standing up to the formidable bowling of the touring Aborigine team.

  60. An exception is the famous TennielPunch cartoon ofDisraeli as Fagin, teaching his party how to pickpocket the Reform Bill from the Liberals.Punch, 52 (9 November 1867): 189.

  61. This representation of Disraeli as Jew could even employ the old association (and instant identification) of Jews and pigs. For a cartoon of Disraeli cuddling a pig, see Hood'sComic Annual for 1878 (1878), 70.Hood's Comic Annual (formerlyTom Hood's Comic Annual) was published byFun. The artist is Thomson. Histories of the cartoon generally ignore the portrayal of Disraeli as a Jew, but see C. R. Ashbee's comment that Disraeli was depicted, with his “cynicism and sometimes tawdry grandeur” as “the Jew boy,”Caricature, 11. One of the functions of caricature may be to emphasize the subtle points of difference between “the subject and his fellowmen”; James Campbell Cory,The Cartoonist's Art (Chicago, 1920), 12, quoted in Edna Hines, “Cartoons as a Means of Social Control,”Sociology and Social Research, 17/5 (May–June, 1935): 455.

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  62. Fig. 8, “The Jew,” appears in R. Knox,The Races of Men (1862), 193. Fig. 9 is fromFun, 22 (28 August 1875): 90–91. Robert William Buss, in hisEnglish Graphic Satire (1974), 155, argues that the portrayal of Jews with three hats was inspired by Jonathan Swift'sThe Tale of the Tub, with its satire on the Triple Crown of St. Peter. For the association of Disraeli with a Jew wearing two (or three?) hats seePunch, 16 (19 May 1849): 211. For other three-hatted Jews in caricature see M. Dorothy George,Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum (1954), vol. 2 (1830–1832), illustrations 16118 (1830), 290, 16896 (1831), 563, and 17376, (1832), 730, Eduard Fuchs,Die Juden in der Karikatur. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich, 1923), 148, and Gerald Croner (ed.),England, The History of the Anglo-Jewish Community (Jerusalem, 1978), 107.Punch frequently portrayed the two- or three-hated Jew; see for example, 12 (10 April 1847): 149 and 32 (27 June, 1857): 259. For a particularly vicious portrayal of the three-hatted Jew see George Du Maurier's cartoon “A Legend of Camelot,” (24 March 1866): 128.

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  63. “The Man in the Street” was a regular column inFunny Folks. Fig. 10 is from 78, (3 June 1876): 66. Fig. 11 is from the archives of the National Portrait Gallery, no date. Fig. 12 is fromFun, 23 (1 March 1876): 101. Fig. 24 is fromPun, 22 (14 August 1875): 69.

  64. [David Oedipus],Benjameni de Israeli. Who is this Uncircumcised Philistine? (1881), 33.

  65. The Englishman (19 February 1876): 724. This new representation of Disraeli threatened much that he had worked for both as a novelist and politician. “The Eastern crisis of 1876 not only crystallized the anti-Semitism that had shrouded Disraeli's career from the beginning,” Ragussis writes, “it threatened his attempt, in his writings, to reveal Hebrew culture as the basis of English life, and in his public career, to prove that a person of Jewish ancestry could successfully govern England”; Ragussis,Figures of Conversion, 210.

  66. “⋯as Disraeli himself observed of the word ‘unconstitutional’, ‘I never yet have found any definition of what that epithet means, and I believe with the single exception of the word ‘Un-English’ it baffles discussion more than any other in our language’.” Quoted without reference or date by Robert Blake in his 1992 Romanes Lecture,Gladstone, Disraeli, and Queen Victoria (Oxford, 1993), 18. For a brief discussion of the use of the phrase “un-English,” see Hugh Cunningham, “The Conservative Party and Patriotism,” in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds.),Englishness. Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (1986), 295. Interestingly, Disraeli himself used the phrase to satirize the electioneering techniques and principles of Rigby inConingsby (Signet Classic edition, New York., 1962), 290; see also Ragussis,Figures of Conversion, 187.

  67. Vivien Grey. A Romance of Youth (1904), 1, 14. ForVivien Grey and Disraeli's other early novels as a portrayal of his “own complex and varied experience as a Jewish patriot in Victorian England,” see Montagu F. Modder, “The Alien Patriot in Disraeli's Novels,”The London Quarterly and Holborn Review, 159 (July, 1934): 366.

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  68. MacColl,Contemporary Review, 39 (June, 1881): 945.

  69. Anon.,Beaconsfield: A Mock-Heroic Poem, 24, 6. For the image of the Wandering Jew in Victorian England, see Montagu Frank Modder,The Jew in the Literature of England. To the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1960), esp. 352ff. See also George K. Anderson,The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence, RI, 1965). The “Jew might strike his tent tomorrow and not a vestige of him remain among us,” seeThe Times (18 April 1853), quoted in Polly Pinsker, “English Opinion and Jewish Emancipation (1830–1860),”Jewish Social Studies 14, 1 (January, 1951): 81. Throughout the long decades of the Emancipation struggle the Jew as a doomed wanderer until he returns to the promised land was stressed, and continued well after Emancipation was achieved; seeJewish Chronicle (8 February 1867): 5. Eugene Sue'sThe Wandering Jew (1844) was dramatized in England as “All for Gold.” In his anti-Semitic diatribe,Good Friday, or the Murder of Jesus Christ by the Jews (1830), William Cobbett stressed how the Jews deserved their Biblical punishment to wander as perpetual aliens, always “at the absolute disposal of the sovereign power of the state⋯, 13. When Disraeli became Prime Minister in 1867, one observer commented that “⋯the division between him and mere mortals [is] more marked. I would as soon thought of sitting down at table with Hamlet or Lear or the Wandering Jew”; Sir John Skelton,The Table-Talk of Shirley (1895), 257. The Wandering Jew was very much alive as a popular folk legend in the 1870s. In hisThe Wandering Jew, published in 1881, Moncure Daniel Conway relays an account inNotes and Queries (1871) in which the author, James Pearson, meets an old man on the Lancashire moors, and they hear “the whistling overhead of a covey of plovers.” The old man then says that is a bad omen as “there was a tradition that they [the plovers] contain the souls of those Jews who assisted at the cruxifixion [sic], and in consequence were doomed to float in the air forever,” and those who heard the wandering Jews would meet some ill-luck. Pearson then missed his coach and had to continue on foot, whereupon the old man, naturally, reminded him of the omen, 159.

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  70. T. Weymss Reid, “Lord Beaconsfield,”Politicians of To-Day. A Series of Personal Sketches, 2 vols. (1880), vol. 7, 38–9. Lord Bryce,Century Magazine (March, 1882): 733. Significantly Bryce continues (ibid.) by asking how “did he so fascinate and rule them?” “However high its [Jewry's] gifts may be, prejudice cannot fail to be excited. The nations will be sure to feel, as they do, that the wanderer comes rather to live upon than with them”; Goldwin Smith in a letter, 12 October 1907, to Jonas A. Rosenfield in Texas, Arnold Haultain, (ed.), ASelection from Goldwin Smith's Correspondence, 1864–1910, 505.

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  71. Pall Mall Gazette (19 April 19 1881); J. A. Froude,Lord Beaconsfield, in Stuart J. Reid (ed.),The Prime Ministers of Queen Victoria (1890), 85, 170, 261–2. It is interesting that to at least one organ of French opinion Disraeli was, on the contrary, “English to the very tips of his fingers in his policy” and “alien only in his oratory,”Le Temps (15 August 1876), quoted inPublic Opinion (19 August 1876): 230. Explicit expressions in England of Disraeli's Englishness are rare, but see the obituary in theNewcastle Express, Disraeli “with all his faults, was a thorough statesman and a thorough Englishman”;Public Opinion (30 April 1881): 539. At best all the absurd talk of Disraeli as “Un-English,” wrote one contemporary, “makes Mr. Disraeli a sort of Bedouin Sheik who has just stepped out of the desert into our drawing-rooms⋯ The critic who fancies that a man whose father and grandfather were English citizens cannot be an Englishman because he has a dash of alien blood in his veins, must know little of ethnology.” “Shirley” [Sir John Skelton], “A Last Word on Disraeli,”Contemporary Review 39 (June, 1881): 989.

  72. Freeman,Contemporary Review 37 (June, 1880): 966. Freeman's awareness of the sensitivities of the age (“The word ‘Jew’ seems to be forbidden”) is interesting. TheJewish Chronicle carried on a campaign against the way the press customarily referred to the religion of accused criminals who happened to be Jewish. Freeman may have been aware of this or of theJewish Chronicle's bitter resentment of his and Goldwin Smith's views.

  73. For fig. 12, see note 64, above. For fig. 13, seePunch, 70 (15 April 1876): 147. Tenniel's cartoons of Disraeli lacks the venom and passion of Gordon Thomson's perhaps partly because he was a Conservative at heart and sympathized with Disraeli's policies. Tenniel told Spielmann, “As for my political opinions, I have none; at least if I have my own little politics I keep them to myself and profess only those of my paper”; M. H. Spielmann,The History of Punch (1895), 10, quoted in Houfe,The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators, 64.

  74. Wemyss Reid,Politicians of To-day, vol. 7, 48. The elevation of Victoria to Empress of India was to some the fruition of a grand scheme first outlined by Disraeli inTancred, where he had suggested transferring the throne to India. To Freeman, “The object of Lord Beaconsfield's rule has been to turn the dreams ofTancred into realities, and it is wonderful how largely he has succeeded. It is no small feat⋯ to have turned a European Queen, the daughter of Cerdic and William, into an Asiatic Empress of his own making⋯ the Empire of India was one form of Asiatic triumph over Europe”; Freeman,Contemporary Review 37 (June, 1880): 966. The other “triumph” was the continued presence of the Turks in Europe, one that Disraeli was determined to see prevail even if it costs “10,000 or 20,000 murdered Chistians”; ibid.

  75. For fig. 14, seeFun 5 (6 July 1867): 176. For fig. 15, seeJudy 14 (8 April, 1874): 253. Sander Gilman, inThe Jew's Body (New York, 1991), ch. 7, “The Jewish Nose,” has analyzed the way anti-Semites have employed exaggerated representations of the Semitic nose. In the late eighteenth century P. Grose in hisRules for Drawing Caricature (1791), suggested that the Jewish nose should be drawn as a “parrot's beak,” quoted in Isaiah Shachar, “Studies in the Emergence and Dissemination of the Modern Jewish Stereotype in Western Europe” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1967), 315. For a satire on the “Oriental-Ikey-Mosaic” nose, seeFunny Folks 64 (26 February 1876): 61.

  76. Fig. 16 is fromOne Hundred Cartoons from the Pages of Fun (1880), 60. The original was published in the issue of 9 May 1877. Fig. 17 is fromFun 31 (7 April 1880): 139. For fig. 25, see footnote 92, below.

  77. Fig. 18 is aCarte de Visite photograph by Mayall.

  78. Fig. 19 is fromOne Hundred Cartoons from the Pages of Fun, 24. The original was published in the issue of 23 August 1873. Fig. 20 is from ibid., 6; the original was published in the issue of 10 February 1872. For fig. 24 see n. 91, below.

  79. Fig. 21 is fromOne Hundred Cartoons from the Pages of Fun, 92. The original appeared on 5 November 1879. For fig. 22 see ibid., 48. The original appeared on 3 May 1876. For a German cartoon of the Jew as elephant see Fuchs,Die Juden in der Karikatur, 309.

  80. L. P. Curtis,Apes and Angels. The Irishman in Caricature (Newton Abbot, 1971). Curtis has argued that whilePunch endowed Gladstone with a facial angle of about 86°, it gave Disraeli one of only 78° (and Irishmen could have a facial angle little different from apes — as low as 50°); ibid., p. 52.

  81. One Hundred Cartoons from the Pages of Fun, 53. The original appeared in the issue of 27 September 1876. The reference is the agitation which was building up over Disraeli's Eastern policy.

  82. Interestingly, Henry Irving's portrayal of Shylock at the Lyceum (to Ellen Terry's Portia) was sympathetic. For a fascinating discussion of this and interpretations of theMerchant of Venice from Shakespeares own day to the present, with a very important section on Victorian productions, see John Gross's superbShylock. A Legend and its Legacy (New York, 1992). Irving's Lyceum production opened in November 1879. To Gladstone, the great actor's Shylock, was “Irving's best, I thought”; Matthew,Gladstone, 1875–1898, quoted 71. For the persistence of the blood libel in England, see Frank Felsenstein,Anti-Semitic Stereotypes. A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, MD, 1995), passim.

  83. Echo (25 April 1878).

  84. The Englishman (11 November 1876): 97.

  85. In his essay, “Disraeli: the Chosen of History,” Rieff argued that Disraeli's face and posture fascinated contemporaries: “It was the face and stoop of Irving's Shylock”; P. Rieff,Commentary 13/1 (January, 1952): 29.

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  86. George Henry Francis,The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, M. P. A Critical Biography (1852), 115.

  87. Anon.,Peace or War. An Indictment of the Policy of the Government (1877), 31.

  88. In the strip-cartoon, “The After Life of Shylock,” Disraeli-Shylock, in another reworking of medieval anti-Semitic mythology, kidnaps Portia's son and demands and gets a ransom. His ultimate triumph, made possible with the help of the mysterious and evil “Chamber of the Upper Ten” (Gladstone made much during the Eastern Question of Disraeli's support among the “upper ten thousand” — the old jingoist aristocrats and the financiers and plutocrats of the City), is to banish Gladstone to “perpetual opposition”;Funny Folks 6, 274 (28 February 1880): 69.

  89. Herbert Atherton,Political Prints of the Age of Hogarth, A Study of Ideological Representations of Politics (Oxford, 1974), 37.

  90. Fig. 24 is fromFun 22 (14 August 1875): 69. The £5,000 may refer to the budget surplus despite which Disraeli retained the unpopular income tax.

  91. Fig. 25 is fromFun 20 (July–December, 1874): frontispiece. “Dizzy's mixture” appears to be more harmful than Godfrey's Cordial which was an opiate for babies, and one that was held responsible for many infant deaths.

  92. Gombrich and Kris,Caricature, 7–8.

  93. Fig. 26 is from Anon,Bits of Beaconsfield; A New Series of Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature. Illustrated (1881). Fig. 27 is fromFun 8 (8 November 1873): 193. Fig. 28 is fromFun 19 (7 February 1874): 57–58; Gladstone is, of course, St. George. In anotherFun cartoon celebrating the victory of “William the Conqueror” in the 1880 election, the chain-mail of a defeated Disraeli makes him look particularly reptilian. Thomson, the cartoonist, could not resist the pun on Gladstone's name, but the analogy makes Disraeli the Anglo-Saxon, Harold!Fun 31 (14 April 1880): 149.

  94. For fig. 29 seeBits of Beaconsfield. It is interesting that he is being rejected with several of his novels. The only concrete reference to his politics is the annexation of Cyprus as a component of his “Peace with Honour” triumph at the Congress of Berlin at the close of the Eastern Question. His opponents saw in the annexation both the cynical partition of Turkey and Disraeli's personal vision of imperialism.

  95. See for example,Fun 27 (2 January 1878): 9 and 27 (13 February 1878): 68–73.

  96. Fig. 30 is from the signs of the Zodiac in Charles A. Ross,A Book of Comicalities (1872), 27. Fig. 31 is the Tenniel illustration toAlice Through the Looking-Glass, reproduced in Rodney K. Engen,Sir John Tenniel: Alice's White Knight (Aldershot, 1991), 94. Fig. 32 is fromFunny Folks, vol. 2, 61 (5 February 1876): 33. Robert E. Bell,Women of Classical Mythology. A Biographical Dictionary (Santa Barbara, CA, 1991), 219. Hecate was closely linked to Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld. She had an “unearthly aspect” and was closely associated with the infernal regions. “At night she sent forth demons and spectral beings to prey on and startle the unwary passersby” (ibid.).

  97. The devil image was tapped, consciously or unconsciously by Dickens in his portrayal of Fagin. For a most convincing analysis of Fagin as devil see L. Zatlin,The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel (Boston, 1981), Fagin has red hair, a “withered old claw” which reminds Bill Sikes of “being nabbed by the devil” and he is described as “engendered in the slime and darkness,” a “hideous phantom, moist from the grave,” and “a merry old gentleman,” ibid., 124–125. From the days of O'Connell's attack and the heated reviews of Disraeli'sGeorge Bentinck, Disraeli and anti-Christ had been associated with one another, perhaps most outrageously in the comment of theSpectator in 1867 on one of Disraeli's proposals in the Parliamentary Reform Bill: “Had he proposed an addition of eight members instead of seven, the number of the House of Commons would have been the mystic number of the Beast, 666⋯ an accidental irony which, considering the man, his antecedents, and his motives, would be nearly perfect”;Spectator (8 May 1867): 542. In hisAn Answer to Some of the Opinions and Statements respecting the Jews made by B. Disraeli, Esq., M.P., in the 24th Chapter of his Biographical Memoir of Lord George Bentinck (1852), 13, Arthur Padley cited “the most benevolent of Christian writers, St. John”: — “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ! He is anti-Christ that denieth the Father and the Son⋯”; Padley went on to say “so long as Israel is Anti-Christ, suffer him not to sit on the same bench with members of Parliament to make law for a Christian church and a Christian state.” The advice the young Harrington (who has already been terrified by the nurse-maid's stories of a child-eating Jewish pedler) receives from his father is to avoid all dealings with Jewish money lenders, for “dealing with the Jews,” he explains, “Tis something very like dealing with the devil, my dear⋯ It is certain that when a man once goes to the Jews, he soon goes to the devil. So Harrington, my boy, I charge you at your peril, whatever else you do, keep out of the hands of the Jews — never go near the Jews, if once they catch hold of you, there's an end of you, my boy”; Maria Edgeworth,Harrington (1816), quoted in Modder,The Jew in the Literature of England, 135.

  98. Bryce Papers, Mss. 6, Folio 125, Freeman to Bryce, October 22, 1876; B.M.Add. Mss. Rev. G. C. Boase, 35,073, folio 61, E. A. Freeman to the Rev. G. C. Boase, 26 March 1877. “Synagogue of Satan” occurs in Revelations, see Trachtenberg,The Devil and the Jews, 20. In view of the popularity ofThe Merchant of Venice in nineteenth-century England, it is worth noting that Trachtenberg points out that there are two references in it to the association of Jews and the Devil: “Let me say ‘Amen’ betimes lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew,” (II, i, 22) and “Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnate” (II, ii, 27).Bryce Papers, Ms. 7, fol. 11, Freeman to Bryce, 10 April 1881. To Freeman Disraeli was the “Arch-Deceiver,” Stead (ed.),The MP for Russia, vol. 1, 371. Freeman regretted the fact that political decorum did not allow him to denounce in public Disraeli's policies as “Satanic.” Freeman,Contemporary Review 37 (June, 1880): 963. The American, George Mackpeace Towle, in hisCertain Men of Mark. Studies of Living Celebrities (1880), 100, describes Disraeli as “a political Mephistopheles.” Even the generally reserved J. R. Green, who did not associate himself with the anti-Semitism of Freeman or Smith, got caught up in the rhetoric of the age. To fight against Russia, he wrote in May, 1877, would be to go “into war on the side of the Devil in the cause of Hell. It will be so terrible to have to wish England beaten”; Leslie Stephen (ed.),Letters of John Richard Green (1901), 460.

  99. W. R. W. Stephens,The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, vol. 2, 389.Bryce Papers, Mss. 6, Folio 137, 8 April 1877; Mss. 6, Folio 125, 22 Octobe 1876.

  100. Anon [“Comus”],The Devil's Visit to Bulgaria and Other Lands (Brighton, 1876), 5. A pamphlet published by the Birmingham Liberal Association in 1878 could refer to Disraeli as “Mephistophelian”; J. Cuckson,Earl Beaconsfield: A Political Sketch (Birmingham: Birmingham Liberal Association, 1878), 18: “Nearly all our troubles have been hatched in the adventurous and imaginative brains of one man, whose Mephistophelian genius is foreign to the traditions and speech of our political history.” The author (ibid.) stressed “His career has been un-English from beginning to end.”

  101. Gladstone asked Disraeli to document the charge and also his alleged verbal abuse of Disraeli during the entire Eastern Crisis, a cold response which further irked Disraeli who replied that he was far too busy with matters of State to go through the entire record! Gladstone stuck to his guns and said he criticized Disraeli's policies, not his character. He did in fact generally avoid slandering Disraeli's character and would not be drawn into the mud-slinging of the 1870s. For all this, see B.M.,Gladstone Papers, Add. Mss., 44,457, fol. 168, letters of 30 July 1878. For Gladstone's private reticence on Disraeli, see Matthew,Gladstone, 1875–1898, 34. According to theSaturday Review, in an analysis of the way Disraeli, Gladstone, and Bright were portrayed in cartoons, “As to Lord Beaconsfield, we know that mephistopheles is the mildest term of reproach which many Dissenting ministers can find for him⋯”;Saturday Review, 47/1,212 (18 January 1879): 78.

  102. The Hornet (7 August 1878): 912–913.

  103. Quoted in Georgina Battiscombe,Mrs. Gladstone. The Portrait of a Marriage (1956), 158, 174. Her comment recalls theFoetor Judaicus of medieval anti-Semitism. For the continuation, into the nineteenth century, of belief in theFoetor Judaicus, see Felsenstein,Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 257–259.

  104. Quoted in Battiscombe,Mrs. Gladstone, 174.

  105. William T. Stead,Gladstone in Contemporary Caricature (1898), 49.

  106. Freeman,Contemporary Review 30 (August, 1877): 495; Freeman in a letter of 4 March 1877 to Mme. Olga Novikoff, W. T. Stead (ed.),The MP for Russia, vol. 1, 334. Freeman also thought England was “Jew-ridden”;Bryce Mss, Mss. 6, folio 167, Freeman to Bryce, 5 June 1878.

  107. The tenacity of old stereotypical images and the way they were drawn upon, consciously or unconsciously, by Victorians, is discussed acutely by Felsenstein in his analysis of Dickens: “Fagin's ‘Jewishness’ emanates⋯ from Dickens's imaginative reinvigoration of attitudes of the endemic anti-Semitic stereotype that for so long had haunted the Christian consciousness”;Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 239.

  108. Fig. 34 is fromOne Hundred Cartoons from the Pages of Fun, 49. The original appeared in the issue of 28 June 1876. Once again the specifics which occasioned the cartoon (the thorny issue of state education) are far less important that the imagery employed in the cartoon. For other cartoons of Disraeli as magician or conjurer, see, ibid., 68 “The Abode of Mystery,” (original appeared in the issue of 23 January 1878) and ibid., 55, “The Celebrated Indian Crown Trick; or The Asian Mystery” (original appeared in the issue of 10 January 1877) andFunny Folks 4, 165 (26 January 1878): 25. For Tenniel's portrayal of Disraeli as alchemist see,Punch 76 (November 22,1879): 235.

  109. Spectator (20 July 1878): 915; ibid. (24 August 1878): 1061. Ibid. (2 November 1878): 1357. In its obituary theSpectator argued that he “displayed the genius of a political magician in making English nobles, and English squires, and English merchants prostrate themselves before the image of the policy which he had set up”;Public Opinion (30 April 1881): 538. In similar vein theSpectator argued that “The cabinet assuredly has been magnetized⋯ How this marvellous vision [of an “Oriental policy”] has been translated from the dreams of the wildest of rodomontade and romance writers into the accepted policy of the stolidest and most practical-minded of all European States, is a question, to our minds, rather for the philosopher of magnetism to determine, than for any strictly political explanation”;Spectator (13 July 1878): 883. Similarly, the obituary in theSheffield Telegraph: “The success of Mr. Disraeli would in ancient times have been attributed to supernatural aid” (April 30, 1881): 539.

  110. Quoted in Cecil Roth,Benjamin Disraeli. Earl of Beaconsfield (New York, 1952), 84–85. where Carlyle is quoted as calling him “a cursed old Jew, not worth his weight in cold bacon.”

  111. Anon.,Britain at the Bar. A Scene from the Judgment of Nations. A Domestic Poem (1877), 14. See also T. P. O'Connor,Lord Beaconsfield. A Biography (1905), 467. In its obituary, theBirmingham Daily Post commented on the mystery of Disraeli's power, his possession of “an influence” over even those within the party who disliked or distrusted him. Even they “could neither resist nor explain” that influence, but simply “obeyed him with a docility which must ever remain one of the mysteries of English politics.” Even when “the more distrustful broke away, or even passed into open rebellion, he could lure them back again, and rivet the chains firmer than ever” (20 April 1881). A letter by Horrocks Cocks, published in theNonconformist (10 April 1878), argued that “the Jewish Premler” inhis antagonism to Russia was driven as much by Semitic as patriotic urges, for he shared “all the instincts, passions, prejudices, and antipathies of his race,” and Cocks continued, just as Esther had conquered at the court of a real emperor, so “Benjamin — but not byhis beauty — has become a great conjurer in the court of a nominal Empress, Victoria.”

  112. Ragussis,Figures of Conversion, 204. In that sense these portrayals echo the rhetoric of the Victorian literature on the unmasking of the “secret Jew” by the Spanish Inquisition; ibid., 205.

  113. “Throughout the cartoons of the period [roughly 1870–1881] there is no one figure which appears with more persistent regularity than that of Lord Beaconsfield, and with scarcely an exception he is uniformly treated with an air of indulgent contempt. Of course his strongly marked features, the unmistakably Semitic cast of his nose and lips, the closely curled black ringlets clustering above his ears, all offered irresistible temptation to the cartoonist, with the result that throughout the entire series, in whatever guise he is portrayed, the suggestion of charlatan, of necromancer, of mountebank, of one kind or another of the endless genus fake, is never wholly absent”; Arthur B. Maurice and Frederick T. Cooper,The History of the Nineteenth Century in Caricature (1964), 246.

  114. Fig. 35 is fromJudy, 22 (15 May 1878): 314–315. Fig. 36 is fromJudy 20 (7 February 1877): 172–173.

  115. One Hundred Cartoons from the Pages of Fun, preface.

  116. For the Conservatives' attempts to tar Gladstone with the brush of “un-English,” see Hugh Cunningham, inEnglishness. Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, 295–6.

  117. For “perlocutionary” acts, see J. L. Austin,How to do Things with Words (Oxford, 1962), esp. 94ff. See also Neil MacCormick's interesting review, “Names can hurt people,” of Catharine A. MacKinnon'sOnly Words, inThe Times Literary Supplement, 4757 (3 June 1994): 3–4, quoting Austin.

  118. Ragussis,Figures of Conversion, 260.

  119. Maurice and Cooper,The History of the Nineteenth Century in Caricature, 102, no source given.

  120. For “Ethnic prejudice” and “xenophobic hostility,” see Langmuir,Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 341. For “casual prejudice” and “peripheral concern”, see Levy,Antisemitism in the Modern World, 2.

  121. For the “significant chimerical” qualities which Gavin Langmuir regards as a crucial feature of “classic” anti-Semitism, seeToward a Definition of Antisemitism, 315, 338, 341. The phrase about a “life-shaping force,” from Levy,Antisemitism in the Modern World, 3, has a special relevance to the glib way stereotyping of Anglo-Jewry in general and Disraeli in particular was employed to explain away the complexities of England's foreign policy during the Eastern Question.

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    Anthony S. Wohl

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For the name “Ben JuJu,” see note 82, below. I include and discuss some of the material in this paper from a different perspective in my essay “‘Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi’: Disraeli as Alien,”Journal of British Studies 34/3 (July 1995). I would like to thank the University of Chicago Press for granting permission to reproduce some of this material. Place of publication is London unless stated otherwise.

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Wohl, A.S. “Ben JuJu”: Representations of Disraeli's Jewishness in the victorian political cartoon. Jewish History 10, 89–134 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01650962

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