‘Der Alte Jude’: The Jewish Life of Benjamin Disraeli

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "'Der Alte Jude': The Jewish Life of Benjamin Disraeli." The Weekly Standard, May 6, 2016.

Excerpt

A recent book in the Yale University Press series on “Jewish Lives,” a biography of the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, opens provocatively: “Does Benjamin Disraeli deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives?” Perhaps not, a reader of the book might well conclude. Disraeli has always been a challenge, to Jews and non-Jews, contemporaries as well as biographers. But rereading the man himself, I was reassured that he was entirely worthy of a place in “Jewish Lives” (and justified the significant space I gave him a few years ago in my The People of the Book).

 

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