Muscular Jews: Young England, gender and Jewishness in Disraeli's “political trilogy”
In Tough Jews, a recent study of the sexual politics of Zionism, Paul Breines describes the genesis of Jewish nationalism as uthe historic break with the culture of Jewish meekness and gentleness and the beginnings of a tough Jewish counterculture." Breines sees the context of "the emergence of a tough Jewish imagery at the turn of the century [as] an extension of the Jewish nationalist awakening of the period [and]... a logical outcome of the larger nationalist dynamic" sweeping contemporary Europe. He argues that it derives from a reaction against as well as a reflection of European nationalisms: "The racial and bodily dimension of much of turn-of-the-century nationalist anti-Semitism was a decisive factor in the emergence of Jewish ideals of toughness, courage and physicality. Modern, postreligious, racial anti-Semitism presented a double image of the Jew: first, as the wielder of immense economic power and, through it, of secret but extensive control of the world's political systems, and second, as physically weak, repulsive, and cowardly."1 Breines is right to locate the invention of a new masculinized Jewish body within the context of widespread aspirations towards the body politic at the end of the nineteenth century. In this essay, however, I would like to trace some of these currents back to an earlier moment in discussions about national identity in nineteenth-century England. Examining the writings of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1830s and 40s, and in particular his representations of "tough Jews," I will be looking at connections between masculinity, Jewishness and English national identity.
Thomas Carlyle and the Jews
quences of Romanticism and German philosophical idealism proceeding &dquo;by ... logical stages, through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, into Hitler&dquo;. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl unhesitatingly pronounced Carlyle and Nietzsche to be nineteenth-century precursors of twentieth-century totalitarianism, and described Carlyle as &dquo;undoubtedly&dquo; belonging &dquo;in a line of which the present-day totalitarian movements constitute, if not the straight prolongation, yet a normal branch&dquo;. The Scottish literary critic H. J. C. Grierson retitled his 1930 lecture on &dquo;Carlyle and the Hero&dquo; as Carlyle and Hitler when he published it in 1933. He claimed in his preface that the &dquo;recent happenings in Germany&dquo; perfectly illustrated the conditions which &dquo;lead up to, or at least make possible, the emergence of the Hero as Carlyle clearly thought of him&dquo; and the &dquo;feelings, religious and political (including economic)&dquo; that washed the &dquo;Hero&dquo; into power. Grierson’s American colleague Joseph Ellis Baker asserted in his Saturday Review article &dquo;Carlyle Rules the Reich&dquo; later in 1933 that Hitler’s philosophy as set forth in Mein Kampf &dquo;might be treated in a footnote to our reading of one of the best-known writers of English prose&dquo;. Philosophers like Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, have absolved Carlyle of the Nazi-Fascist taint, and carefully distinguished what they saw
Life in London
I was once [in the autumn of 1815] invited to dinner by Sir James Burges1 … I there met, to my great delight, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott; and amongst the rest of the company were Lord Caledon, and Croker2, the Secretary to the Admiralty.…