Daniel R. Schwarz. Disraeli’s Fiction. New York:
Macmillan, 1979. 42-51.
- Alroy is Disraeli’s ultimate heroic fantasy. He
uses the figure of the twelfth-century Jewish Prince, Alroy,
as the basis for a tale of Jewish conquest and empire.
Disraeli found the medieval world in which Alroy lived an
apt model for some of his own values. He saw in that world
an emphasis on imagination, emotion and tradition; respect
for political and social hierarchies; and a vital spiritual
life. Alroy anticipates Disraeli’s attraction for the
Middle Ages in Young England. Writing of the flowering of
medieval Jewry under Alroy enabled him to express his
opposition to rationalism and utilitarianism.
- In fact, the historic Alroy was a self-appointed messiah in
Kurdistan during a period of severe tribulation and unusual
suffering for the Jews.1 Alroy’s father claimed he was
Elijah and that his son was the Messiah. Although his actual
name was Menahem, young Alroy took the name David, the
appropriate name for a king of the Jews, and promised to
lead his followers to Jerusalem where he would be their
king. Apparently learned in Jewish mysticism, Alroy managed
to convince his followers that he could perform supernatural
acts. While he scored some victories before he was murdered,
probably by his father-in-law, his successes were hardly of
the magnitude of his victories in Disraeli’s romance.
- Since completing Vivian Grey, Disraeli had been
fascinated by Alroy, the Jew who had achieved power and
prominence during Jewish captivity. But perhaps he needed
the inspiration of his 1831 trip to Jerusalem to finish
Alroy. Disraeli wrote in the Preface to The
Revolutionary Epick (1834) that the purpose of
Alroy was ‘the celebration of a gorgeous
incident in the annals of that sacred and romantic people
from whom I derive my blood and name.’2 Undoubtedly the tale of a Jew becoming
the most powerful man in an alien land appealed to Disraeli,
who at the age of twenty-nine had not yet made his political
or artistic reputation. Indeed David Alroy’s first
name evokes visions of the David and Goliath legend which
embodies another victory for a Jewish underdog. Disraeli
uses the factual Alroy as a basis for his romance, but he
extends Alroy’s power and prowess and introduces
supernatural machinery and ersatz Cabalistic lore and ritual.
- Alroy represents Disraeli’s own dreams of personal
heroism and political power in the alien British culture.
Alroy embodies not only his concept of himself as
a potential leader, but his notion that the nation requires
strong, visionary leaders who are true to its traditional
manners and customs. Criticising Peel, he wrote, ‘My
conception of a great statesman is one who represents a
great idea—an idea which may lead him to power; an
idea with which he may identify himself; an idea which he
may develop; an idea which he may and can impress on the
mind and conscience of a nation.’3 He felt that some men were born to
lead, and believed that, like Alroy, he was one of these.
- Doubtless Disraeli’s journey to Jerusalem stimulated
his fantasies of revived Jewish hegemony. Moreover, he
believed that the Jews are not only an especially gifted
race but the most aristocratic of races.4 He also believed that the Jewish race
is the source of all that is spiritual in European
civilisation, most notably Christianity. Disraeli’s
only historical romance, except for ‘The Rise of
Iskander’ (1833), resulted from his desire to depict
Jews on a heroic scale. But it also derives from the
discrepancy between his aspirations and his position in the
early 1830s. In Alroy’s hyperbolic self-dramatisation
is the thinly disguised voice of the young frustrated
Disraeli who has not yet begun to fulfil the ‘ideal
ambition’ of which he wrote in his diary. Yet with
typical Disraelian emotional resilience, Alroy’s early
self-pity and ennui give way to the vision of a
transformation of his condition: ‘I linger in this
shadowy life, and feed on silent images which no eye but
mine can gaze upon, till at length they are invested with
all the terrible circumstance of life, and breathe, and act,
and form a stirring world of fate and beauty, time, and
death, and glory’ (Pt1Ch1).
- As the romance opens, Alroy is lost in despair and self-pity
because both he and his people pay tribute to the Moslem
Caliph: ‘I know not what I feel, yet what I feel is
madness. Thus to be is not to live, if life be what I
sometimes dream, and dare to think it might be. To breathe,
to feed, to sleep, to wake and breathe again, again to feel
existence without hope; if this be life, why then these
brooding thoughts that whisper death were better?’
(Pt1Ch1). But the assault of the Moslem Lord Alschiroch upon
Alroy’s sister Miriam arouses him to action and he
kills the Lord. As he sleeps ‘dreaming of noble
purposes and mighty hopes’, Miriam awakes him and
warns him that he must flee his home and the wrath of the
Moslems. He makes his way to Jabaster who recognises him as
‘the only hope of Israel’ (Pt3Ch1). Alroy dreams
that he has been anointed by the Lord to lead the Jews out
of Captivity to their chosen land, Jerusalem. Jabaster tells
him that the Cabala insists he must get the sceptre of
Solomon before he can free the Jews: ‘None shall rise
to free us, until, alone and unassisted, he have gained the
sceptre which Solomon of old wielded within his cedar
palaces’ (Pt3Ch3). Alroy undertakes a traditional
romance quest, including visions, mysterious appearances and
disappearances, and encounters with spirits, before
receiving the sceptre from Solomon’s own
hand—only to see the King immediately disappear and to
find himself transported once again to the company of
Jabaster. Aided by Jabaster and the divinely inspired
prophetess Esther, he begins to triumph. Beginning with a
small band, he scores victory after victory and gradually
conquers Bagdad. But at the height of his powers he falls in
love with the Caliph’s daughter, Princess Schirene,
and betrays his mission by marrying her and not continuing
to Jerusalem. Jabaster opposes the marriage and his decision
to remain as Caliph of Bagdad as a betrayal of his
commitment to Jewish customs and traditions. Jabaster argues
for ‘a national existence’ and for
re-establishing ‘our beauteous country, our holy
creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs’
(Pt8Ch6), a position that looks forward to the
traditionalism of Disraeli’s Young England movement
and the concept of a nation that dominated his thinking when
in office.
- When Alroy starts to enjoy his power and to savour his
prominence, his visions and prophetic dreams cease and his
decline begins. Eventually he loses a vital battle to the
Karasmians and reenters Bagdad as a captive.
Disraeli’s implication is that arrogance and
self-conceit are incompatible with imaginative activity. The
significance and frequency of his imaginative experience
decline as he forgets God’s command and marries
Schirene; the alliance with a Gentile ironically fulfils his
identity as a second Solomon. When Alroy tells Jabaster,
‘We must leave off dreaming’, he renounces
imagination, the very quality that has given him the
capacity to achieve greatness. Alroy’s rationalism and
worldliness betray the dream of rebuilding the temple which
was the catalyst for his heroic activity. Alroy’s
apostasy begins when he belittles Jerusalem and when he
dismisses the Prophetess Esther as a ‘quaint
fanatic’ after she counsels him not to enter Bagdad,
which she calls Babylon. He becomes concerned with secular
matters, such as the need for a ‘marshal of the
palace’, the position to which he appoints Honain
(Pt8Ch2). He is captivated by the princess, whom he had
previously rejected when he had first been tempted by her.
At this point we recall not only the prophetess’
denunciation of Bagdad, but Alroy’s own words to
Honain: ‘I fly from this dangerous city upon
[God’s] business, which I have too much
neglected’ (Pt5Ch6). Speaking the language of courtly
love, he puts Schirene before his love for God, and
renounces his heritage: ‘If the deep devotion of the
soul of Alroy be deemed an offering meet for the shrine of
thy surpassing loveliness, I worship thee, Schirene, I
worship thee, I worship thee!’ (Pt8Ch4).
- In Alroy the evolving pattern of events and
circumstances depends upon Alroy’s moral health,
whereas we have seen in Contarini Fleming that the
character’s visions and dreams, and on occasion actual
events, depend on his psychological life. Alroy’s
moral status determines the action. Such a pattern,
in which a man’s behaviour shapes the world, enables
Disraeli to reconcile the conflict between his own poetic
and political ambition. For example, when Alroy has the
confidence to restore Israel’s glory, he has the
vision in which he fulfils his quest for the sceptre of
Solomon. Or, when the trumpet sounds to signal the time for
Alroy’s trial, Miriam in response to his disgrace
dies. The Jewish participants in the alliance that overthrew
Alroy are absent from the denouement, as if by their part in
Alroy’s overthrow they deserve to be discarded from
the romance.
- As with Contarini, Alroy’s visionary experience occurs
in times of heightened awareness, but these states cease to
occur during his complacent rule of Babylon. Alroy regains
the capacity to experience the spectre of Jabaster when he
recognises the vulnerability of his actual situation prior
to the climactic battle: ‘I feel more like a doomed
and desperate renegade than a young hero on the verge of
battle, flushed with the memory of unbroken triumphs!'
(Pt10Ch4). Alroy's imaginative powers recover as he begins
to acknowledge his shortcomings and his unjust treatment of
the prophetess and Jabaster. Before his battle with the
rebels, he realises: ‘I am not what I was. I have
little faith. All about me seems changed, and dull, and
grown mechanical’ (Pt10Ch5). Even though he knows
Jabaster’s ghost is summoning him to his doom, he
seems to welcome his presence; Alroy knowingly accepts as
his retribution a pattern of events which will fulfil the
prophecy of his own destruction: ‘A rushing destiny
carries me onward. I cannot stem the course, nor guide the
vessel’ (Pt10Ch10). But at the height of his military
successes, when he feels fulfilled as a public man, his
imagination becomes less active because he has deviated from
his purposes. At this point he condemns Abidan, one of his
most loyal, if zealous, lieutenants as a
‘dreamer’ and rejects the prophetess
Esther’s visions (Pt8Ch1). When Alroy becomes a man of
the world and forswears his imaginative experiences, he is
already on the road to his undoing. His success derives from
his faith, from his idealism, and from his powers of
imagination that enable him to hear the Daughter of the
Voice and to dream of Afrites. Condemning Abidan is
tantamount to rejecting his former self. Gradually he ceases
to be the Prince of Captivity, not because he fulfils his
holy purpose of rebuilding the temple and restoring the Jews
to Jerusalem, but because he becomes Caliph. Although
Alroy’s religious faith had been his best political
guide, he abandons that and begins to rely on reason:
The world is mine: and shall I yield the
prize, the universal and heroic prize, to realize the
dull tradition of some dreaming priest, and consecrate a
legend? He conquered Asia, and he built the temple. . .
. Is the Lord of hosts so slight a God, that we must
place a barrier to His sovereignty, and fix the
boundaries of Onmipotence between the Jordan and the
Lebanon? . . . Well, I am clearly summoned, I am the
Lord’s servant, not Jabaster’s. Let me make
His worship universal as His power; and where’s
the priest shall dare impugn my faith, because His
altars smoke on other hills than those of Judah?
(Pt8Ch1) Alroy’s pride makes him
believe that he is entitled to reinterpret the Lord’s
calling. He relies on reason rather than inspiration;
sophistry displaces imagination. At least through the Young
England period, Disraeli believed in the imagination as a
necessary guide to political wisdom. The limitations of
reason are illustrated in Popanilla (1828),
Disraeli’s satire of utilitarianism.
- Jabaster and Abidan are dedicated to ideological purity
whatever the consequences. In the name of theocracy, they
reject Alroy’s power. Yet in their conspiracy against
their leader, we may see Disraeli’s impatience with
those who would limit the English King’s power. Later,
this attitude became part of his coherent political
philosophy in A Vindication of the English
Constitution (1835). Abidan’s justification
for regicide is a deliberate satire of Cromwell’s
views: ‘King! Why what’s a king? Why should one
man break the equal sanctity of our chosen race? Is their
blood purer than our own? We are all the seed of
Abraham’ (Pt9Ch1). Just as Honain and Schirene tempt
Alroy, Abidan tempts Jabaster by appealing to his vanity:
‘Thou ne’er didst err, but when thou placedst a
crown upon this haughty stripling. . . . ’Twas thy
mind inspired the deed. And now he is king; and now
Jabaster, the very soul of Israel, who should be our judge
and leader, Jabaster trembles in disgrace . . .’
(Pt9Ch1). Disraeli implies that the zealotry of Jabaster,
who would massacre Moslems, is both inhumane and misguided,
if for no other reason than that the wheel of fortune has a
way of turning. Significantly, Alroy later recalls his own
gentle rule as Caliph, when he is being subjected to cruel
punishment; because he refuses to forswear his faith and
insists that he is the Lord’s anointed, he dies a
martyr’s death. Perhaps Disraeli wished to remind his
primarily Christian audience that the Jews had a long
tradition of being the victims of persecution.
- Disraeli is ambivalent to Honain, Jabaster’s brother
who has achieved prominence under the Caliph’s rule
and who again is serving Alroy’s conquerors. On one
hand, Honain’s equivocation represents a temptation
that Alroy must reject. On the other hand, he is the
ultimate pragmatist who counsels compromise in contrast to
his brother’s ideological purity. His brother’s
polar opposite, he lives by his own resources and eschews
commitment to principles. As such, he is an heir to
Beckendorff and Contarini’s father, whose creeds he
suggests when he asserts, ‘We make our fortunes, and
we call them Fate’ (p. 106). Honain survives three
Caliphs because his own welfare is at the centre of his
value system. The very moment that Alroy rejects Jabaster he
acknowledges the abilities of Honain, the man who lives by
his wits: ‘I must see Honain. That man has a great
mind. He alone can comprehend my purpose’ (Pt8Ch1).
Honain always counsels worldliness and, after Alroy’s
capture, compromise. He is an example of the apostate Jew
who has made his way in the world. Perhaps he is a
projection of Disraeli’s view of his own
father’s apostasy. Honain may also reflect
Disraeli’s own troubled response to his Jewish roots.
- If Contarini vacillates erratically between imagination and
action, Disraeli shows in Alroy that the life of
action is not incompatible with the imaginative life. For
Alroy’s political success is dependent upon visions
that show how a life of action need not exclude poetic and
imaginative impulses. Alroy uses his imagination in the
service of his political goals. For example, the catalyst
for his original act of rebellion is his insight that, as
‘the descendant of sacred kings’, he is not
suited for a life of activity (Pt1Ch1). His imagination
creates the fiction of Jewish and personal glory. Killing
the city governor Alschiroch who harassed his sister (his
alter ego throughout the novel) is the necessary heroic
action which takes him from the imaginative world into the
public world.
- That sexual motives play an important part in Alroy
and often displace heroic and public motives is an
indication of Disraeli’s worldliness and refusal to
compromise his own complex vision of mankind’s motives
and needs for the sake of the character who embodies his
fantasy of Jewish eminence. Alroy’s conduct, including
his tolerance of Moslem influence in his council, is shaped
by his erotic interest in Schirene, the Gentile princess of
Bagdad whom he eventually marries. The prophetess’s
real motive for wishing to murder Alroy is not so much
ideological purity as sexual jealousy. As she watches Alroy
sleep, her monologue begins with the indictment that he is
‘a tyrant and a traitor’ who has betrayed
God’s trust. But like all those who think that they
act under God’s auspices—Alroy, Abidan,
Jabaster—she is not without pathetically human
feelings and failings: ‘Hush my heart, and let thy
secret lie hid in the charnel-house of crushed affections.
Hard is the lot of woman: to love and to conceal is our
sharp doom! O bitter life! O most unnatural lot! Man made
society, and made us slaves. And so we droop and die, or
else take refuge in idle fantasies, to which we bring the
fervour that is meant for nobler ends' (Pt9Ch5).
- Disraeli wants to create a context where the marvellous is
possible. Moreover, he wishes to present himself as an
original artist and to flout conventional expectations as to
what a work of prose fiction should be. His use of rhythm
and rhyme is part of his rebellion against artistic
captivity, a captivity created by standards he did not
recognise and by what he felt was failure to appreciate his
genius. In the original preface to Alroy, Disraeli
stressed the genius of his achievement, particularly the
prose poetry. Alroy is written in a prophetic tone
and biblical rhythms as if Disraeli were proposing this as
his contribution to Jewish lore. The fastidious notes are in
the tradition of talmudic learning that addresses texts as
sacred and values scholarship as homage to God. That
Alroy is written in metrical prose punctuated by
what Disraeli called ‘occasional bursts of lyric
melody’, is the primary reason for the remoteness of
its prose from colloquial English.5 Lyric interludes, sometimes in rhyme,
certainly contribute to Disraeli’s efforts to create
an ersatz orientalism based on artifice rather than mimesis:
‘The carol of a lonely bird singing in the wilderness!
A lonely bird that sings with glee! Sunny and sweet, and
light and clear, its airy notes float through the sky, and
trill with innocent revelry’ (Pt2Ch5). But the
stylised dialogue, the vatic tone accompanying the spare
plot, the supernatural machinery, the bizarre reversals of
fortune, and the hyperbolic descriptions of setting all
contribute to astonish the normal expectations that a reader
brings to prose fiction. Thus the ‘wondrous’
tale describes not only Alroy’s conquests, but the
tale itself with its remarkable style and tone. While the
style deprives us of Disraeli’s ironic wit and playful
vivacity, the taut symmetrical plot, which accelerates as it
reaches Alroy’s demise, shows progression in
Disraeli’s mastery of narrative form. The subject is
hardly conducive to his exuberant self-mockery or boisterous
digressions. But, although the author takes himself as
seriously as he ever does in any of his prose fiction,
Disraeli’s propensity for elaborate description, which
was so much of the fun of the first novels, finds an outlet
in the wonders of life in Bagdad, as in the following
passage:
The line of domestics at the end of the
apartment opened, and a body of slaves advanced,
carrying trays of ivory and gold, and ebony and silver,
covered with the choicest dainties, curiously prepared.
These were in turn offered to the Caliph and the Sultana
by their surrounding attendants. The Princess accepted a
spoon made of a single pearl, the long, thin golden
handle of which was studded with rubies, and
condescended to partake of some saffron soup, of which
she was fond. Afterwards she regaled herself with the
breast of a cygnet stuffed with almonds, and stewed with
violets and cream. . . . Her attention was then engaged
with a dish of those delicate ortolans that feed upon
the vine-leaves of Schiraz, and with which the Governor
of Nishabur took especial care that she should be well
provided. Tearing the delicate birds to pieces with the
still more delicate fingers, she insisted upon feeding
Alroy, who of course yielded to her solicitations.
(Pt9Ch2)
- Disraeli wanted to establish the authenticity of his
wondrous tale. For that reason he created as his
editor-speaker a Jewish historian and scholar. But he must
have known that very few readers would discover that he had
taken liberties with the Alroy legend and really knew only
scattered bits and snips of the Cabala tradition. One
wonders whether the notes are in part an elaborate joke at
the expense of readers who would take the editor and
themselves too seriously and accept what is often mumbo
jumbo. Is there not a note of dead pan humour in the
following from the 1845 preface: ‘With regard to the
supernatural machinery of this romance, it is Cabalistical
and correct’? Disraeli must have known that given the
multiple and contradictory sources, it is impossible to be
correct about either the legend of Alroy or the Cabala.
According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, the Cabala is
a general term for ‘esoterical teachings of Judaism
and for Jewish mysticism’, but there is no accepted
and correct ‘version’. And the factual record of
Alroy and his movement is, according to the same source,
‘contradictory and tendentious’.6
- Interweaving personal recollections of the East with
informed if rather abstruse knowledge of Jewish lore, the
notes mediate between the text and the audience. The notes
become part of the reading experience and give Alroy
an authenticity as Jewish myth that it lacks as personal
fantasy. Alroy fuses the myths of the Chosen People, of
return to the homeland, and of the long awaited Messiah. As
is appropriate in Judaic tradition, Alroy turns out to be a
heroic man, but not without human limitations. His demise
may be Disraeli’s unconscious affirmation of the
Jewish tradition that the Messiah has not yet come to redeem
mankind. When Jabaster rebukes him for not following his
mission (‘you may be King of Bagdad, but you cannot,
at the same time, be a Jew’,) a spirit shrieks
‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’, the words that
Daniel interprets upon the wall to mean that God had weighed
Belshazzar and his kingdom and found them wanting (Pt8Ch6).
Significantly, Alroy regains the Jewish title, Prince of
Captivity, after he is overthrown as Caliph. In his final
suffering and humility, he has achieved the stature that the
Jewish exiled Prince, Disraeli’s metaphor for himself, deserves.
- The Jewish desire for a Messiah is not finally fulfilled,
but Alroy has significance for others, and particularly
other Jews, as a historical figure. Miriam’s epitaph
suggests Carlyle’s notion of the value of an heroic
figure: ‘Great deeds are great legacies, and work with
wondrous usury. By what Man has done, we learn what Man can
do; and gauge the power and prospects of our race. . . . The
memory of great actions never dies’ (P10Ch19).
Disraeli the imaginative poet is the heir to Alroy the
imaginative man. Perhaps, by telling his story of the Jew
who rose to prominence in a foreign land, it became more
plausible to imagine himself as a political leader. But if
Alroy is an objectification of Disraeli’s ambition,
does he not also reflect Disraeli’s anxieties and
doubts, specifically his fear of his own sensual weakness
and a certain paranoia about betrayal? Perhaps he wondered
whether, like Daniel and Alroy, he would be found wanting
when his opportunity came.
- Yet Alroy indicates Disraeli’s commitment to
his Jewish heritage. His surrogate, the narrator, glories in
the Jewish victories and in the triumph of the Prince of
Captivity over his oppressors. Disraeli’s notes, which
are a fundamental part of reading Alroy, show not
only his knowledge of Jewish customs, but his wide reading
in Jewish studies. His notes not only demonstrate both to
himself and his readers that he has the
intellectual and racial credentials to narrate Jewish
history and legend, but they give us the perspective of a
Jewish scholar who is trying to provide an authoritative
edition of the Alroy legend. Indeed, Miriam had anticipated
the possibility of such a poet-editor: ‘Perchance some
poet, in some distant age, within whose veins our sacred
blood may flow, his fancy fired by the national theme, may
strike his harp to Alroy’s wild career, and consecrate
a name too long forgotten?' (P10Ch19).
Notes
1 Encyclopedia Judaica (New York: Macmillan, 1971), I:750-1.
2 Quoted in Monypenny and Buckle, I:194.
3 Quoted in Stephen R. Graubard, Burke, Disraeli and Churchill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 139.
4 See Chapter XXIV entitled ‘The Jewish Question’ in Lord George Bentinck (London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1905), 314-30.
5 Quoted on Monypenny and Buckle, I:198.
6 Encyclopedia Judaica, X:490; I:750.
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