D'Israeli & Disraeli and The Genius of Judaism
2005; De Gruyter; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1515/asch.2005.135
ISSN1865-9438
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval and Classical Philosophy
ResumoWhen Isaac D'Israeli published The Genius of Judaism in 1833, he was sixty-seven years old. Why he did so at this time of his life can only be a matter of speculation. He had resigned from Bevis Marks synagogue in 1817, the year his four children were baptized, moved from London in 1829 to Bradenham House in Buckinghamshire to become a kind of country squire, and, not a Christian and at best a lapsed Jew, at his death in 1848 was buried beside his Jewish wife in Bradenham Church. He had, of course, already dealt with the subject in one way or another early in his career. In Vaurien (1797) he interposed a whole chapter called »A Jewish Philosopher. A Dissertation on the Jews, tending to prove that they should not be burnt,« whose thesis was that »the children of Jacob are composed of all nations, and cannot blend alike with other people among whom they reside; as there are metals in nature, which no chymical process can amalgamate with others.« His paean to Moses Mendelsohn (whose Phaedon the Jewish philosopher in Vaurien had been reading while at dinner eating pork chops) in the following year, »A Biographical Sketch of the Jewish Socrates,« was echoed in the celebration in »the history of the mind of Mendelsohn« of the »noblest picture of the self-education of genius« in D'Israeli's Literary Character of Men of Genius. And there were numerous essays in his Curiosities of Literature, among them »The Talmud,« »Rabbinical Stories,« and »The Jews of York.« It must be said, however, that in essence there was no change in his view that the Jews were a »peculiar people.« Their genius lies in their »separation […] from all the generations of mankind,« a detailed presentation of the causes and consequences thereof being the matter of The Genius of Judaism.
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