“Aquaviva was General of the Jesuits, ruled every cabinet in Europe and colonized America before he was thirty-seven. What a career!” exclaimed the stranger (Sidonia), rising from his chair and walking up and down the room; “the secret sway of Europe!” (p. 120. The references are to Longman’s edition published in 1919. The italics are ours.)
Taking up a study of the character of Sidonia the Jew, Disraeli the Jew begins to refer to the Jews as “Mosaic Arabs.” If a modern writer were to describe the Jews thus, virtually as Arabs of the Mosaic persuasion, it would be denounced as another attempt at “persecution,” but Disraeli did this a number of times, his purpose evidently being to give the Jew his proper setting as to his original position among the nations. Again he refers to them as “Jewish Arabs.” Both of these terms may be found on page 209.
Disraeli also gives voice to the feeling, which every Jew has, that whoever opposes the Jew is doomed. This is a feeling which is strongly entrenched in Christians also, that somehow the Jews are the “chosen people” and that it is dangerous to oppose them in anything. “The fear of the Jews” is a very real element in life. It is just as real among the Jews as among non-Jews. The Jew himself is bound in fear to his people, and he exercises the fear of the curse throughout the sphere of religion—“I will curse them that curse thee.” It remains to be proved, however, that opposition to the destructive tendencies of Jewish influences along all the principal avenues of life is a “cursing” of the Jews. If the Jews were really Old Testament people, if they were really conscious of a “mission” for the blessing of all nations, the very things in which they offend would automatically disappear. If the Jew is being “attacked,” it is not because he is a Jew, but because he is the source and life of certain tendencies and influences, which, if they are not checked, mean the destruction of a moral society.
The persecution of the Jew to which Disraeli refers is that of the Spanish Inquisition, which rested on religious grounds. Tracing the Sidonia family through a troubled period of European history, our Jewish author notes:
