Thoughts out of Season, part 1 | Page 6

his
medical skill, used to show to the peasants around him the skin of a
completly cured patient of his. Both Nietzsche and Disraeli know the
way to health, for they have had the disease of the age themselves, but
they have--the one partly, the other entirely-- cured themselves of it,
they have resisted the spirit of their time, they have escaped the fate of
their contemporaries; they therefore, and they alone, know their danger.
This is the reason why they both speak so violently, why they both
attack with such bitter fervour the utilitarian and materialistic attitude
of English Science, why they both so ironically brush aside the airy and
fantastic ideals of German Philosophy--this is why they both loudly

declare (to use Disraeli's words) "that we are the slaves of false
knowledge; that our memories are filled with ideas that have no origin
in truth; that we believe what our fathers credited, who were convinced
without a cause; that we study human nature in a charnel house, and,
like the nations of the East, pay divine honours to the maniac and the
fool." But if these two great men cannot refrain from such outspoken
vituperation--they also lead the way: they both teach the divinity of
ideas and the vileness of action without principle; they both exalt the
value of personality and character; they both deprecate the influence of
society and socialisation; they both intensely praise and love life, but
they both pour contempt and irony upon the shallow optimist, who
thinks it delightful, and the quietist, who wishes it to be calm, sweet,
and peaceful. They thus both preach a life of danger, in opposition to
that of pleasure, of comfort, of happiness, and they do not only preach
this noble life, they also act it: for both have with equal determination
staked even their lives on the fulfilment of their ideal.
It is astonishing--but only astonishing to your superficial student of the
Jewish character--that in Disraeli also we find an almost Nietzschean
appreciation of that eternal foe of the Jewish race, the Hellenist, which
makes Disraeli, just like Nietzsche, confess that the Greek and the
Hebrew are both amongst the highest types of the human kind. It is not
less astonishing--but likewise easily intelligible for one who knows
something of the great Jews of the Middle Ages--that in Disraeli we
discover that furious enmity against the doctrine of the natural equality
of men which Nietzsche combated all his life. It was certainly the great
Maimonides himself, that spiritual father of Spinoza, who guided the
pen of his Sephardic descendant, when he thus wrote in his Tancred: "It
is to be noted, although the Omnipotent Creator might have formed,
had it pleased him, in the humblest of his creations, an efficient agent
for his purpose that Divine Majesty has never thought fit to
communicate except with human beings of the very highest order."
But what about Christianity, to which Disraeli was sincerely attached,
and whose creation he always considered as one of the eternal glories
of his race? Did not the Divine Majesty think it fit then to communicate
with the most humble of its creatures, with the fishermen of Galilee,
with the rabble of Corinth, with the slaves, the women, the criminals of
the Roman Empire? As I wish to be honest about Disraeli, I must point

out here, that his genius, although the most prominent in England
during his lifetime, and although violently opposed to its current
superstitions, still partly belongs to his age--and for this very
pardonable reason, that in his Jewish pride he overrated and even
misunderstood Christianity. He all but overlooked the narrow
connection between Christianity and Democracy. He did not see that in
fighting Liberalism and Nonconformity all his life, he was really
fighting Christianity, the Protestant Form of which is at the root of
British Liberalism and Individualism to this very day. And when later
in his life Disraeli complained that the disturbance in the mind of
nations has been occasioned by "the powerful assault on the Divinity of
the Semitic Literature by the Germans," he overlooked likewise the
connection of this German movement with the same Protestantism,
from the narrow and vulgar middle-class of which have sprung all those
rationalising, unimaginative, and merely clever professors, who have so
successfully undermined the ancient and venerable lore. And thirdly,
and worst of all, Disraeli never suspected that the French Revolution,
which in the same breath he once contemptuously denounced as "the
Celtic Rebellion against Semitic laws," was, in spite of its professed
attack against religion, really a profoundly Christian, because a
democratic and revolutionary movement. What a pity he did not know
all this! What a shower of splendid additional sarcasms he would have
poured over those flat-nosed Franks, had he known what I