With Coningsby, or the New Generation (1844), and Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred, or the New Crusade made up his most successful and famous trilogy of works. All deal with individuals caught in the conflict of different communities—religious, social, and/or political—neither of which they fit into comfortably.

Tancred draws its title both from the protagonist’s name and the quest on his part to retrace his ancestors’ journey to Jerusalem during the times of the Crusade in defense of Christianity. Disraeli’s personal conflicts surface, as he examines the value of the preservation of his own Jewish culture, a culture he could never fully accept.

Disraeli reintroduces characters from his two previous novels, most particularly Sidonia, the proudly Jewish character from Coningsby who rejected a life in politics, where his religion would be questioned. In Tancred, Sidonia serves as a negotiator, involved when the book’s protagonist, Tancred, Lord Montacute, is abducted in Jerusalem, but through the negative experience becomes part of a community that holds the Greek gods as their deities.

Having traveled to Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre in search of understanding “The Asian mystery,” he will discover the importance of belief in the divine, regardless of the name given to its representative deity. Disraeli wrote the book to develop his own theories regarding religion, one of which was the importance of spiritualism.

Tancred becomes enthralled with the daughter of a Jewish financier named Eva Besso. Eva, whose name suggests Eve, the first woman of biblical fame, teaches Tancred about the history of the area’s civilization. She tells him that communities around the Mediterranean were accomplished long before those in Europe.

When Tancred declares his love and desire to marry Eva, she rejects him as his parents arrive to take him back to Europe.

Disraeli’s biographers make much of the fact that he wrote the mystical romance at the very time he should have been assuring his fellow members of Parliament of his “normalcy.” Referred to often as “an Oriental,” Disraeli actually proved the most English of men, far removed from the Jewish lands of his ancestors. However, he did hold the Eastern outlook, made clear in his novel, on material goods as desirable but ultimately dissatisfying.

The novel shocked many of Disraeli’s contemporaries. Historian and philosopher Robert Carlyle detested Disraeli and his book, referring to him as a monkey. Many more of his peers did not much read, and so Disraeli did not come under attack in Parliament due to the novel.

He would, however, expound on his ideas in Parliament when the Jewish Lionel de Rothschild was elected but could not assume his seat, as he was required to swear on the Christian faith. In a speech that left the House of Commons silent, Disraeli declared that Christ’s church had itself made the Jewish religion famous, and that as a Christian, he could not exclude from the legislature men who were of Christ’s original religion. Like the novel, his speech won him few supporters.

His novel serves as a fine example of the expression of private sentiment in fiction.

Bibliography
Maurois, André. Disraeli. New York: Time Life Books, 1965

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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