Benjamin Disraeli by Adam Kirsch,   Random House of Canada.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) was the most exotic figure ever to reach the summit of British politics. He is still remembered as a notable exception in British history. More than a century and a quarter after his death, he is still the only Jew to have been prime minister of England.

When his father had him converted to Protestantism at the age of 12, his desire was to open for him avenues of education that otherwise were closed. He could not have foreseen that the change in religion would make it possible for his son, one day, to enter into a political career. For at the time, Jews, Catholics as well as dissenters were all “disabled” from serving in Parliament.

After several attempts, Disraeli was elected as a Conservative member of Parliament in 1837. His maiden address was drowned out by discordant jeers and laughter.

The author of this brief but compelling biography, poet and New York Sun book critic Adam Kirsch, writes that Disraeli’s Jewishness was the central fact about him. “It didn’t matter that he was born in London like his father before him or that he spoke no language but English. It didn’t matter that he was, in fact, a practising Christian, baptized into the Church of England.” Former British prime minister Winston Churchill wrote that Disraeli never became wholly assimilated to English ways of life. It was as though he remained a permanent immigrant in the country of his birth.

It is sometimes overlooked that Disraeli, like his father, was a prolific and widely read author. Before he entered Parliament, six of Disraeli’s novels, several fantasies, satires, verse, travel journalism and political pamphlets were in print. His novel, Alroy, set in the 12th century, was written after an extensive tour of the Near East, including Palestine. It deals with Jewish persecution, survival and national identity. The book’s messianic hero, David Alroy, seeks to achieve positive Jewish selfhood through a redeemed religio-political state in Palestine.

Disraeli’s greatest legislative achievement was the passage of the Second Reform Bill in 1867, which gave the right to vote to most male heads of households – a measure more liberal than even the Liberals had been ready to contemplate. Many of his Conservative colleagues felt betrayed. The result was that Disraeli laid himself open to charges of opportunism and hypocrisy. The author suggests that “this compounded the distrust he already inspired – as a novelist, a dandy, an adventurer and, of course, a Jew.’

In 1839, he married a wealthy widow 12 years his senior. The match considerably enhanced his social position and provided him with financial security. “Dizzy married me for my money,” his wife was known to say, but “if he had the chance again, he would marry me for love.” Actually, the union turned out to be lasting and successful.

The author is convinced that Disraeli’s Jewishness gave him the confidence to compete with the best-born men in England; it gave him the dignity he sustained through the most wounding attacks; it licensed him to see his passage through the world as a noble adventurer.

Once, baited by an anti-Semite, he famously responded, “When the ancestors of the right honourable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown land, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

Disraeli felt no contradiction between his adherence to the Anglican faith and his pride in being Jewish. In arguing that Jews should not be excluded from Parliament, he suggested that Christianity owed most of its basic tenets to the Hebrew Bible and to the Jewish teachings of Jesus.

Among Disraeli’s major achievements was the purchase of a share in the Suez Canal company for Britain, with the help of a four-million-pound loan from the Rothschild family.

This engaging volume devotes as much attention to the Jewish side of Disraeli’s life and career as to his political activities. In both spheres, he remains a many-sided, enduringly provocative figure.