April 19: Primrose Day

Reposting from April 19, 2005.

Today is Primrose Day in the United Kingdom, an uncelebrated memorial day marking the death of former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s only Jewish head of government and a staunch imperialist. [When we first conceived this blog, Disraeli was my close second choice as an alias—albeit because of his politics, not his religion, which is the subject of this post.]

Born to a Jewish family, Disraeli was baptized a Christian as a teenager but never stopped thinking of himself as a Jew. Perhaps it was political motive: non-members of the Church of England were not allowed to join Parliament until the 1860s. His background was an open secret, however. He was once attacked for being Jewish by the Irish nationalist politician Daniel O’Connell, to which he replied:

Yes, I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

In the same line of questioning, Queen Victoria—with whom he was very close—once asked him, “Mr. Disraeli, what is your real religion? You were born a Jew and you forsook your great people. Now you are a member of the Church of England, but no one believes that you are a Christian at heart. Please tell me, who are you and what are you?” To which Disraeli is famously said to have replied, “Your Majesty, I am the blank page between the Old Testament and the New.”

Other Quotable Quotes:

• “I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many of the prejudices of the few.”
• “A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.”
• “Individuals may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.”
• “What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”
• And my all time favorite: “The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.”

Rest in peace, Ben.