Jews who find a steady diet of books about the antisemitism of England’s learned (and also not so learned) classes more unpleasant  than exploratory surgery will find a welcome antidote in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s  learned, scintillating,  and  (mostly) optimistic historical essay about the counter-tradition that she calls English “philosemitism.”     Professor Himmelfarb has been writing, with consummate mastery, about English intellectual life since 1952.  Robert Nisbet said of her that “Doubtless God could create a better interpreter” of this subject, “but doubtless God hasn’t.” In 2004 she received the National Humanities Medal awarded by the President. More recently, she has followed in the footsteps of the late Milton Himmelfarb, her very wise and learned brother, in writing about the Jewish dimension of English history and literature. In 2009 she published The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot; and now The People of the Book.

Like the word “antisemitism,”   the term, “people of the book”  is steeped in ambiguity,  tainted in its origin, and generally applied anachronistically.  If you’ve ever wondered how the fellow sleeping, his siddur held upside down, next to you in shul belongs to “the people of the book,” remember that the term originated with Muhammad and appears first (and often) in the Koran to refer to both Jews and Christians. There, it usually has pejorative overtones, as in “Ye People of the Book! Why reject ye the Signs of Allah.”  Similarly, “philosemitism” was  originally pejorative; and it was invented,  like its opposite, “antisemitism,” by German Jew-haters. They used it to disparage people they deemed  unduly sympathetic to Jews.  The term “antisemitism” itself was a pseudo-scientific euphemism for old-fashioned Jew-hatred, and to this day is often invoked by devotees of the Arab cause: “How can I be called an anti-semite [spelled thus] when I support the Semites called Arabs?” The answer to this dishonest question is that antisemites don’t hate “Semites”:  they hate Jews.

Himmelfarb, without denying either the pioneering role of England’s antisemites (the inventors of the blood libel, and the first to expel their country’s Jewish population) or their recent resurgence, tries to balance it with “another aspect of Jewish experience—the respect, even reverence, for Jews and Judaism displayed by non-Jews before and after the Holocaust.” Most of the English thinkers, writers, and politicians she discusses converted both “People of the Book” and “philosemitism” into positive terms. As she uses the word, philosemitism among the English may take the form of love of Jews  as “God’s ancient people,”  or toleration of them (as with liberal politicians like Macaulay), or admiration and worship of the Hebrew Bible, even when they call it  “Old Testament,” which for literate Jews is a calumny.

Himmelfarb knows that philosemitism is a cat that can jump in many directions. She admits that some formidable persecutors of the Jews have had far better Hebrew than their Jewish victims. (In America, Yale and Harvard combined excellent instruction in Hebrew with base discrimination against Jews.)  John Milton, whose fluency in Hebrew, poetry permeated by the Hebrew Bible, and commentaries on Tanach and Maimonides, would seem to give the lie to Anthony Julius’ claim that the greatest English writers have been its most flagrant antisemites,  hated both Judaism and Jews. Only the fact that he was employed by Cromwell kept him from publicly opposing his master’s decision to readmit Jews to England. He disparaged  them as “Judaizing beasts,” and argued that “the existence of God is proved … by their dispersion… throughout the whole world…on account of their sins.”

Himmelfarb celebrates those philosemites like John Locke, an advocate of toleration, and Locke’s friend,  Isaac Newton, who searched the Bible for evidence of “the restoration of the Jewish nation.”  Many of them developed the habit of imitating (perhaps appropriating) the historical Jewish experience and bringing it  home, as Blake would later write,  “to England’s green and pleasant land.”  “Perhaps the highest compliment the English could pay the Jews,” Himmelfarb  observes, “was to refer to their own country as ‘Israel’ and to their own people as ‘Israelites.'”  (In 1968 former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan actually said that “the future I hope for Britain is …like that of Israel,”  which in the Six-Day War had displayed “what any great people need—resolution, courage, determination.”)

At one point Himmelfarb  calls  Joseph Addison’s admiration for  real, living Jews the embodiment of “philosemitism in  its purest form” because the eighteenth-century essayist’s Judeophilia was primarily “natural” rather than strongly religious or evangelical.  Addison  admired Jews for  staunch adherence to their religion in spite of persecution, and did not aspire to convert them to his.  But Jews rarely get what they desire in “pure” form, which may explain why they often resist taking “yes” for an answer where philosemites are concerned.

The book’s most striking  examples of philosemitism’s mixture of blessing and curse both come from the Victorian period. The first is the book’s only Jewish philosemite: Benjamin Disraeli.  His story is well-known. In March 1817, as young Benjamin was approaching bar-mitzvah age, his father Isaac (already at odds with his synagogue) responded with alacrity to the suggestion of a Christian friend that he have his children baptized into the Church of England, so that they could have the chances available to other English children. Unlike his brothers Raphael and Jacobus, who were quickly baptized and renamed (Ralph and James) Benjamin was reluctant;  but he eventually succumbed. For some time he showed little sign of his Jewish “background.” When he traveled to the Holy Land as a young man, “of Jewish places of worship he saw nothing,” and his glowing description of Jerusalem makes no mention of Jews whatsoever. Such facts would not surprise those of his latter-day critics  who have alleged that his ideas of Jewishness were never hindered by any actual knowledge of the subject. Yet those ideas permeated not only his novels but also his parliamentary speeches. His chief idea was a bizarre, discomfiting mixture of sense and (mostly) nonsense called “racial Judaism.” A typical example is his grotesque insistence that “half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a  Jew.” His ignorance of Judaism was so vast that he knew nothing of Jewish dietary laws;  and when  a clergyman in his employ told him  that the Sabbath for which he always expressed contempt was a Jewish invention, he fired the man.  In Tancred (1847) , the only Disraeli novel Himmelfarb discusses at length, the author’s  spokesman Sidonia sees crypto-Jews managing affairs everywhere, as professors, ambassadors, generals, cabinet members;  he also wonders whether Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were Jewish. Hannah Arendt, in a savage attack on Disraeli, pointed out that he “produced the entire set of theories about Jewish influence and organization that we usually find in the more vicious forms of antisemitism” (and in Disraeli’s contemporaries like Carlyle, who called him “a cursed old Jew, not worth his weight in cold bacon” and Lord Palmerston, who moaned that “we are all dreadfully disgusted at the prospect of having  a Jew for our Prime Minister”).

And yet, and yet—there is something genuine, honorable, even irresistible, in Disraeli’s Jewish imaginings. In Tancred  he alludes to the “days of political  justice when Jerusalem belonged to the Jews,” and says that those days will return because the Jews in exile have diligently gone on pretending they were still living in their ancient homeland. In one of the few passages where he shows some awareness of Jewish religious practice, Disraeli describes Jews in Whitechapel or some other “icy clime” preparing once very year to live for a week in their sukkah. He concludes thus: “The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persists in celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards.” When Himmelfarb calls Disraeli “the quintessential philosemite,” it is because he substantiated the witticism (to be coined by Haim Hazaz in 1942) that when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist. England was the Israel of Disraeli’s  imagination, and he deserves the street named after him in modern Jerusalem.

And then there was Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh earl of Shaftesbury  (1801-85). The paradox in his case was not the Miltonic tension between love for the Hebrew Bible and blind hatred for Judaism and Jews. Shaftesbury combined genuine love for both with unswerving loyalty to a Christian England. He was “an Evangelical of the Evangelicals,” and also  felt deep, almost idolatrous reverence for Jews, to whom he made a point of bowing when he passed them on the streets of Germany. He aspired to be a modern Cyrus,  restoring God’s people not merely to “Palestine” but to “Eretz Israel.” He coined what would later become a Zionist slogan:  “There is a country without a nation;  and God now, in His wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country.”  Yet he was a missionary not only for but to Jews, whom he aspired to convert to Christianity;  and he opposed admitting  them to Parliament or suspending, for their sake, the requirement that MPs  pledge to serve “on the true faith of a Christian.” England eventually did, after decades of  debate, allow Jews to serve in Parliament without taking that oath. Yet even today, when British Israel-haters fulminate against a Jewish state, England remains a Christian state, with an official Protestant church, a Protestant monarch, a Protestant educational system.   Should English Jews have spurned or  welcomed  Shaftesbury’s support? Would they have been better off under the atheist regimes of communism? More to the point (as Himmelfarb intimates):  should Israeli and American Jews rejoice in  the support of Shaftesbury’s spiritual descendants, or be frightened by it? Menachem Begin, when asked this question, had no hesitation about answering : “Look, when the Messiah comes, we will simply ask him: ‘Have you been here before?'”

Edward Alexander is the author, with Paul Bogdanor, of The Jewish Divide over Israel:  Accusers and Defenders (Transaction Publishers).