ABSTRACT
In a letter to Lion Philips, a Dutch uncle who founded the Philips Electronics dynasty and was a major source of (capitalist) income to young Karl Marx, he remarks that Benjamin Disraeli is their Stammgenosse, that is, of the same stock. Thus Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew for seven years longer than Karl Marx, who became a little Lutheran at age six. The philosemitic Matthew Arnold observed that Lord Beaconsfield [Disraeli] "treat[s] Hellenic things with the scornful negligence natural to a Hebrew. " The relentlessly antisemitic Radical magazine Punch depicted the Disraeli of 1867 as Fagin, stealing the opposition's bill from its back pocket. Disraeli's ignorance of Judaism was formidable (he was unaware of the dietary laws, and a clergyman in his employ had to remind him-and was fired for doing so-that the Sabbath of which he was so contemptuous was a Jewish institution).
