nature in a charnel house, and, like the nations of the East, pay
divine honours to the maniac and the fool." But if these two great men
cannot refrain from such outspoken vituperation--they also lead the
way: they both teach the divinity of ideas and the vileness of action
without principle; they both exalt the value of personality and
character; they both deprecate the influence of society and
socialisation; they both intensely praise and love life, but they both
pour contempt and irony upon the shallow optimist, who thinks it
delightful, and the quietist, who wishes it to be calm, sweet, and
peaceful. They thus both preach a life of danger, in opposition to
that of pleasure, of comfort, of happiness, and they do not only
preach this noble life, they also act it: for both have with equal
determination staked even their lives on the fulfilment of their
ideal.

It is astonishing--but only astonishing to your superficial student of
the Jewish character--that in Disraeli also we find an almost
Nietzschean appreciation of that eternal foe of the Jewish race, the
Hellenist, which makes Disraeli, just like Nietzsche, confess that the
Greek and the Hebrew are both amongst the highest types of the human
kind. It is not less astonishing--but likewise easily intelligible for
one who knows something of the great Jews of the Middle Ages--that in
Disraeli we discover that furious enmity against the doctrine of the
natural equality of men which Nietzsche combated all his life. It was
certainly the great Maimonides himself, that spiritual father of
Spinoza, who guided the pen of his Sephardic descendant, when he thus
wrote in his Tancred: "It is to be noted, although the Omnipotent
Creator might have formed, had it pleased him, in the humblest of his
creations, an efficient agent for his purpose that Divine Majesty has
never thought fit to communicate except with human beings of the very