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Tancred Or, The New Crusade
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458 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 1847
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233 people want to read
About the author
Benjamin Disraeli
1,062 books189 followersOne of the great British politicians of the nineteenth century, Disraeli served twice as Tory Prime Minister (1868 and 1874 - 1880) and was also a prominent figure in opposition. He is most famous today for the bitter hatred between himself and his political rival William Gladstone. He enjoyed the favour of Queen Victoria, who shared his dislike of Gladstone. His most significant political achievements are the 1867 Reform Act, in which he was instrumental, and the creation of the modern Conservative Party, with which he is credited. His literary career was greatly overshadowed by his parliamentary ambitions ('climbing the greasy pole'), but includes both romances and political novels.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 21, 2008
Beginning this, I found hope and promise in a clever, novel story, but at moments that novelness was destroyed by Disraeli's attempts at philosophizing. (I know, I know; he's a Victorian; what did I expect??!) So the book is interesting and great in those moments when the story itself is progressing though action; it is much less interesting and great in those moments when the "situation" is being described or character backgrounds are being discussed.
The story is the story of Tancred, an idealized noble British youth who is set on traveling to Jerusalem and the surrounding biblical areas in search of inspiration and revelation. Tancred's realtionships with women--especially his expectations for women--are fairly typical (spiritual, inspiring, beautiful, intellegent, conversant, pure) and the plot's revelations about those women push he forward on his quest.
The story is the story of Tancred, an idealized noble British youth who is set on traveling to Jerusalem and the surrounding biblical areas in search of inspiration and revelation. Tancred's realtionships with women--especially his expectations for women--are fairly typical (spiritual, inspiring, beautiful, intellegent, conversant, pure) and the plot's revelations about those women push he forward on his quest.
June 25, 2014
Tancred is the story of a Victorian crusader. Unlike the violent crusaders of the middle ages, he is crusading the Middle East this time with his European Enlightenment, civilisation and religion as the rightful heir to the holy land. In Tancred, Disraeli establishes a strong link between Judaism and Christianity, and discovers that in many ways half the statesmen who run the world are linked to Judaism one way or another. The European Tancred, unlike the 'decayed' races of the Middle East, is justified moralistically in imperialistically desiring the Middle East.
August 15, 2023
Well, that was pretty awful. If you're studying Disraeli, I guess you have to read one of the novels. Since I'm interested in Disraeli's Jewish self-concept, Tancred made sense; it is largely set in Ottoman Syria - modern Israel and Lebanon -- and many of the key characters are Jewish. In Tancred, Disraeli lets his characters make the point that he made in English society: My ancestors were writing the great literature of the ancient world and giving birth to your religion when your ancestors were living in stone huts and had no written language. Disraeli had travelled to the Eastern Med. as a young man, so he was not totally out of his depth in writing of it, but the plot is meandering, illogical in some places, improbable in all places, and sloppily structured. Disraeli is better early in the book writing about English types he knew better.
September 6, 2022
The future prime minister walks the line between imaginative and ridiculous in this slightly comic, slightly romantic novel. But certainly the converted Jewish writer (then politician) was brave to set his own philo-Semitic mythology against the dominant anti-Semitic tropes of the Victorian day. Only George Eliot would do as much.
August 13, 2017
A note that there have been other 19thC & 20thC editions. Read as a child, these books were uplifting and inspiring. Along with Dickens, Shaftesbury, Cobbett, the Brontes, Anna Sewell and Mayhew they allowed a 'warts'n'all' understanding of how the 19thC political system worked alongside, not necessarily with, the social order of things.
Disraeli was one of my childhood 'heroes' so I did feel honour-bound to read his personal books as well as biographical notes.
The style would be considered ponderous, perhaps, by comparisons with some of today's lightweight conversations. Nevertheless they throw a light on yet another perspective of politicans who sought to work for more than one public good at a time when the ruling class was clear, obvious, and accepted as being in its rightful place.
Disraeli was one of my childhood 'heroes' so I did feel honour-bound to read his personal books as well as biographical notes.
The style would be considered ponderous, perhaps, by comparisons with some of today's lightweight conversations. Nevertheless they throw a light on yet another perspective of politicans who sought to work for more than one public good at a time when the ruling class was clear, obvious, and accepted as being in its rightful place.
July 25, 2021
Last and least read of the unofficial Young England series. Besides the recurring characters Coningsby and Sybil, it's a whole different kind of book than the two earlier books. With travelling in the Middle-East where Tancred spends a lot of time philosophizing about the different religions.
February 2, 2025
Reception to 1847’s “Tancred”, the third of Benjamin Disraeli’s so-called political trilogy, was largely negative until the last 20 years or so. This generation (2004-2024) has produced multiple scholarly treatments that take the book seriously and lift it above the judgment that it is a silly Orientalist travelogue that simply preaches the superiority of the Jewish race in an effort to promote the political prospects of one particular Jew, Disraeli himself.
The novel is about a young aristocrat named Tancred Montacute, who turns down his father’s request that he seek a seat in parliament because he would rather go to Jerusalem. He yearns for a direct revelation from God, of the type received by the characters in the Bible, and figures such revelations only ever happen in the Holy Land.
'If an angel would but visit our house as he visited the house of Lot!' says Montacute, in a “tone almost of anguish.”
'But I want to see an angel at Manchester.' ' he adds later.
That Disraeli actually provides him with such an angelic visit in the Holy Land points to the author’s hubris: he deigns to write (in a political trilogy that he says spells out his philosophy) a divine revelation that puts his own views directly in the mouth of God.
The early complaints about the novel are not wholly unfounded. It is at its most fun in the first 100 pages when Tancred is in England, circulating among the nobility and meeting the major characters from Disraeli’s previous political novels, including Coningsby, Sybil, and their respective spouses.
The previous books, as has been pointed out by Jennifer Conary in a 2010 essay, were highly optimistic about the power of the parliament to effect positive change. So it’s interesting to see Tancred in the lead among the leads from those books, as his philosophy (which seems to carry each argument) is that parliament is not the answer and is largely powerless.
Instead it is the Angel of Arabia who gives the author’s guidance. The bulk of the book is spent in the Middle East, interacting with an Emir named Fakredeen whose unprincipled style of political scheming some scholars say is confessional on Disraeli’s part.
“Fakredeen had no principle of any kind;” Disraeli writes, “he had not a prejudice; a little superstition, perhaps, like his postponing his journey because a hare crossed his path. But, as for life and conduct in general, forming his opinions from the great men of whom he had experience, princes, pashas, and some others, and from the great transactions with which he was connected, he was convinced that all was a matter of force or fraud.”
Jonathan Parry in a 2017 essay on “Tancred”does a great job of dispelling the notion that this is revelatory of Disraeli’s lack of principle as a politician, a charge that has followed him for almost 200 years. But the relish with which Disraeli writes of Fakredeen’s love for intrigues echoes lines Disraeli wrote about himself, or rather an autobiographical character named Vivian Grey, when he was just 24 years old in 1826: “It has been shown that [Vivian Gray] was one precociously convinced of the necessity of managing mankind, by studying their tempers and humouring their weaknesses.”
And Fakredeen’s views of his debts seems to parallel Disraeli’s views of his own significant obligations, which dogged him all his life and propelled him to his success in climbing what he famously called “the greasy pole” of parliamentary hierarchy: “Fakredeen was fond of his debts; they were the source indeed of his only real excitement, and he was grateful to them for their stirring powers.” It is worth asking whether Disraeli would even have been a Tory had he not acquired deep debts in his youth attempting to start a newspaper. It was perhaps those obligations that drove him to accept sponsorship by a member of the Tory party, before which he was running for parliament as an independent radical.
Parry also does remarkable and much-needed work contextualizing “Tancred” within history. But his detailed historical account leaves one intriguing passage under-explained. The keys to Fakredeen’s enigmatic relationship to Disraeli may be in this passage:
“The character of Fakredeen was formed amid the excitement of the Syrian invasion and its stirring consequences. At ten years of age he was initiated in all the mysteries of political intrigue.”
The specific nature of the “Syrian invasion” is largely lost to average reader nowadays, and this passage is ripe for investigation by a scholar. “Tancred” remains the only one of Disraeli’s political trilogy without a critical edition.
Ultimately, the latest view on this book is correct: it has been given short shrift by critics, even if it is not, as Disraeli thought, his best work.
The novel is about a young aristocrat named Tancred Montacute, who turns down his father’s request that he seek a seat in parliament because he would rather go to Jerusalem. He yearns for a direct revelation from God, of the type received by the characters in the Bible, and figures such revelations only ever happen in the Holy Land.
'If an angel would but visit our house as he visited the house of Lot!' says Montacute, in a “tone almost of anguish.”
'But I want to see an angel at Manchester.' ' he adds later.
That Disraeli actually provides him with such an angelic visit in the Holy Land points to the author’s hubris: he deigns to write (in a political trilogy that he says spells out his philosophy) a divine revelation that puts his own views directly in the mouth of God.
The early complaints about the novel are not wholly unfounded. It is at its most fun in the first 100 pages when Tancred is in England, circulating among the nobility and meeting the major characters from Disraeli’s previous political novels, including Coningsby, Sybil, and their respective spouses.
The previous books, as has been pointed out by Jennifer Conary in a 2010 essay, were highly optimistic about the power of the parliament to effect positive change. So it’s interesting to see Tancred in the lead among the leads from those books, as his philosophy (which seems to carry each argument) is that parliament is not the answer and is largely powerless.
Instead it is the Angel of Arabia who gives the author’s guidance. The bulk of the book is spent in the Middle East, interacting with an Emir named Fakredeen whose unprincipled style of political scheming some scholars say is confessional on Disraeli’s part.
“Fakredeen had no principle of any kind;” Disraeli writes, “he had not a prejudice; a little superstition, perhaps, like his postponing his journey because a hare crossed his path. But, as for life and conduct in general, forming his opinions from the great men of whom he had experience, princes, pashas, and some others, and from the great transactions with which he was connected, he was convinced that all was a matter of force or fraud.”
Jonathan Parry in a 2017 essay on “Tancred”does a great job of dispelling the notion that this is revelatory of Disraeli’s lack of principle as a politician, a charge that has followed him for almost 200 years. But the relish with which Disraeli writes of Fakredeen’s love for intrigues echoes lines Disraeli wrote about himself, or rather an autobiographical character named Vivian Grey, when he was just 24 years old in 1826: “It has been shown that [Vivian Gray] was one precociously convinced of the necessity of managing mankind, by studying their tempers and humouring their weaknesses.”
And Fakredeen’s views of his debts seems to parallel Disraeli’s views of his own significant obligations, which dogged him all his life and propelled him to his success in climbing what he famously called “the greasy pole” of parliamentary hierarchy: “Fakredeen was fond of his debts; they were the source indeed of his only real excitement, and he was grateful to them for their stirring powers.” It is worth asking whether Disraeli would even have been a Tory had he not acquired deep debts in his youth attempting to start a newspaper. It was perhaps those obligations that drove him to accept sponsorship by a member of the Tory party, before which he was running for parliament as an independent radical.
Parry also does remarkable and much-needed work contextualizing “Tancred” within history. But his detailed historical account leaves one intriguing passage under-explained. The keys to Fakredeen’s enigmatic relationship to Disraeli may be in this passage:
“The character of Fakredeen was formed amid the excitement of the Syrian invasion and its stirring consequences. At ten years of age he was initiated in all the mysteries of political intrigue.”
The specific nature of the “Syrian invasion” is largely lost to average reader nowadays, and this passage is ripe for investigation by a scholar. “Tancred” remains the only one of Disraeli’s political trilogy without a critical edition.
Ultimately, the latest view on this book is correct: it has been given short shrift by critics, even if it is not, as Disraeli thought, his best work.
June 21, 2025
I read this book not so much for the story value as for the historical interest of how Jews and Palestine/Syria were viewed by the Victorians. I’m always on the lookout for philosemitic voices in the past since so many were antisemitic. So of course Disraeli, being Jewish, did not disappoint. More of a review later!
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November 20, 2024DNF halfway through. Fuck this stupid book I could not care less.
September 20, 2025
The blurb on my version says this book was the last in Disraeli's political novel trilogy, and that it promotes the Church of England's role in reviving Britain's flagging spirituality. Interestingly, this is not at all what the book is about. Actually the novel's hero, Tancred, spurns the ineptitude that he sees in the Church of England, shuns the offer of a life in politics, and is disgusted by the materalism, and shallowness of British society. Tancred takes himself off to the Middle East, dreams dreams, fights wars, falls in love and seems to want to stay there for the rest of his life. I wonder if the book would sell more copies - or maybe fewer - if the publishers were upfront that this book is about a young man's quest to be the hand of God in bringing about the Christian revival of a sad and misguided world. It sounds a bit mad. It was a bit mad. But it was also funny, ironic, playful and clever. It was also a story not so much about finding God, as about finding out that along with idealism there is 'intrigue, politics, management and baffled schemes'. And, most astonishingly, this far-fetched novel about religious wars and crusades was written by a British Prime Minister. I doubt that I would have read it if it had been written by just someone who was a writer. Although it seems to be a book all about the great religions of the world, it is also a book where Disraeli positions himself as an exotic, winning, charming Jewish Christian in British society - and so it is a political book.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews