The Little Professor

Dis vs. D'Is, take two

Nearly five years ago, I offered some scattered remarks about the great Dis vs. D'Is controversy--namely, did Victorian writers who spelled Benjamin Disraeli's name as "D'Israeli" (i.e., did not pay attention to the normalized spelling) do so for anti-Semitic reasons?   At that time, I suggested that it could not, in fact, be concluded that anti-Semitism was necessarily the reason: everything from his father's ongoing fame (and, therefore, the D'Israeli spelling) to ignorance might be in play.   It recently occurred to me that this is one of those questions that could be addressed, albeit not settled, by a trawl through GoogleBooks. 

The search parameters: full-view results (so I could check context), using only the English-language results; US results considered separately from those of the UK & Ireland.  Obviously, mentions of "Benjamin D'Israeli," the grandfather, had to be separated from "Benjamin D'Israeli," the PM.   

Excluding duplicates, irrelevant results, & foreign language references, here are approximately the first twenty examples.  I started at the end of the search results:

From the UK & Ireland, D'Israeli spelling with no obvious reference to Judaism or anti-Semitism:

From the UK & Ireland, laying heavy emphasis on the Judaism, with or without anti-Semitic overtones:

  • The Churchman 39 (May 3, 1879): 489.  Reprints a tidbit about the likelihood that D and John Henry Newman were out playing in the same place as little kids, and notes the incongruity of the "handsome little Jew boy" and the "Puritan" having the careers they did.  

From the USA, D'Israeli spelling with no obvious reference to Judaism or anti-Semitism:

From the USA, references  laying heavy emphasis on the Judaism, with or without anti-Semitic overtones:

  • "The Jew and the Turk," The Guardian 29.9 (Sept. 1878): 264 ff.  Rather ambivalent article in a Reformed Church magazine about the Jews in the modern world; argues that "[a]lthough a professed Christian, he is still a Jew at heart." Praises D's abilities, however.  
  • "Benjamin D'Israeli--The Jew," The Southern Review 24.48 (Oct. 1878): 373-84.  Um, no ambiguity there.  Insists on D's essential Jewishness; throws "oriental" stereotypes around with gleeful abandon.  Admires his accomplishments. 
  • "The Miracle of Hebrew History,"  The Gospel in All Lands 10 (Aug. 1881): 91.   Missionary article.  Praise for D in passing, but noticeable grumpiness about Jewish "selfish interests."  

(I observed that in the 1870s, at least one Jewish author went out of his way to note that D had altered the spelling of his name.  One wonders if he thought people were in need of a reminder.)

Twenty is not, of course, a statistically useful sampling.  As a beginning, though, the trends are interesting: most of the D'Israeli spellings occur in contexts where Judaism never comes up; some come accompanied by highly admiring comments; and the error still kicks in even after D's death.  Right now, the Dis vs. D'Is issue looks like a bit of a damp squib.  Some writers apparently use the D'Is spelling as a slur, but others just seem to think that that's how you spell his name (including people, like Gower, who actually knew the man!).    At some point, I'll run a decade-by-decade search to cover the earlier phases of his career, and see if that affects the results.  Someone who wanted to pursue a real research project on the topic would have to search nineteenth-century newspapers (and break out the statistics). 

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