Before he became Prime Minister of Britain, Benjamin Disraeli wrote several novels. Among them, although one of the least well known, was The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, a historical fantasy set in 12th century Persia. The hero of the novel is a tribal leader named David Alroy, a Jew upon whom Disraeli bestowed the title of Prince of the Captivity.
In the novel, David Alroy, who comes across as a sort of Persian King Arthur, commanded an army that had many unbelievable adventures and won several impossible battles. One day he was told by a sorcerer that if he were to go on a quest to Jerusalem to retrieve King Solomon’s sceptre, he would be able to restore Israel to its former glory. He would, in effect, be the Messiah. Fired with enthusiasm, Alroy set off with his army, enjoying further adventures and winning more battles on the way, until he got to Jerusalem and recovered the sceptre. Sadly, after even more adventures, for reasons that it is pointless to go into, he lost the sceptre and his messianic mission was doomed. The book ends with Alroy being beheaded, dying with a smile on his face.
It is not a very good book; the plot is impossible to follow and the language is archaic, even for the 19th century. Disraeli himself said that the first chapter made as much sense read backwards as it did read forwards. Still, if you are interested, it is free to read, online at Project Gutenberg.
The Wondrous Tale of Alroy is a work of fiction but David Alroy did exist. He lived in 12th Century Kurdistan and his real-life story is far more interesting than Disraeli’s version. There are two versions of his story, one written in 1169 by Samuel Ibn Abbas, the other written a few years later by the Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela.
Benjamin of Tudela was a global traveller, in an age when few people left their towns and villages. He wrote a book, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, which recounts his wanderings across the Jewish world and is one of the earliest sources of evidence we have for the worldwide dispersion of the Jewish nation. He left his home town of Tudela in Northern Spain in around 1165 and travelled through Rome and Constantinople to Palestine, Baghdad and Persia. He turned east, journeying to India and may have reached China before heading home through Arabia and Egypt. When he reached Alexandria he boarded a boat across the Mediterranean, arriving back in Spain in 1173. He wrote his book shortly after. It was first published in English in 1840 and it too is available online.
The possibility that a Jewish force might take advantage of the chaos to seize Jerusalem must have seemed a realistic option to the Jews of the Kurdish mountains.
Among the places Benjamin of Tudela visited was Amadiya, a town now in Iraqi Kurdistan. He told his readers that, about 10 years before his arrival in the town, a man named David Alroy had led a rebellion there against the King of Persia. He gathered together all the Jews who lived in the mountains in order “to go forth and fight against all the nations, and to march and capture Jerusalem.” Benjamin describes Alroy as a deeply learned man who had studied the Talmud in Baghdad and knew the whole of Jewish law and all the wisdom of Islam. He had read the writings of the magicians and soothsayers and was familiar with all secular literature.
Benjamin’s story continues with David Alroy pretending to perform miracles, to persuade the Jews that he had been sent on a divine mission to free them from their subservience to the Persian king and capture Jerusalem. As soon as they heard this the Jews rejoiced, they declared Alroy to be the Messiah and banded together under his command. When the King of Persia heard what was going on he summoned Alroy and asked him if he was indeed the King of the Jews. Alroy replied that he was and the king threw him into prison.
David Alroy did not stay in prison long. He used magic, a perfectly natural thing to do in those days, to escape his captors. He made himself invisible, threw his cloak over a river so that he could walk across on it, and completed a ten day journey in the course of one night. The King of Persia, furious that Alroy had escaped, threatened to slay all the Jews in his empire unless they handed the fugitive over. The Persian Jews, who hadn’t fallen under Alroy’s spell, decided wasn’t worth the trouble and the head of the community in Mosul sent him a message telling him to give himself up or be excommunicated. Meanwhile, the Governor of Amadiya sent a bribe of 10,000 gold pieces to Alroy’s father-in-law, urging him to kill him. The father-in-law did as he was told. He slew Alroy while he was sleeping and the revolt came to an end.
There is no reason to think that Ibn Abbas held a more accurate opinion of Alroy’s character and motivation than Benjamin of Tudela, although it does appear that some of the facts in his account are more accurate than Benjamin’s. He gives David Alroy’s real name as Menahem ben Solomon Ibn Al-Ruji, a name that turns up in other documents from the same place and time. Modern research suggests Menahem was indeed his real name, that he took the name David to compare himself to King David and that Alroy is a corruption of Al-Ruji. According to Iibn Abbas, after his death a group of his followers continued to claim that he had been the Messiah. They called themselves Menahemites. There is no independent evidence that a sect with that name ever existed.
Historians do think, based on fragments of documents that have been found, that there was indeed an outburst of messianic fervour among the Jews of Kurdistan in the 12th century. This was the period of the Second Crusade; battles were igniting between Crusader and Muslim armies, the Crusaders were in control of Jerusalem and competing Muslim armies were struggling among themselves for dominance. The region was in turmoil. The possibility that a Jewish force might take advantage of the chaos to seize Jerusalem must have seemed a realistic option to the Jews of the Kurdish mountains.
Depending on how we look at it, David Alroy was at best a failed Messiah, at worst an unsuccessful rebel. It is odd therefore that Disraeli turned him into a conquering hero, a successful military leader who won many battles before eventually losing his life. It tells us more about Disraeli than it does about David Alroy.
Disraeli was born Jewish but was converted at the age of 13 by his father who, having fallen out with his synagogue, decided that his son had a greater chance of prospering in the world if he was to be a Christian. Disraeli always regarded himself as a Christian, despite his opponents constantly taunting him for his Jewish ancestry, but his sympathy for Jews and Judaism was manifest. Several of his novels contain Jewish themes or reflect on the Jewish origins of Christianity. He actively supported the campaign for Jews to sit in Parliament; when Lionel de Rothschild was elected as a Member in 1847 but unable to take his seat because he could not swear a Christian oath, Disraeli argued in Parliament for a change in the law. When, 11 years later, the law was finally changed so that Jews could now sit as Members of Parliament, Disraeli, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was instrumental in bringing it about.
Disraeli wrote The Wondrous Tale of Alroy in 1833. He said that he composed it after visiting Jerusalem where his thoughts turned to “a personage whose marvellous career had, even in boyhood, attracted my attention, as one fraught with the richest materials of poetic fiction.” However, Disraeli’s image of Alroy is whimsical and impossibly romantic. The Jewish Encyclopedia, first published in 1901 and still the best around, sums it up perfectly: “(Disraeli’s) novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, is purely imaginary, and exalts a man who was probably a vulgar impostor into a high-souled "hero of a dramatic romance," and invests him with a halo of glory.” Samuel Ibn Abbas would be the first to agree.