This is not only untrue, but inaccurate. It is the sort of mistake adopted by such as imagine Mahomet to have been a Turk. Disraeli had early in life travelled far into the East, had been present at Yanina during an insurrection, had known leading pachas (one of whom consulted him), and observed inner intrigues. But while the Moslem soldier and peasant always impressed him, he detested the system of the Sultan. An early passage records this detestation. Pondering, in _Contarini Fleming_, the failure of successive Governments to rid Asia of “the revelations of the son of Abdallah,” he calls its whole object one “to convert man into a fanatic slave.” His two earlier romances, _Alroy_ and _Iskander_, both glow with this theme--rebellion against Islam. The picturesqueness, both in scenery and history, of all Mediterranean countries,[126] fascinated him; so did the charm of the East, which, as a stripling, he defined as “repose.” But it was the habitation of the Turk, not the Turk, that exercised the spell. “Live a little longer in these countries before you hazard an opinion as to their conduct,” says one of his characters. “Do you indeed think that the rebel beys of Albania were so simple?... The practice of politics in the East may be described by one word, dissimulation....” An adverse opinion also characterises his letters from the East, some of which are embodied in his books. _Alroy_, dedicated to Jerusalem, as _Iskander_[127] is to Athens, are neither of them favourable to Turkey. And even the Turkish want of humour annoyed him. “I never offered an opinion till I was sixty,” says the old Turk in the last romance, “and then it was one which had been in our family for a century.” He detested fanatics as he detested bores, but he loved purpose; and the sole thing that recommended the Turk to him was that, though a fanatic and a bore, he was both for a purpose. Moreover, up to 1840 the Greeks were more favourable to the Jews than the Turks; and it can scarcely be contended that his attitude to the Afghans--who are Semite by race--was prejudiced by the fact. No; if we seek for a Semitic affinity in Disraeli outside that to Israel, we must find it in that to the Saracens of Spain.