Today we find an almost total absence of solidarity across the democratic political spectrum against the threats that confront the West. Such magazines as Standpoint in London, the Weekly Standard in Washington, or Commentary in New York, can do something to rebuild the alliance against anti-Western ideologies that the Cold Warrior generation sustained from the 1950s to the 1980s. Yet the enemies of the open society are far more subversive now than in those days. They invade our space, physical and virtual, with ease. They saturate us with propaganda, deploying traditional media such as broadcasting stations, social media and every conceivable form of cyber-warfare directed at the West. With terrifying rapidity, hostile foreign powers are buying into our institutions and corporations, our universities and cities, literally and metaphorically; they are thereby buying influence on our policies and our silence about their atrocities. Let there be no illusions about the malign intentions of our antagonists, external and internal. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian regimes are out to undermine the intellectual pillars of democratic capitalism. Meanwhile, our public opinion is seduced by the dream of a world without enemies, by the pathologies of relativism — cultural, moral and epistemological — and by the need to fill the void created by ignorance of or hostility to the Judaeo-Christian core of our civilisation. I hesitate to adopt Disraeli’s implicitly racial idiom, but he was not entirely mistaken when, speaking of the early 19th century, he observed that “the decline and disasters of modern communities have generally been relative to their degree of sedition against the Semitic principle.” France had been in “a state of collapse or convulsion”; Germany “has never at any time been thoroughly converted”; Spain had been in decline ever since the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims. By contrast, “England, notwithstanding her deficient and meagre theology, has always remembered Sion. The great transatlantic republic is intensely Semitic and has prospered accordingly.”

Disraeli may be one of the most peculiar paragons of philosemitism to feature in The People of the Book, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s superb history. But he was astonishingly prescient, anticipating by nearly two centuries today’s crisis of Judaeo-Christian culture. Almost a century after Disraeli’s dream of a Zionist return to Palestine became a reality with the Declaration by his successor Arthur Balfour, we might expect knowledge and appreciation of the Jewish contribution to civilisation to be greater than ever before. Yet what Europe endorses, tacitly or overtly, is the BDS campaign: not content to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, it seeks to blacken, delegitimise and slander the Jewish state. When Palestinians stab and terrorise Israeli civilians, the criticism is all of IDF soldiers; spurious comparisons with the Nazis are reserved not for Abbas, who never condemns and always rewards the killers, but for Netanyahu. In the Spectator, the Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan asks some cogent questions about Europe: “After 1989, why have the European elites failed to denounce the immorality of Communism? Why have the same elites supported the likes of Yasser Arafat and the Iranian governments? Why are extremist parties well supported and why is anti-Americanism on the rise in Europe? . . . Why do the European elites hate Christianity? Why is anti-Semitism on the rise on the European Left? Why is Europe committing demographic suicide . . . ? Why does Europe look like it has given up hope in its future?” But if continental Europe is overrun by those whom Disraeli called “the modern Attilas”, what of the English-speaking peoples, by whose fidelity to biblical principles he set such store? How “Semitic” is Obama’s America? And does Sadiq Khan’s England remember Zion?