"Disraeli was a racial thinker. He thought race "the key of history". "All is race", he wrote; "All is race; there is no other truth", said Sidonia. Race, for him, transcended everything: it explained religion; it explained politics. Disraeli was far more of a racial thinker than a social or religious thinker... Disraeli's racial doctrine went the whole hog. Not only was race the key to history, but some races were far superior to others. There were master races, and there were the rest. Their superiority was a biological matter rather than just a cultural one, and depended on purity of blood. Interbreeding caused racial degeneration. If such doctrines ring oddly today, let us recall that they were advanced for the best of reasons: to raise a downtrodden people, the Jews, in the esteem of mankind, and to raise them, moreover, not to equality, but to a position of hardly deserved superiority among the nations. Disraeli was unusual not because he used the common coin of pseudo-scientific racial thought, but because he used it for Jewish (and therefore, in the circumstances, virtuous) ends. Disraeli said little about the lower races; his object was to praise, not to disparage. There was an absence of malign intent. Still, Disraeli believed that to think racially was to be modern and scientific."