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Early in February 1831 young Benjamin Disraeli, traveling for his health, arrived at Jerusalem. He first viewed the city—“thunderstruck”—from the Mount of Olives, where Jesus had made ready for his ride as the Messiah, savior of the Jews from the bondage of Rome. Disraeli's own entrance into the holy city seems to have been the unconscious goal of his hygienic journey, for he stayed in Jerusalem only one week but left it cured of the strange neurosis which had afflicted him at home in England and on the continent of Europe for about five years. “This week,” he wrote to his sister Sarah, “has been the most delightful of all our travels.”
The nature of his neurosis can be gleaned from isolated passages in his correspondence and hints from his fiction books. It appears to have been characterized by alternations of sharp tension and anxiety, extravagance of emotion, severe headaches and heart palpitations, moods of gloom and despair which erratically gave way to stimuli that set his nervous cycle turning again. Thus he was unable to concentrate on any task, no matter how grateful to his pride. After the sensational prosperity of his first novel, Vivian Grey he could not bring himself to produce another novel until the want of money for his tour of the Western Orient drove him to write The Young Duke . The best he could do in the interval between these novels was a skinny, feverish-feeble satire, The Voyage of Captain Popanilla , which incidentally ridiculed his doctors. He presented its hero as a humorous victim of physicians who asserted that he “had overworked his brain; that he must take more exercise; that he must breathe more air; that he must have relaxation; that