The Wondrous Tale of Alroy

At a desert oasis, Alroy meets the mystic Jabaster, who tells him that he is destined to restore the Jews to their former greatness but first he must find Solomon's sceptre.

The novel then skips to Alroy being rescued from a merchant, who has accused him of stealing the emerald ring, by the Caliph's physician, Lord Honain, who turns out to be Jabaster's brother.

Honain takes Alroy (masquerading as his deaf, dumb eunuch slave) to observe Princess Schirene, the Caliph's daughter by a Jewess, who is lined up to marry the King of Karasmé, whom she detests.

A prisoner in Baghdad, Alroy learns that Honain has negotiated a settlement such that Miriam is safe and that he could be banished with Schirene if he were to confess that he is an instrument of the devil and used sorcery to seduce her.

Disraeli himself said that the first chapter made as much sense if read backwards and his biographer Robert Blake writes, "Most modern critics would attribute no [credit] whatever to Alroy which is written in a deplorable sort of poetry-prose and is perhaps the most unreadable of his romances".

[7] Charles C. Nickerson, in describing Alroy as an interesting failure as a novel, says it is "full of the most appalling rant" and "some engaging implausibilities", and has "a strain of resolute and humourless extravagance".

[8] Eli Kavon however is complimentary of the novel, saying that Disraeli "rediscovered the legend and gave it new life as an inspiring and romantic proto-Zionist saga of a man who would fire the imagination of a people".

[9] For students of politics, Alroy is significant both for the fact that it portrays its author’s "ideal ambition" and for it being the only novel by Disraeli, born a Jew and then baptised into the Church of England, with a "distinctive Hebrew subject".