THE DISRAELI FAMILY.1

By lucien wolf.

“The resources of political invective seem to become poorer every
day,” said Lord Beaconsfield to Lord Rowton one day in the library
at Hughenden, as he laid aside a Radical newspaper he had been
reading. “Fifty years ago they called me an adventurer, and now,
when they are very angry, they cannot think of anything more
scathing to say of me.” Then, after a pause, a merry twinkle came
into his eyes, and he added: “Just fancy calling a fellow an
adventurer when his ancestors were probably on intimate terms
with the Queen of Sheba!” Lord Rowton used to tell this story
in illustration of his chief’s insensibility to criticism. “He didn’t
care a d—n what people said of him,” was the private secretary’s
breezy overture to the anecdote. It has, however, another value,
which relieves it of some of its apparent irrelevancy. It shows how
much Lord Beaconsfield’s mind dwelt on his Hebrew ancestry even
in old age, when he was gorged with honours of his own making.

This ancestry was to him more a matter of race than of
family. He had very little precise knowledge of his own direct
forbears. His grandfather, a practical man of business, never tried
to pierce the obscurity of his origin. His father could have told
him a good deal about his maternal ancestors and other distinguished
connections of the family, but he does not appear to have done so.
The truth, no doubt, is that Judaism was one of the many questions
upon which father and son differed, in spite of the deep personal
affection which subsisted between them. Isaac D’Israeli, though he

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

1        The Society tenders its thanks to the proprietors of the Times for per-
mission to reproduce the text of this paper, which was read before the Society
on December 20, 1904, and printed in the Times of that and the following days,
in connection with the centenary of the birth of Lord Beaconsfield.

202 

never became a Christian, and always remained warmly attached
to his co-religionists, was a pessimist in Jewish history, and utterly
incapable of understanding the race idea. His son, though a
Christian, was an enthusiast for his people’s past, and, by his
imaginative grasp of its mystic and grandiose spirit, actually became
a pioneer of that revival of Jewish race consciousness to which the
exact science of the new historical school has of late years given
so strong an impulse. The different standpoints of the two men
are strikingly illustrated by a comparison of Isaac’s “Genius of
Judaism” with Benjamin’s “Alroy”—both written in the same
year under the influence of sympathies strongly stirred in each
by the struggle for Jewish emancipation. While in the one we
find a somewhat peddling advocacy of ceremonial reforms and social
assimilation, in the other we are confronted by a glowing picture
of unbending Judaism, laughing triumphant derision at the Gentile,
even in the moment of blackest disaster. In this diversity of view
there was obviously little room for genealogical confidences of the
kind that the son would have liked. Moreover, owing to the feuds
which had followed the secession of the D’Israelis and Basevis
from the Synagogue, Isaac was probably not disposed to dwell
with much garrulousness on the traditions of his Jewish relatives.
Benjamin had consequently to rest satisfied with the knowledge
that he was of the blood of Moses and Jesus, of David and Solomon,
and that in the Dispersion his forefathers had belonged to the
Sephardi section of Jewry, whose culture and learning irradiated
the shores of the Mediterranean during the age of Saracen conquest,
and whose subsequent duel of three centuries with the Inquisition
forms by far the most romantic chapter of European history. It
was upon a rough deduction from this vague knowledge, together
with a casual mention in the domestic circle of some connection
with the Lara family, that the whole story of the Disraelis, as set
forth in his Memoir of his father, was founded.

The story is brief and in general terms, but only a very super-
ficial examination of it is needed to show that it is largely an
effort of fancy. It relates how the original Disraelis were forced
by the Inquisition to emigrate from Spain at the end of the fifteenth
century, and sought a “refuge in the more tolerant territories of the

Venetian Republic.” There they “dropped their Gothic surname,
and, grateful to the God of Jacob, who had sustained them through
unprecedented trials and guarded them through unheard-of perils,
they assumed the name of Disraeli, a name never borne before
or since by any other family, in order that their race might be
for ever recognised.” Passing over the very questionable tribute
to the toleration of Venice at this period, let us see what justification
there is for the account of the origin of the family name. It is
perfectly true that the Marranos or Crypto-Jews, on their escape
from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, frequently exchanged
their “Gothic surnames” for that of Israel as a token of gratitude
and fidelity to “the God of Jacob.” In the Synagogue archives of
Amsterdam and London, and among the early Jewish wills in
Somerset House, many records of these changes may be found, as,
for example, “Eliahu Israel, alias Bento Lopes,” and “David Israel,
alias Prospero Dias.” This, however, happened long after the
expulsion of 1492, for at that time the Iberian Jews had not
resorted to any Gothic disguises as such. It is also true that a
good many Israels are found in Venice, though not before 1631,
and even then without any indications of Gothic aliases. But Israel
is not Disraeli, and there is no documentary trace of this latter
name anywhere previously to the first marriage of Lord Beacons-
field’s grandfather in 1756, when it was still spelt with a D’. The
truth is that the name was originally Israeli, which is not Italian
but Arabic. It means “Israelite,” and, as a coined Hebraism,
occurs once in the Bible (2 Sam. xvii. 25), where, however, it is
believed to be an incorrect reading for “Ishmaeli”=“Ishmaelite.”
As a surname it was used by the Moors in Spain and the Levant
to distinguish Jews holding public office, or otherwise coming into
frequent contact with the non-Jewish population. Thus the famous
Vizier to the Caliphs Abderrahman III. and El Hakem II. of
Cordova, Chasdai Ibn-Shaprut, was frequently called El Israeli.
Sometimes the designation became a permanent surname, as in the
cases of the distinguished literary families of Israeli, which flourished
in Kairouan and Toledo in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, and
both of which were originally El Israeli. Now it is very unlikely
that a Spanish Jew, escaping from the Inquisition to Venice, would

seek to afficher his Hebrew origin by adopting an Arabic name. He
would most probably have expressed himself in Italian or Spanish,
which, in his case, would have been all the more natural, since
in both languages the equivalent for “Israelite” is the same, viz.
“Israelita.” But this is not the only reason for suspecting the
accuracy of Lord Beaconsfield’s story. The statement that the
name Disraeli had “never been borne before or since by any
other family” is only true of Lord Beaconsfield himself, for he
was the first Disraeli. His father to the end of his days spelt
his name D’Israeli, and his grandfather, who first adopted the
nobiliary particle—which is really not nobiliary at all, but only
the Aramic di used by the Sephardim in their Synagogal names
in lieu of the Hebrew ben (son of)—was known in his young days,
like his father before him, as simple Israeli. Nor is it quite true
to say that the name stands absolutely alone in the world’s
onomasticon. Throughout the eighteenth century a Huguenot
family, named Disraell, was resident in London. It was related to
the Lefevres, Chaigneaus, and Colvilles, and it seems to have become
extinct with one Benjamin Disraell, of Beechey Park, Carlow, a rich
money-lender and notary of Dublin, who died in 1814. There is
also to-day, in Vienna, a family named Disraeli, but they confirm
Lord Beaconsfield’s hypothesis, since they have only recently adopted
the name. They are a Bukarest family, utterly unconnected with
the real Disraelis, and, previously to their emigration into Austria,
bore the simple cognomen of Israel. Even in its most authentic
form of Israeli the name was, as we have already seen, not un-
precedented in the fifteenth century, for it had been borne with con-
siderable distinction by Jews five hundred years before, and it was
still current at the time of the Spanish exodus. But if all these flaws
in Lord Beaconsfield’s story could be explained away or admitted
to modify it in unessential details, there would still remain one
objection which would prove fatal to it as a whole. This is that
there is absolutely no trace in the public records of Venice, either
municipal or Synagogal, of any family named Disraeli or Israeli
previously to 1821. Had such a family “flourished as merchants
for more than two centuries under the protection of the Lion of
St. Mark”—as Lord Beaconsfield tells us—there must have been

some record of its existence; but even the local Jewish registers
of births, deaths, and marriages, and the still legible tombstones
on the Lido are silent with regard to it.

No one who has any experience of the investigation of oral
family traditions would dream of impugning Lord Beaconsfield’s good
faith in publishing this story. Such traditions are almost invariably
a sort of spurious cocoons spun round small nuclei of truth. Their
formation is a mental process, which, in course of time, unconsciously
transmutes the hypotheses, by which it is sought to explain im-
perfectly remembered facts, into unquestioned history. Their
spuriousness varies according to the amount of authentic material
available at the time of their composition, and it was Lord Beacons-
field’s misfortune to speculate on the fragmentary facts transmitted
to him, at a time when the scientific study of Jewish post-Biblical
history and sociology was still almost a blank. It is, nevertheless,
strange that neither he nor his sister—for it was Sarah Disraeli who
supplied him with the material for the Memoir of his father—should
have taken the trouble of making inquiries of the Synagogue autho-
rities in Venice, or even of examining the legal papers of their
grandfather before giving their vague recollections to the world.
Had they taken this elementary precaution, they would have found
that even Benjamin D’Israeli himself did not come from Venice, but
from Cento in Ferrara, and that his only connections with Venice
were through his sisters, who settled there midway in life, and the
relations of his second wife.

This Benjamin D’Israeli was the son of Isaac Israeli, and was
born in 1730. He was the eldest of three children. The other two
were daughters, Rachel, born in 1741, and Venturina, born in 1745.
It is in connection with Venturina’s death in 1821 that the name of
Israeli first appears in the archives of the Venetian Ghetto. The
only other reference is the register of the death of Rachel in 1837.
Lord Beaconsfield, in the Memoir of his father, speaks of an elder
brother of Benjamin, who was a banker in Venice and a friend of
Sir Horace Mann, but this must be a mistake, for, apart from the
absence of any record of this brother, and of any mention of him
in the minute and copious correspondence of Mann, the fact that
Rachel and Venturina Israeli kept a girls’ school in the Ghetto

renders their possession of a banker brother very doubtful. Of Isaac
Israeli nothing is known, but it is noteworthy that he bore a name
honoured in Jewry, and that he married into a family of great
antiquity and of considerable renown in Ferrara. He or his
ancestors probably came from the Levant, where the name-form
“Israeli” would find an environment more favourable to its survival
than in Western Europe, where the Israelis of Toledo had long
before assimilated themselves to the native Israels. It is not
unlikely, in view of the rarity of his patronymic, that he was of
the family of the famous philosopher and court physician, Ishac
Ibn Sulaiman El Israeli of Kairouan, who flourished in the tenth
century, but this can only be conjectured. His wife, Rica or
Eurichetta Rossi, was, however, unquestionably of the ancient
family of Min-Haadumin, which traced its origin to one of the
Jews led into captivity after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus
and Vespasian, and, at a later date, translated its Hebrew name
into its literal Italian equivalent of Dei Rossi. The Min-Haadumin
were numerous in Ferrara, where Isaac Israeli spent his life, and
it was in the capital of the former duchy that the most illustrious
of the clan, Azaria dei Rossi, practised as a physician and wrote his
remarkable Cyclopædia of Bible Criticism, Meor Enayim, in the
latter half of the sixteenth century. As we shall presently see,
this was not the last alliance of the Israelis with the famous
Red House.

After a short apprenticeship in Modena, Isaac Israeli’s son, Ben-
jamin, emigrated to England in his eighteenth year. A strong impulse
had been given to Anglo-Italian trade through the establishment, in
1740, of a branch of the great Venetian and Levantine banking house
of Treves in London, and consequently Italians, chiefly Jews, were
flocking into the country. From letters still preserved by one of
Benjamin Israeli’s great-grandchildren, it is clear that the attraction
which brought him to these shores had much less to do with the
stability of the dynasty in Great Britain, by which Lord Beaconsfield
has characteristically accounted for his migration, than with a hum-
drum, but entirely creditable, desire to find the best market for his
knowledge of the straw bonnet trade. To a precisely similar ambition
was due the almost contemporaneous establishment of the first

Montefiore in this country. In both cases the prescience of the
emigrants was justified, for a few years later, owing to the patronage
of the beautiful Misses Gunning, everybody was wearing Leghorn chip.
At first Benjamin was employed at a moderate salary in the counting-
house of Messrs. Joseph and Pellegrin Treves in Fenchurch Street.
Here he made the acquaintance of Mr. Aaron Lara, a friend of his
principals, and a prosperous City broker, who thought sufficiently
well of him to introduce him to his family. In 1756 he married
Aaron Lara’s sister-in-law, Rebecca Mendez Furtado. This marriage
explains a passage in Lord Beaconsfield’s Memoir of his father, which
has given rise to a very wide-spread misapprehension. In the course
of an enumeration of the leading Sephardi families “flourishing in
this country when my grandfather settled in England,” he mentions
the Laras, “who,” he adds, “were our kinsmen.” From this it has
been conjectured that Lara was the “Gothic surname” of the
Disraelis spoken of in an earlier passage of the Memoir. This
suggestion has received the countenance of Mr. Froude, and—so
quickly does hypothesis grow into history—a recent French biog-
rapher of Lord Beaconsfield, M. Courcelle, declares roundly that
“ses ancêtres, fixés d’abord en Espagne, faisaient remonter leur
origine à la maison de Lara.”

As a matter of fact these Laras had nothing whatever to do with
the great Spanish House of Lara, nor with the Spanish Marrano
family of the same name. They were Portuguese Marranos long
settled at Guarda and Sabugal, which were notorious hotbeds of
Crypto-Judaism. Their “Gothic surname” was, no doubt, derived
from the baptismal sponsorship of some member of the noble Portu-
guese family of Lara. In 1720 Clara Henriques de Lara, a daughter
of a farmer of the tobacco revenue of Guarda, married Gaspar Mendez
Furtado, son of Joao Francisco Orobio, formerly of Fundao, but then
a rich merchant of Belmonte. Five years later, both husband and
wife were denounced as Judaisers, and, on a warrant issued by the
Lisbon Inquisition, were arrested at Covilha. Gaspar was tortured
and Clara threatened, and both consented publicly to abjure their
heresy, which was done in the presence of the King at the Lisbon
auto-da-fé, on October 13, 1726. They were then released, and some
scores of their relatives, who were implicated in the charge against

them, were pardoned. Gaspar, crippled in body and reduced to
beggary, did not long survive his sufferings. In 1730 his widow,
with her six children and the seven children of her uncle, José
Nunes de Lara, a bookseller of Sabugal, managed to escape to Eng-
land, where she made public profession of Judaism, changed her name
to Abigail, and gave Hebrew names to all her children. The syna-
gogue came generously to her assistance, handing over the young
Laras to the care of the Orphan Society, and providing dowries for
her daughters. Some of the Laras prospered exceedingly. The
eldest, Francisco or Aaron, married his cousin Ignes, alias Rachel,
Mendes Furtado, the eldest daughter of Gaspar, and his youngest
brother José alias Benjamin, married into the rich Jessurun Alvares
family. A nephew, Moses, married Sarah Mendez da Costa, name-
sake and cousin of the mysterious widow, Mrs. Brydges Willyams of
Torquay, who, in 1863, bequeathed £40,000 to Lord Beaconsfield,
coupled with the “wish and desire that he should obtain the per-
mission of her Majesty to use and adopt the names and arms of the
families of Lara and Mendez da Costa in addition or precedent to
that of Disraeli.” This was the family from which Benjamin Israeli
or, as he now called himself, D’Israeli, took his first wife. She was
the second daughter and fourth child of Gaspar and Clara Mendez
Furtado, and was three years older than her husband.

The offspring of this marriage was one daughter, who, in 1771,
when she was only fourteen years old, married her cousin, Aaron
Nunes Lara, one of the sons of Aaron Lara and Rachel Furtado.
Left a widow at an early age, she married in 1793 Angiolo, alias
Mordecai, Tedesco, by whom she had four daughters. Widowed
again in 1798, she settled in Leghorn with her children, and died
there in 1807. Her eldest daughter, Hannah, married her cousin,
Samuel Tedesco, of Leghorn, and had three children, all of whom died
in infancy. Her second daughter, Rebecca, married Flaminio de
Rossi, also a merchant of Leghorn, and died without issue. The third
daughter, Sarah, became the second wife of Flaminio de Rossi, by
whom she had one son, Vittorio. The youngest daughter, Maria,
never married. There is consequently to-day only one descendant of
Benjamin D’Israeli’s first marriage, Vittorio de Rossi, son of Flaminio.
He is one of the most distinguished lawyers and economists in Italy,

 

and the leading authority on commercial law in the kingdom. In
this capacity he was commissioned by the Government in 1893,
together with the Marquis Luigi Ridolfo, to carry out the fusion of
the Tuscan and Sardinian National Banks, and reorganise them as
the Bank of Italy. Signor de Rossi, who is legitimately proud of his
double descent from the Min-Haadumim and the Disraelis, was
appointed the first President of the new bank, and was made a
Commander of the Crown of Italy and a Chevalier of the Order of
SS. Maurice and Lazarus. The other descendants of Gaspar and
Clara Mendez Furtado have chiefly distinguished themselves in music
and the drama. They include Abraham da Sylva, better known as
Anthony Grove; John Furtado, who, one hundred years ago, was a
well-known writer on the theory of music; Charles Furtado, the
popular pianist, and his daughter Teresa Furtado, still remembered
as a charming actress; Selina Dolaro, one of the brighest stars of
opera bouffe, and—Mr. Pinero.

On his marriage with Rebecca Mendez Furtado, Benjamin
D’Israeli left the Messrs. Treves and established himself in New
Broad Street as an Italian merchant, importing straw hats, marble,
alum, currants, and similar merchandise. He soon found this
occupation pall upon what his grandson calls his “ardent tempera-
ment,” and in 1759 he obtained for himself an address at Sam’s
Coffee House, and devoted a large portion of his time to the more
exciting operations of ‘Change Alley. With capital, credit, and
experience alike limited, it was not difficult to tell whither this was
likely to lead. Within a few months he found himself in serious
difficulties and beset with litigation. He resumed business, however,
but with indifferent success, and, after struggling on for five more
years, he suffered a further affliction in the loss of his wife.

His fortunes were repaired by his second marriage, which took
place in May 1765. The bride was Sarah Shiprut de Gabay Villareal,
younger daughter of a prosperous city merchant, Isaac Syprut, whose
mother had been a Villareal, and whose wife, Esther, was sister-in-
law to Simon Calimani, then Chief Rabbi of Venice. Of Isaac
Syprut’s origin nothing has been ascertained with certainty, but, in
view of the rarity of his surname, it is probable that he was
descended from the Spanish family of Ibn Xaprut, or Shaprut, a

member of which, the famous Abou Joussuf Chasdai Ibn Shaprut,
served two of the most illustrious Caliphs of Cordova as Vizier in the
tenth century. It is a curious coincidence that this Shaprut is often
referred to by the Arab historians as “El Israeli.” Isaac Syprut’s
connection with the Villareals is more authentic, though not abso-
lutely clear. His maternal grandfather seems to have been Jonas
Gabbai de Villa Real, a scion of one of the wealthiest Marrano
families in Portugal, who, together with a brother, Abraham da Costa
Villa Real—if, indeed, the two were not identical—visited England
in the time of Charles II. Jonas was admitted a broker on the
Royal Exchange as early as 1673, but a few years later the whole
family returned to Portugal. There Abraham’s son, José da Costa
Villareal, amassed a fresh fortune as Providetore General of the
Armies of the King. In 1726 a charge of Judaism was brought
against him, and the Inquisition was moved to order his arrest.
Profiting by a great fire, which opportunely broke out in Lisbon, José
collected all his movable property, and, together with his father and
mother and fifteen other members of his family, embarked on one of
his own ships and escaped to England. The London newspapers of
the time report that the value of the property thus brought by the
Villa Reals to this country exceeded £300,000. Immediately on
their arrival in London the family made public profession of Judaism.
The males, including José’s father, who was then seventy-three years
old, underwent the Abrahamic rite. Those who had wives had their
marriages resolemnised in the synagogue, and all exchanged their
Portuguese baptismal names for Hebrew. Large sums were given
by them to the Jewish poor as thank-offerings for their escape, and
José endowed a school for twenty Jewish girls, which still flourishes
under his name Lord Beaconsfield is, however, mistaken in stating
that the Villareals were among the leading Jewish families in this
country when his grandfather settled here. The family had, indeed,
already become extinct in the male line so far as the Jewish com-
munity were concerned. José, soon after his arrival in London, had
contracted a brilliant marriage. His bride was Kitty da Costa, the
pretty and coquettish daughter of Joseph da Costa of Totteridge,
banker and landowner, and the leading English Jew of his time.
Kitty’s mother was a Mendez, daughter of Dr. Fernando Mendez,

F.R.S., Physician in Ordinary to Charles II. Among her uncles were
the great Jewish bankers, Jacob Salvador and Francisco Lopes Suasso,
Baron d’Avernes le Gras, who had financed the English Revolution
of 1688. One of her sisters was the wife of Joseph Treves, head of
the firm in which Benjamin D’Israeli had first served, and a collateral
of the present Barons Treves de Bonfili of Venice. In 1731 Kitty,
who was only twenty-two years old, was left a widow with two
children—a son, Abraham, and a daughter, Sarah. After fighting a
sensational action for breach of promise of marriage, brought against
her in the Arches Court of Canterbury by her cousin, Jacob Mendez
da Costa, she became a Christian, had her children baptized and
renamed respectively William and Elizabeth, and married one of the
magnates of the Lisbon trade, William Mellish of Blythe, in Not-
tingham. Hence in Benjamin D’Israeli’s time the only Villareal in
England was Mr. Mellish’s stepson, William. Nevertheless, the
connection proved of considerable value to him. We have a sug-
gestive glimpse of its intimacy in the fact that, when D’Israeli first
went to live at Enfield, it was as a tenant of Juglands Lodge, on the
Middlesex property of the Mellish’s, and later on he farmed some
wheat land on their Essex estates.

The relationship must also have proved very useful to him in
the City. At any rate, he soon became a man of substance. For
ten years he prudently devoted himself to his import business, which
he carried on at No. 5 Great St. Helens. There also he established
his private abode, until in 1783 he leased a large house in Baker
Street, Enfield. The Stock Market, however, never ceased to attract
him, and in 1776 he rented an office in Hamlin’s Alley, Cornhill, and
recommenced business there as an unlicensed broker. Three years
later he took to himself two partners, and the firm became known as
Messrs. D’Israeli, Stoke & Parkins. At the same time he continued
his business at Great St. Helens, which was afterwards transferred
to Little Winchester Street, and, in 1792, to Old Broad Street. His
success in ‘Change Alley is attested by the fact that the more respect-
able of the brokers, who had already organised the beginnings of the
present Stock Exchange at New Jonathan’s Coffee House, admitted
him to their body, and afterwards elected him a member of their
Committee for General Purposes. When, in 1801, it was resolved to

build the present Stock Exchange, Mr. D’Israeli was appointed a
member of the committee entrusted with the plan of conversion.
He remained a member of the Stock Exchange until 1803, when he
retired from business; but to the day of his death he retained an
address at Tom’s Coffee House, and was often seen in Cornhill, dab-
bling in stocks and shares. One of the most notable enterprises with
which he was associated was an attempt to substitute English straw-
plaiting for the finer Italian straws then used for the best hats and
bonnets. He patented a process by which “a wood which is the
growth of this kingdom” was to be so treated as to yield a plait in every
way equal to the Leghorn straws. The enterprise does not seem to
have proved successful. D’Israeli died in November 1816 at his
house in Charles Street, Stoke Newington, and was attended on his
deathbed by the famous Dr. Aikin, who happened to be his neighbour.
He left a fortune valued at £35,000.

By Sarah Syprut, Benjamin D’Israeli had one son, Isaac, the
father of Lord Beaconsfield. He was born, not at Enfield as most of
his biographers state, but in Great St. Helens, on May 11, 1766—the
date is now published for the first time—and was duly initiated into
the Abrahamic covenant eight days later by Isaac Carriao de Payba,
an uncle of Mrs. Pellegrin Treves. The theory which has fascinated
Radical biographers of Lord Beaconsfield, that Benjamin Disraeli,
the money-lender of Dublin, was a brother or half-brother of Isaac, is
doubtful. As we have already seen, this Benjamin Disraeli was not
a Jew either by faith or race, but a Protestant of apparently Huguenot
extraction. It is certain that he was not a son of either of Benjamin
D’Israeli’s wives. Isaac D’Israeli was the idol of his maternal grand-
mother’s old age. Esther Syprut had been a widow since 1762; she
lost her only son in 1771, and with her daughters, Reyna and Sarah,
she did not find herself always in agreement. Sarah’s social ambitions
and consequent alienation from her people could not but be frowned
upon by her mother, who, besides being a sister-in-law of a “Rabbino
Maggiore,” was herself a pillar of the Synagogue. As for Reyna,
both she and her husband, Abraham Namias de Crasto, gave deep
offence to the old lady by their want of “filial duty and regard,” and
consequently she cut each of them both off with “the sum of one
shilling only.” It is pleasant to note that their brother-in-law,

Benjamin D’Israeli, remained their good friend, and provided for
their daughter, Rachel de Crasto, in his will. Isaac thus became the
heir to the whole of his grandmother’s property, and from his twenty-
fifth year, when he entered upon his inheritance, found himself in
easy circumstances and independent of his father. It was, no doubt,
this windfall, rather than the intercession of Mr. Pye, which induced
the elder D’Israeli to waive his objections to Isaac’s literary career,
and thus rendered possible the compilation of his popular “Curiosities
of Literature” and many other genial essays in history and criticism.
In February 1802 Isaac married Miriam, or Maria, Basevi, one of
the daughters of Naphtali Basevi, a wealthy Italian merchant and a
prominent member of the Synagogue. The Basevis are a Verona
family, and it is claimed by them that Jacob Batsheba Schmieles, the
wealthy Court Jew of Prague, who was ennobled by the Emperor
Ferdinand in 1622 under the style and title of Baron Basevi von
Treuenburg, was of their house. This, however, is doubtful, although
the Baron’s tomb is to-day shown to English visitors to Prague as
that of one of Lord Beaconsfield’s ancestors. Naphtali was the son
of Solomon Basevi of Verona, and he settled in England in 1762 “to.
establish,” as his alien certificate states, “a house of trade.” Here
he married in 1767 Rebecca Rieti, the English-born daughter of a
compatriot, Abraham Vita Rieti. The Rietis, who originally came
from Mantua, had since the fourteenth century been prominent
in the Rabbinates of Rome, Perugia, Bologna, Siena, and Venice;
but in England they devoted themselves to more commonplace occu-
pations, and an uncle of Mrs. Basevi, one Solomon Rietti, was one of
the founders of Ranelagh Gardens. Through Maria Basevi, the
children of Isaac D’Israeli—including, of course, Lord Beaconsfield—
acquired a line of ancestry which, from two points of view, is excep-
tionally interesting. In the first place, it gave them four generations
of English-born forbears—instead of one as is generally alleged—for
Maria herself, her mother, Rebecca Rieti, her maternal grandmother,
Sarah Cardoso, and this lady’s father, Jacob Aboab Cardoso, were all
of English birth. In the next place, the ancestry through Jacob
Cardoso is of the utmost distinction in Jewish history, for Jacob’s
father, David Aboab Cardoso, was an Aboab, and the genealogy of
his family is on record reaching back without a break to the famous

Isaac Aboab, the last Gaon of Castile, who, at the time of Torquemada’s
expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, led a contingent of twenty
thousand of his brethren into Portugal, and obtained from King
John II. permission to remain in that country for a limited period.
Thus Lord Beaconsfield’s efforts to trace his ancestry to a victim of
the colossal exodus of 1492 were founded on a truer instinct than he
knew, for it is not in a nameless participant in that drama that his
most interesting progenitor is really found, but in one of its chief
actors.

Lord Beaconsfield’s ancestry, though comprising such dis-
tinguished names as Aboab, Villareal, and Ibn Shaprut, is still
inferior to that of his nephew and heir, Mr. Coningsby Disraeli,
the present head of the House of Israeli. When Isaac D’Israeli
married Maria Basevi, he became related, through his brother-in-law,
Joshua Basevi, and his sister-in-law, Sarah Basevi, to all the leading
Jewish families of the day—the Lindos, the Lumbrozo de Mattos
Mocattas, the Mendez da Gostas, the Ximenes, the Montefiores, the
Lousadas, and the Goldsmids. At a later date he acquired through
the Montefiores a remote connection with the Rothschilds. Of all
these connections the most interesting is that of the Lindos. Joshua
and Sarah Basevi both married Lindos, who consequently claimed
Lord Beaconsfield and his brothers as their nephews. Eventually
the two families became more closely associated by the marriage
of Lord Beaconsfield’s brother, Ralph, with his cousin, Katherine
Trevor, a daughter of Charles Trevor of the Stamp Office, by
his wife Olivia, née Lindo, and a grand-daughter of Ephraim Lindo
by his wife Sarah, née Basevi. Of this marriage Mr. Coningsby
Disraeli is the only male issue. He is consequently on his mother’s
side a Lindo, and through that family he claims an ancestry of
unrivalled antiquity and distinction. In the first place, the Lindos
themselves cover the whole modern history of the Anglo-Jewish
community. The first of their name in this country, Antonio
Rodrigues Lindo, was a fugitive from the Lisbon Inquisition. His
father, Joao Lindo, was a merchant of Campomaior, and his mother,
Constanza Nunes, was of Guarda. Both were of the most obstinate
sect of the Marranos. One of Antonio’s maternal uncles was prose-
cuted by the Inquisition in Mexico for Judaism. Another was the

great London merchant and financier, Don Antonio Fernandez de
Carvajal, who assisted Menasseh ben Israel in his negotiations with
Oliver Cromwell for the resettlement of the Jews in England in
1655. After his release by the Inquisition in 1662, Antonio Lindo
lived for some years in France, but eventually settled in England
with his wife and son. He was now known as Isaac Lindo, and he
became the founder of a very numerous and widely-ramified family,
which for eight generations has been honourably distinguished in
all branches of Jewish public work. Ephraim Lindo, who figures
genially in the pages of Mr. Smiles’s “Life of John Murray” as one
of the great publisher’s friends, stands midway in the Lindo gene-
alogy between Antonio Rodrigues Lindo and Mr. Coningsby Disraeli,
for he was one of the great-great-grandsons of the one and great-
grandfather of the other.

But it is through the marriages of the Lindos that Mr. Disraeli
obtains his most distinguished ancestors. Isaac Lindo’s son Elias—
Ephraim’s great-grandfather—married in 1708 Rachel Lopes Pereira,
a cousin of Diego Lopes Pereira, first Baron d’Aguilar, who, in his
day, was a banker and merchant of European reputation. Diego
first became known by the signal success with which he farmed the
tobacco revenue in Portugal, an occupation in which his father had
preceded him. He amassed great wealth and established banking
businesses in London and Amsterdam. In 1725 the Austrian
Government, which had always experienced considerable difficulty
with the remunerative exploitation of its Tobacco Regie, offered him
the post of Chief Administrator. He accepted the offer on condition
that the fullest religious freedom was secured to himself, his family,
and his dependants. Once in Vienna, he professed Judaism, and
founded the present Sephardi Synagogue in that city. He acquired
great influence at Court, was created Baron d’Aguilar by the Emperor
Charles VI., and, according to a passage in Pinto’s Réflexions Critiques,
held the post of State Treasurer to the Empress Maria Theresa. He
afterwards settled in London with his fourteen children and a large
retinue of servants and slaves, and died in Bishopsgate in 1759. Still
more brilliant from the genealogical point of view was the marriage
of Elias Lindo’s son Isaac—Ephraim’s grandfather—to Bathsheba,
daughter of Ephraim Abarbanel, The Abarbanels are the premier

family in Jewry, and their pedigree in many prolific branches is well
established. Their most illustrious ancestor is Don Isaac Abarbanel,
the son and grandson of Spanish statesmen and himself Minister
of Finance to three European Sovereigns—Alfonso V. of Portugal,
Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, and Ferdinand I. of Naples. It
was during Abarbanel’s tenure of the Castilian Exchequer that
Torquemada prevailed on the King and Queen to order the gigantic
Jewish Diaspora of 1492. The Jewish Minister toiled in vain to
procure the withdrawal of the edict, and finally left Spain with a
large number of his fellow-exiles for Sicily, while, as we have already
seen, another ancestor of the Disraelis, Isaac Aboab, headed the
Western exodus to Portugal. Whether Don Isaac was actually a
lineal ancestor of the Abarbanels who intermarried with the Lindos
is doubtful, for these Abarbaneĺs belonged to the Marrano section of
the family which remained in Andalusia under “Gothic surnames”
until the seventeenth century. They preserved, however, the tradition
of their descent, and, on escaping to Amsterdam and London, resumed
their ancient name. Menasseh ben Israel married a daughter of one
of these Abarbanels, and his brother-in-law, Manuel Martinez Dormido,
alias David Abarbanel, preceded the famous Dutch Rabbi in the
negotiations of 1655 with Oliver Cromwell, which resulted in the re-
settlement of the Jews in England. It was from another brother-
in-law of Menasseh that the English Abarbanels were descended.
But that these Abarbanels were of the posterity of Don Isaac’s grand-
father, Samuel Abarbanel, alias Juan de Sevilla, is unquestionable.
Tradition, indeed, assigns an even more illustrious extraction to the
family. Isaac Abarbanel claimed to be descended in the direct line
from King David, and, on more than one occasion, signed himself “of
the posterity of Jesse the Bethlehemite.” So firmly was this tradi-
tion credited that Menasseh ben Israel cherished a hope of seeing
the Messiah issue from his alliance with a daughter of this Davidic
House. Lord Beaconsfield’s genealogical instinct was evidently not
very much at fault when he hazarded to Lord Rowton his joke
about “ancestors who were on intimate terms with the Queen of
Sheba.” His nephew might, however, repeat it with more exact
appropriateness.

There is one aspect of the history of the Disraeli family upon 

which a great deal might be written, but which can only be very
briefly referred to here. Lord Beaconsfield was frequently reproached
by the more personal of his critics and antagonists as being an alien,
without connection of blood with any English family. It is perfectly
true that on his father’s side his was only the second generation of his
family which was English-born, but maternally he came of a family,
the Aboab Cardosos, which had been settled in this country since
the closing decade of the seventeenth century. In this respect
the Disraelis were not more alien than many English families of
Huguenot extraction. As for his want of blood relationship with
families of English race, that also is an error. It is true that no
Anglo-Saxon blood coursed in his veins, but not a little of the blood
of his own ascertained forefathers was in his time and is still mingled
with that of the English landed gentry and peerage. Thus, through
the Villareals, he might have claimed his friend, Lord Houghton, as
a not very distant cousin, for Kitty Villareal’s daughter, Elizabeth,
became Viscountess Galway, and was consequently Lord Houghton’s
great-grandmother. The Da Costas, the Mendez’, the Aguilars, the
Treves, and the Lindos, to all of whom the Disraelis were related,
have in the same way become ancestors of scores of the great families
which figure in Debrett. From Pellegrin Treves, indeed, most of the
leading Roman Catholic families in Great Britain are descended, and
even the late Duchess of Norfolk was one of his great-grandchildren.
This point is, however, of no very great importance, for physiological
science has not yet succeeded in establishing any exact relationship
between the moral character of a man and his often very complex
ethnical extraction. All that can be said with certainty is that in
Lord Beaconsfield some of the best blood in Jewry—the blood of men
and women inured to hardship, athirst for freedom, and invincibly
attached to high ideals—was touched by the sympathetic genius of
British traditions and forthwith produced a great Englishman.

[Note.—Documents illustrative of this article will be published in
a later volume of the Society’s Transactions.]