The Disraeli Family

The Memory that the family transmitted of itself goes back to the great rupture at the end of the fifteenth century. According to the account that Benjamin Disraeli inscribed in the preface he wrote for an edition of his father's memoirs, the ancestors of the lineage would have fled Spain at the end of the fifteenth century and would have established themselves in Venice, where they remained for some two centuries before his great-grandfather settled in Cento. This is the foundation of the family romance: a noble Iberian origin, a long stay in the Serene Republic, then migration to the small city of Emilia.

Modern historiography regards this Venetian genealogy with caution. The account transmitted by Benjamin is plausibly embellished: the claim of a "pure" Sephardic ancestry and of a long patrician residence in Venice serves the writer's pride as much as documentary truth. What remains established, however, is the anchoring in Cento, in the duchy of Ferrara governed by the house of Este — one of the refuges where the Jews, expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, found relative tolerance and were able to rebuild communities, academies and commercial enterprises. The crisis and creativity that marked the Sephardic world between 1391 and 1648 form the exact backdrop to this settlement: northern Italy was, for the descendants of Iberian exiles, a laboratory of survival and cultural renaissance [Benjamin R. Gampel, Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648, 1997 — ref:4].

In this oldest part of family History, tradition and archive diverge without quite contradicting each other. The archive does not go back as far as Spain; Memory, for its part, plants its roots there. This gap is not a defect: it speaks to the very function of Sephardic Memory, which keeps alive the remembrance of Sefarad long after the registers have fallen silent. In transmitting, even if amplifying it, the story of exile, the Disraeli lineage participates in this collective fidelity to the lost land that traverses the entire diaspora of the south.

It is in Cento, in the Ferrarese region, that the archival item takes over from legend. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, the ancestor Isaac Israeli, of Cento, married Rica — or Eurichetta — Rossi, a member of a distinguished Italian Jewish family of Ferrara. From this union was born, in Cento on 22 September 1730, Benjamin D'Israeli the Elder, he who would transport the lineage to England.

The proximity of Ferrara is not immaterial. The city of the Este had been, in the 16th century, one of the great centers of Sephardic culture in Italy, a land of welcome for marranos returned to Judaism and a place where Spanish and Portuguese liturgical traditions were maintained. The alliance of the Israeli with the Rossi, "a distinguished Italian-Jewish family," inscribes the lineage in this network of cultivated families who, between synagogue and commerce, perpetuated the intellectual heritage of Sefarad on Italian soil.

The name itself deserves attention, for it carries a rare identity charge. Even as so many Sephardic families adopted surnames merged into the local landscape, this one — Israeli, then D'Israeli — openly displayed belonging to the people of Israel. The choice of this form, claimed and not imposed, is in itself an act of fidelity. The lineage thus echoes the immense work of Memory that Jewish onomastics itself represents, the science of names in which can be read the migrations, occupations, fidelities and ruptures of an entire people [Joseph Toledano, Une histoire de familles : les noms de famille juifs, 1999 — ref:3]. In a world where the name could conceal or protect, the D'Israeli bore theirs like a banner.

In 1748, Benjamin D'Israeli, born a hundred and eighteen years earlier, established himself in England. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he first prospered as a merchant in London, notably importing products from Italy, before directing his business towards other ventures. He was a member of the London congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews and married at their Bevis Marks synagogue — the oldest and most prestigious in Great Britain. His first wife, whom he married on 2 April 1756, was Rebecca Mendez, second daughter of Gaspar Mendez Furtado, a Portuguese Jew who had fled the Lisbon Inquisition to seek refuge in England.

This alliance said everything about the milieu into which the lineage inserted itself: that of the great families of the Portuguese nation of London, Marranos returned to Judaism, merchants and financiers, who had rebuilt in the City the communal life broken by the Inquisition. By uniting with the Mendez Furtado, refugees from Lisbon, the D'Israeli also married a history of persecution overcome. The memory of the great waves of Iberian exile — from the persecutions of 1391 to the expulsions and inquisitorial courts — remained the matrix of all this Western diaspora [Wikipedia (FR), Persécutions anti-juives de 1391, 2024 — ref:11].

Benjamin the elder made his fortune. A shrewd merchant, he rose in London society without denying his belonging, remaining faithful to Bevis Marks. It is in this economic success, patiently built by an immigrant from Italy with no capital other than his know-how and his communal network, that the lineage expressed one of the most constant virtues of the diaspora: the capacity to take root through labour, to transform exile into establishment. Economic action was not here the pursuit of vain opulence, but a condition of survival and transmission: it is the fortune of the grandfather that, a generation later, would allow the son to devote himself entirely to letters.

From Benjamin the Elder was born, in 1766, Isaac D'Israeli, who made the family name a name in English literature. Freed by paternal fortune from the necessity of commerce, Isaac devoted himself entirely to scholarship. He became one of the great anecdotists and historians of the literary life of his time, author of the Curiosities of Literature and collections on the misfortunes and quarrels of men of letters, among which his Calamities of Authors, a meticulous inquiry into the ills that befell men of the pen [« Calamities of Authors », Isaac D'Israeli, corpus Zakhor, ID aa4b4ee1-1062-4054-970d-08142b07848b].

On February 10, 1802, Isaac married Maria — or Miriam — Basevi, from another merchant family in London of Italian Jewish descent. The marriage was happy and produced five children: Sarah ("Sa", 1802-1859); Benjamin ("Ben" or "Dizzy", 1804-1881); Naphtali, born in 1807 and died in infancy; Raphael, called "Ralph" (1809-1898); and Jacobus, "James" or "Jem" (1813-1868). The children received names according to Jewish custom and the boys were all circumcised. Benjamin was born in Bloomsbury, in London, on December 21, 1804, and was circumcised at Bevis Marks on December 29 following.

But Isaac, attached as he was to Jewish culture, was poorly suited to religious authority. In 1813, he found himself caught in a dispute with the administrators of the synagogue: elected warden of Bevis Marks, he refused to exercise the office and also refused to pay the forty-pound fine that this refusal entailed. The quarrel worsened until it broke. Five months after having resigned his membership in the congregation, Isaac had his four surviving children baptized in the Church of England, in 1817. This gesture, decisive for Benjamin's future — whom no law would then have allowed to sit in Parliament had he remained Jewish — was nevertheless not a conversion of conviction: Isaac, neither quite Christian nor still a practicing Jew, later retired to Bradenham House, in Buckinghamshire, as a kind of country gentleman.

Isaac himself, far from disavowing his origin, devoted an entire book to it in 1833, The Genius of Judaism, a meditation by a man of sixty-seven on the particular genius of his tradition of origin. In this paradoxical figure — the scholar detached from worship yet fascinated by the spirit of Judaism — is expressed one of the deepest tensions of the lineage: fidelity to knowledge and to the Jewish heritage survives here the rupture with the synagogal institution. The contribution of the D'Israeli to thought and letters passes here through an entire body of work; but it is paid for by a shadow, that of the child torn from the community of his fathers. Honesty demands that we name both.

Baptized at thirteen by his father's decision, Benjamin Disraeli grew up as a Christian in status, but he never ceased to think of himself as Jewish by race and lineage. It is here that family memory and public history respond to each other with the greatest force: the man who would become Prime Minister of Queen Victoria made his Jewish origin not a secret to hide, but a title of nobility to proclaim.

His career was prodigious. A novelist before he was a statesman, he opened his work in 1826 with Vivian Grey, a novel of youthful ambition [corpus Zakhor, ID fbedc8e6], then followed with The Young Duke in 1831 [ID 4c6b86d1], Contarini Fleming in 1832 [ID 5e448156], Henrietta Temple and Venetia in 1837 [ID 297a02f9; ID 3e49f056]. His political trilogy of "Young England" — Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847) — brought to the English novel an unprecedented reflection on the nation, the condition of workers and the place of Jews in civilization [ID 97ad5b6e; ID a51c974d; ID 39c3a88a]. In his old age still, at the height of power, he gave Lothair (1870) and Endymion (1880) [ID dd779eb5; ID dc9f8b37].

It is in this work, more than in any speech, that his claimed fidelity is read. Through the character of Sidonia, financier and Jewish sage in Coningsby and Tancred, Disraeli celebrated the genius of his race with an audacity that stood out in the England of his time. The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), a novel devoted to a medieval Jewish prince dreaming of restoring the sovereignty of Israel, reveals more directly this haunting of Jewish national destiny [corpus Zakhor, ID 997cf668]. Disraeli insisted on the idea of a Sephardic superiority because he claimed for himself a pure Sephardic ancestry — the very one that the preface to his father's memoirs fixed in Spanish exile and Venetian sojourn.

The contrast is striking. The decree of political emancipation of British Jews was voted only after his career had begun; he himself would never have sat in the Commons without the baptism of 1817. And yet, this man whom his Christian condition rendered eligible never ceased to assert his Jewishness publicly, even arguing for the admission of practicing Jews to Parliament. Here, virtue is born of a precise and verifiable fact: at the moment when renunciation would have been most convenient, Disraeli chose proclamation. In this, this descendant of Cento and Bevis Marks joined the long chain of those who, throughout exile, refused to make their origin a shame — thus participating, in his singular and not without contradictions manner, in the dignity that the Jewish tradition has defended against all pressures toward erasure.

Taken as a whole, the Disraeli lineage offers a shortcut through the itinerary of Western Sephardi Jewry. Iberian exile, preserved by memory; Italian anchorage, established by archival evidence in Cento and Ferrara; alliance with the great families of the Portuguese nation in London — Mendez Furtado fleeing the Inquisition, Basevi and Rossi come from Italy; economic ascent in the City; finally, double consecration through letters and through power. Each generation married a moment in the history of the diaspora.

This family also illustrates an uncomfortable and fertile truth: fidelity to an origin can survive rupture with its religion. The children of Isaac were baptized, the synagogue was abandoned, and yet the name of Israel was never relinquished, nor attachment to Jewish tradition erased from hearts. Isaac wrote The Genius of Judaism; Benjamin made Jewish blood the secret spring of his novels and the object of his public pride. Where other converted families chose oblivion, this one chose reclamation. It is this tension, sustained to the end, that makes the lineage an almost unique case in the history of European Jewry.

One cannot, however, pass over the silences. The archive does not confirm the Venetian legend; memory was, in places, reconstructed to serve the needs of personal pride. The baptism of 1817 was an act of communal exclusion as much as a social springboard. These shadows do not diminish the lineage: they render it human. Honesty in the account demands that they be named alongside the grandeurs, for it is from this interweaving — embellished memory and rigorous fact, rupture and fidelity — that the true heritage of the Disraeli is made.

From Cento to Downing Street, the Disraeli lineage traversed in three generations the distance separating the merchant immigrant from the head of an empire. But if one seeks what among all Jewish virtues this family expressed best, it must be said plainly: it was the courage of fidelity to origins.

This fidelity took two complementary forms. In Isaac, it was that of knowledge: a life devoted to letters, an erudition placed at the service of culture, and, even in religious detachment, the will to understand and write the "genius" of his tradition. In Benjamin, it was that of public speech: at the summit of a society that would have rewarded his silence, he proclaimed his Jewish blood and defended his own. The lineage's contribution to thought and letters, joined to this obstinacy in not disowning his name, links it to the most ancient of Israel's imperatives — that of remembering, zakhor, and of bearing witness to one's origins whatever the cost.

There were shadows: a genealogy that pride amplified, a baptism that was also a rupture, a part of origins left silent and another magnified. But it is perhaps this very complexity that makes the Disraeli authentic sons of the diaspora. For the diaspora too is made of real exiles and dreamed homelands, of loyalties maintained through ruptures. In keeping alive, even in conversion, the name of Israel, the Disraeli lineage held, in its singular way, the highest promise: never to forget where one comes from.