Isaac D'Israeli

Isaac D'Israeli was born at Enfield, near London, on 11 May 1766, the only son of Benjamin D'Israeli, a Sephardic Jewish merchant who had come from Cento, near Ferrara, in 1748 and prospered in the straw-bonnet trade and on the Stock Exchange; he was a Jew by birth and by his parents, and this fiche states plainly the singular position he chose — he was never baptized and never renounced Judaism, but in 1813, after a quarrel with the Bevis Marks synagogue, which had elected him warden and fined him when he refused to serve, he withdrew from the congregation, and in 1817 he had his four children baptized into the Church of England, among them the twelve-year-old Benjamin who would one day be prime minister.

He himself lived for books. A poet and novelist of no consequence, he found his form in 1791 with Curiosities of Literature, a miscellany of anecdotes, oddities and researches into the lives of writers and the history of books that ran through a dozen editions in his lifetime and was read by everyone in England who read at all — Byron kept it by him, Scott admired it — and he followed it with Calamities of Authors, Quarrels of Authors and the Amenities of Literature of 1841, and with a five-volume Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I that earned him an honorary doctorate from Oxford.

In 1833 he published The Genius of Judaism, an essay of a skeptic on the religion he had been born to, critical of its rabbis and proud of its people. Blind in his last years, he died at Bradenham on 19 January 1848; his son edited his works, and wrote of him with love.