Sampson Gideon

Origins and early life

Sampson Gideon was born in London in 1699, the son of Rowland Gideon, a Sephardi Jewish merchant of the Portuguese community whose family came from the Iberian diaspora by way of the West Indies, and he remained a Jew all his life, never formally baptised.

Work and career

He began as a jobber in the alleys around the Royal Exchange in 1719, survived the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, and became the leading government loan contractor of his generation, the man the Treasury turned to when it needed to place a subscription. During the Jacobite rising of 1745, when the Pretender's army reached Derby and the Bank of England faced a run, Gideon organised the loan that steadied public credit and financed the government's response, and he was afterwards consulted informally by successive chancellors.

He advised on the conversion of the national debt that produced the consolidated annuities, the consols, and he grew rich enough to buy the Belvedere estate in Kent.

Personal life

His position was double and the fiche says so plainly: he backed the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753, saw it repealed within months under a wave of popular antisemitism, and though he kept his own seat in the Bevis Marks synagogue and left it a legacy, he had his children brought up as Anglicans so that they could inherit a title; his son was made a baronet in 1759. He died at Belvedere on 17 October 1762 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Mile End.