Benjamin D'Israeli (merchant)

D'Israeli was born in Cento, near Ferrara, then in the Papal States, now part of the Italian Republic, on 22 September 1730; and died at Stoke Newington, Middlesex, on 28 November 1816.

Although a conforming Jew, and though contributing liberally towards the support of a synagogue, D'Israeli appears never to have cordially or intimately mixed with the community; only on one occasion did he serve in a minor office—that of inspector of charity schools in the year 1782.

It is not unlikely (according to Wolf), 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.

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.

From letters 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 humdrum, but entirely creditable, desire to find the best market for his knowledge of the straw bonnet trade.

In both cases the prescience of the emigrants was justified, for a few years later, owing to the patronage of Maria and Elizabeth the "beautiful Misses Gunning", Italian straw bonnets associated with Livorno ("Leghorn") became the height of fashion.

She was the second daughter and fourth child of Gaspar Mendes Furtado (Portugal, Fundão, near 1695) and Clara Henriques de Lara, and was three years older than her husband.

[4] On his marriage with Rebecca Mendes Furtado, 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.

[4] He soon found this occupation pall upon what his grandson calls his "ardent temperament", 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.

His success is attested by the fact that the more respectable 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.