David Aaron De Sola was descended from a distinguished family of Sephardim, who emigrated from Spain in 1492 on the expulsion of the Jews from that country by Ferdinand and Isabella.

At just eleven years of age, David Aaron de Sola entered as a student to the bet ha-midrash in Amsterdam, studying diligently, and after a course of nine years received his rabbinical diploma from Haham d'Azevdo of Amsterdam who stated that de Sola was "to the fullest extent competent to discharge rabbinical functions...and assume the ministerial office in every city.

de Sola was called to London to become one of the ministers of the Bevis Marks Congregation under Haham Raphael Meldola (who would also later become his father-in-law).

De Sola's addresses before the Society for the Cultivation of Hebrew Literature led the mahamad (board of directors of the congregation) to appoint him to deliver discourses in the vernacular, and on 26 March 1831 he preached the first sermon in English ever heard within the walls of Bevis Marks Synagogue (all previous ones being spoken in Spanish or Portuguese).

This undertaking, which received the encouragement and financial support of Sir Moses Montefiore, "was a remarkable feat of scholarship" and formed the basis for several subsequent editions.

The work had a strange fate, for, the manuscript having reached the hands of a member of the Burton Street Synagogue, it was published in 1842, without the permission of the authors, before it had been revised or corrected for the press, and with an anonymous preface expressing views entirely opposed to those of de Sola and Raphall.

Additionally, de Sola composed a melody for Adon Olam that is still used in both Sephardi and Ashkenazi synagogues in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Their grandson Dr Keith Bernard de Sola Rogers, was part of an illustrious team at St Mary’s concerned with immunology, early blood transfusions, development of sulphonamides, and, above all, penicillin.