als and guarded them
through unheard-of perils, they assumed the name of DISRAELI, a name
never borne before or since by any other family, in order that their
race might be for ever recognised. Undisturbed and unmolested, they
flourished as merchants for more than two centuries under the protection
of the lion of St. Mark, which was but just, as the patron saint of the
Republic was himself a child of Israel. But towards the middle of the
eighteenth century, the altered circumstances of England, favourable, as
it was then supposed, to commerce and religious liberty, attracted the
attention of my great-grandfather to this island, and he resolved that
the youngest of his two sons, Benjamin, the "son of his right hand,"
should settle in a country where the dynasty seemed at length
established, through the recent failure of Prince Charles Edward, and
where public opinion appeared definitively adverse to persecution on
matters of creed and conscience.

The Jewish families who were then settled in England were few, though,
from their wealth and other circumstances, they were far from
unimportant. They were all of them Sephardim, that is to say, children
of Israel, who had never quitted the shores of the Midland Ocean, until
Torquamada had driven them from their pleasant residences and rich
estates in Arragon, and Andalusia, and Portugal, to seek greater
blessings, even than a clear atmosphere and a glowing sun, amid the
marshes of Holland and the fogs of Britain. Most of these families, who
held themselves aloof from the Hebrews of Northern Europe, then only
occasionally stealing into England, as from an inferior caste, and whose
synagogue was reserved only for Sephardim, are now extinct; while the
branch of the great family, which, notwithstanding their own sufferings
from prejudice, they had the hardihood to look down upon, have achieved
an amount of wealth and consideration which the Sephardim, even with the
patronage of Mr. Pelham, never could have contemplated. Nevertheless, at
the time when my grandfather settled in England, and when Mr. Pelham,
who was very favourable to the Jews, was Prime Minister, there might be
found, among other Jewish families flourishing in this country, the
Villa Reals, who brought wealth to these shores almost as great as their
name, though that is the second in Portugal, and who have twice allied
themselves with the English aristocracy, the Medinas--the Laras, who
were our kinsmen--and the Men