Benjamin D'Israeli (merchant)

Benjamin D'Israeli (1730–1816) was an Italian-born merchant and financier, the grandfather of the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield.

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. He moved to England in 1748 and settled there as a merchant, although he did not take out papers of denization till 1801.

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.

D'Israeli married twice. Firstly, on 2 April 1756, he married Rebecca Mendez Furtado, a woman of Portuguese origin. They had a daughter called Rachel. Within a few months of Rebecca's death on 1 February 1765 he married secondly Sarah Siprut de Gabay Villareal, on 28 May 1765. Their only child Isaac D'Israeli was born the next year, on 11 May 1766.

D'Israeli was born in Cento, near Ferrara, in what is now the Italian Republic, on 22 September 1730, the son of Isaac Israeli.

He was the eldest of three children. The other two were daughters, Rachel, born in 1741, and Venturina, born in 1745. Although his grandson later wrote of the family's roots in the Republic of Venice, it seems the family's only connection with that city was through these sisters, for the only records of the family in the archives of the Venetian Ghetto are of Venturina’s death there in 1821 and of the death of Rachel in the register for 1837. Lord Beaconsfield, in the Memoir of his father, speaks of an elder brother of Benjamin, who was a banker in Venice and a friend of Sir Horace Mann, but according to Wolf (1902) this must be a mistake, for apart from the absence of any record of this brother, and of any mention of him in the minute and copious correspondence of Mann, the fact that Rachel and Venturina Israeli kept a girls’ school in the Ghetto makes it very unlikely that they had a banker brother.

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