Editing Benjamin Disraeli (section)

===Role of Jewishness===
{{further|History of the Jews in England}}
By 1882, 46,000 [[English Jews|Jews lived in England]], and by 1890 Jewish emancipation was complete. Since 1858, Parliament has never been without practicing Jewish members. The first Jewish [[Lord Mayor of London]], Sir [[David Salomons]], was elected in 1855, followed by the [[Jewish emancipation in the United Kingdom|1858 emancipation of the Jews]]. On 26 July 1858, [[Lionel de Rothschild]] was allowed to sit in the House of Commons when the hitherto specifically Christian oath of office was changed. Disraeli, a [[Jewish Christian|baptised Christian]] of Jewish parentage, was already an MP, as the mandated oath of office presented no barrier to him. In 1884 [[Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild]], became the first Jewish member of the British [[House of Lords]]; Disraeli was already a member.<ref>Andrzej Diniejko, "Benjamin Disraeli and the Jewish Question in Victorian England" ''The Victorian Web'' (2020) [https://victorianweb.org/authors/disraeli/judaism.html online]</ref>

Disraeli as a leader of the [[History of the Conservative Party (UK)|Conservative Party]], with its ties to the landed aristocracy, used his Jewish ancestry to claim an aristocratic heritage of his own. His biographer [[Jonathan Parry]] argues:<ref>Jonathan Parry, ''Benjamin Disraeli'' (Oxford UP 2007) p 23.</ref>{{blockquote|Disraeli convinced himself (wrongly) that he derived from the Sephardi aristocracy of [[Iberian Jews]] [[Alhambra Decree|driven from Spain]] at the end of the fifteenth century....Presenting himself as Jewish symbolized Disraeli's uniqueness when he was fighting for respect, and explained his set-backs. Presenting Jewishness as aristocratic and religious legitimized his claim to understand the perils facing modern England and to offer 'national' solutions to them. English toryism was 'copied from the mighty [Jewish] prototype' (''Coningsby'', bk 4, chap. 15). Disraeli was thus able to square his Jewishness with his equally deep attachment to England and her history.}}

[[Todd Endelman]] points out that "The link between Jews and old clothes was so fixed in the popular imagination that Victorian political cartoonists regularly drew Benjamin Disraeli as an old clothes man in order to stress his Jewishness." He adds, "Before the 1990s...few biographers of Disraeli or historians of Victorian politics acknowledged the prominence of the antisemitism that accompanied his climb up the greasy pole or its role in shaping his own singular sense of Jewishness."<ref>Todd M. Endelman, ''The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000'' (University of California Press, 2002) p 6.</ref><ref>See also Anthony S. Wohl, "'Ben JuJu': Representations of Disraeli's Jewishness in the Victorian political cartoon". ''Jewish history'' 10.2 (1996): 89–134 [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01650962 online]</ref>

According to Michael Ragussis:<ref>Michael Ragussis, ''Figures of Conversion. The "Jewish Question" and English National Identity'' (1995) p. 175.</ref><ref>See also Anthony S. Wohl, "'Ben JuJu': Representations of Disraeli's Jewishness in the Victorian political cartoon." ''Jewish history'' 10.2 (1996): 89–134</ref> {{blockquote|What began in the 1830s as scattered anti-Semitic remarks aimed at him [Disraeli] by the crowds in his early electioneering became in the 1870s a kind of national scrutiny of his Jewishness — a scrutiny that erupted into a kind of anti-Semitic attack led by some of the most prominent intellectuals and politicians of the time and anchored in the charge that Disraeli was a [[crypto-Jew]].}}