February 20 1874 – 3 Adar 5634
London
Benjamin Disraeli was elected British prime minister for the second time. Disraeli’s family were Sephardic Jews who’d emigrated from Leghorn, Italy. His father had quarreled with the Spanish and Portuguese community in London at the time of his son’s bar mitzvah, and consequently baptized all his children, though he himself remained a Jew. This allowed Disraeli to take a seat in the British parliament, then still closed to Jews. One of the more colorful members of the traditionalist Tory party, he was renowned for his oratory; a well-known jewel was his response to Irish MP Daniel O’Conner’s racial slurs: “Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”