Rebecca d’Israel née Mendes Furtado

Rebecca d’Israel was born in Covilhã, Portugal, one of six surviving children of Gaspar Mendez Furtado and Clara Henriques de Lara. The Inquisition was still active in Portugal at the time. Two years before Rebecca was born her parents had been denounced to the authorities as ‘Judaisers’. This was the term for Catholics of Jewish descent who were suspected of lapsing back into Judaism – as many people did, over all the generations that the Inquisition was in force.

Gaspar and Rebecca were arrested. He was tortured, and Clara was threatened with more of the same. They finally abjured their ’heresy’ in front of the King at an auto da fé (ritual public penance) in 1726. Gaspar, a broken man, died shortly afterwards. Like many other victims of the Inquisition, Clara escaped to London with the children, where she was finally able to make public profession of her Jewish faith, and reverted to her Jewish name, Abigail.

Clara/Abigail’s daughter Rebecca and two of her brothers, both notaries, would later live in Islington. Isaac (?-1801) lived at 35 Upper Street, and Jacob (?-1799) on Paradise Row, which fronted on to Islington Green. Rebecca married the Italian-Jewish immigrant, Benjamin d’Israel (later rendered D’Israeli) at Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1756.

Benjamin (1730-1816) had arrived in London just a few years earlier. Working in the straw hat trade initially – Leghorn hats, from Livorno, were very popular at the time – he switched to banking when an opportunity arose. He lived and worked at Great St Helens in the City, but also had a small house in Essex Road (then called Lower Street), which would be a welcome retreat in those days, being close to open fields and streams.

Rebecca had just one surviving child, Rachael, before dying in her late-thirties. It was Benjamin’s second wife, Sara Shiprut de Gabay (1742-1825), whose son Isaac would be the future prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli's father.