Jerusalem: The Biography

* * Practising Jews could not sit in the House of Commons until 1858. Then a new Act of Parliament finally allowed Lionel de Rothschild to take his seat as the first practising Jew ever to sit in the House. Interestingly, Shaftesbury had repeatedly spoken against this – as a Christian Zionist, his interest was really in the return and conversion of the Jews in preparation for the Second Coming. But much later he graciously proposed to Prime Minister William Gladstone, ‘It would be a glorious day for the House of Lords when that grand old Hebrew (Montefiore) were enrolled on the lists of the hereditary legislators of England.’ But it was too soon. The first Jewish peerage was awarded to Lionel Rothschild’s son, Nathaniel, in 1885, after Montefiore’s death.