Benjamin Disraeli

He was baptised at twelve, in 1817, by his father's decision after a quarrel with the Bevis Marks community. Without that, Parliament would have been closed to him: until the Act of 1858 a member swore "on the true faith of a Christian."

He was not Britain's first Jewish prime minister in any religious sense—he was a communicant Anglican, and nothing else may be printed. But he never concealed his Jewish descent and never once apologized for it. In 1835 Daniel O'Connell called him a descendant of the thief crucified beside Jesus; Disraeli answered that when his opponent's ancestors were savages on an unknown island, his own were priests in the temple of Solomon. In 1847, in the debate over Lionel de Rothschild's right to take his seat, he voted for Jewish rights—against most of his own party—and argued that "Christianity is completed Judaism."

His novels say the same outright: Alroy (1833) is about a Jewish messianic leader, and Tancred (1847) is entirely about Europe needing to return to the Asian—that is, the Jewish—source of its faith. In the nineteenth century that was a defence, not a fashion.