Constituency : City of London 1847-68, 1869-74
Lionel was a cause celebre in Anglo-Jewish history. He was a scion of the famous banking family. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, a keen huntsman and breeder of racehorses. He was first elected to the Commons in 1847. Because he could not take the Christian oath required to sit in the chamber , Lord John Russell ( his colleague in City of London ) introduced a Jewish Disabilities Bill to circumvent the problem. It was rejected by the Lords in 1848 and again in 1849. Lionel resigned his seat and won the by-election to bolster his case. In 1850 he came to the House and was allowed to swear on the Old Testament only but omitted the crucial Christian words and so was again disbarred. The Bill was defeated again in 1850, 1851, 1853 and 1856. In 1857 Lionel sat on a parliamentary select committee to discuss the question , there being no legal impediment to this form of participation. It wasn't until 1858 that the Lords agreed to let the Commons decide its own oath and Lionel was allowed to take his seat , not without objections from Tory bigots, after 11 years as an excluded MP.
Having made such an effort it's surprising that Lionel only spoke once after taking the oath, asking Gladstone a question about the paper duties in 1860.
Lionel lost his seat briefly in 1868 when a Tory snuck in. He was proposed for the Lords but Queen Victoria vetoed the proposal supposedly due to his business activities; she did go on to ennoble his son in 1885. He was unopposed in a by-election a year later. He went down in the debacle of 1874.
Despite their being in different parties Lionel was an intimate friend of Disraeli's and he secretly financed the government's purchase of the Suez Canal shares in 1875. In 1879 Lionel's horse won the Epsom Derby. He died shortly afterwards following an attack of gout. He was 69.
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