The Right Honourable Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC (21 December 1804 - 19 April 1881) was a British statesman and literary figure. He served in government for three decades, twice as Prime Minister - the first and thus far only person of Jewish descent to do so, although Disraeli was baptized in the Anglican Church at an early age. Disraeli's most lasting achievement was the creation of the modern Conservative Party after the Corn Laws schism of 1846...Disraeli descended from Italian Sephardic Jews from both his maternal and paternal sides. His father was the literary critic and historian Isaac D'Israeli who, though Jewish, had Benjamin baptised and raised in the Church of England. The elder D'Israeli (Benjamin apparently changed the spelling in the 1820s) himself was content to remain outside organized religion.