Disraeli was subjected to antisemitic slurs throughout his entire career. When he first presented himself for election, he was greeted by cries of "old clothes"; on another occasion, his opponents hoisted roast pork on a stick in front of him; and he was once offered a donkey to carry himself back to Jerusalem. Caricatures of the politician regularly depicted him with a hook nose and a stooped posture.

One of the more famous instances of such anti-semitism came from Irish nationalist MP, Daniel O'Connell, who in a 1835 election campaign described Disraeli as "the worst kind of Jew."

Disraeli retorted in a letter to the Times: "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."

But the point at which Disraeli's Jewish heritage became a major bone of contention was actually later in his career - at the time of the Bulgarian Christian uprising against Ottoman rule in 1876. The Ottomans had crushed the rebellion mercilessly, and reports circulated in Europe about the atrocities their soldiers and irregular forces had committed against Christians.

The Liberal leader, William Gladstone, was horrified by these stories and published a pamphlet condemning Disraeli for his inaction in defending the Bulgarians. He suggested that Disraeli, because he had been born a Jew, had a sympathy for the Turks because of their lenient treatment of the Jewish minority within the Ottoman Empire.

Other critics piled on, calling Disraeli the "Jew Earl, Philo-Turkish Jew and Jew Premier," an "abominable Jew" and the "traitorous Jew."

(In point of fact, British foreign policy had always been pro-Turkish, but Disraeli's Jewishness made him an easy target.)

A very good recent book on this subject is Adam Kirsch's Benjamin Disraeli, which places Lord Beaconsfield's career within the context of 19th-century anti-semitism.