The Three Lives of Judah P. Benjamin

Judah Philip Benjamin must be bracketed with Disraeli, who was his contemporary, as the ablest Jewish politician ever born under the British flag. But his career outdid Disraeli’s in audacity. Benjamin lived three lives in one. Born in the British West Indies, he went as a child to the United States, made a fortune at the American Bar, became a Senator, and refused a seat on the Supreme Court bench.

Then he became Attorney-General and afterwards Secretary of State in the Confederate Government set up by the seceding Southern States. When the South was beaten, he fled to London. Penniless at the age of fifty-five, he went to the English Bar, where he made another fortune. He retired from practice at seventy, and took his riches to Paris. There he rejoined the wife who had left him nearly half a century before, with whom he spent the rest of his days. As one obituary said, his was ‘a life as varied as an Eastern tale’.