Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (22 November 1808 – 3 June 1879) was a British Jewish banker, politician and philanthropist who was a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family of England. He became the first practicing Jew to sit as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. Life and career The eldest son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his wife, Hannah Barent-Cohen, he was a member of the wealthy Rothschild family. Both of his parents were Jewish. He was born in London, where his father had founded the English branch of the Europe-wide family. In his earlier years, he studied at the University of Göttingen before embarking on an apprenticeship in the family business at London, Paris and Frankfurt. He was admitted to the family partnership in 1836 at a family gathering in Frankfurt. Like his father, he was a Freiherr (baron) of the Austrian Empire, but unlike his father, he used the title in British society. By royal licence of Queen Victoria on 16 June 1838, he was allowed (along with other male-line descendants of his late father) to use the Austrian title of baron in the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Gladstone proposed to Queen Victoria that Lionel be made a British peer. She demurred, saying that titling a Jew would raise antagonism and furthermore it would be unseemly to reward a man whose vast wealth was based on what she called "a species of gambling" rather than legitimate trade. However, the Queen did raise Lionel's son Nathan to the peerage in 1885, and he became the first Jewish member of the House of Lords. Banker Rothschild was responsible for raising large sums for the government, especially in the Crimean war, and for philanthropic relief of the victims of the Great Irish Famine. On 1 January 1847, he founded the British Relief Association, alongside Stephen Spring Rice, John Abel Smith and other notable aristocrats. The Association went on to raise £500,000, and was the largest private provider of relief during the Irish Famine and Highland Potato Famine. In 1861, in protest at the suppression of the Polish uprisings, he (initially) refused to contract a loan to Russia. His most famous undertaking was financing the government's purchase of the Suez Canal shares from Egypt for £4 million. Parliament In 1847, Lionel de Rothschild was first elected to the British House of Commons as