Disraeli's first introduction to life was at a Mr. Poticary's, at Blackheath, where he remained for several years--till he was too old to be left there, and till a very considerable change took place in the circumstances of the family. In 1817 the grandfather died. Isaac Disraeli succeeded to his fortune, removed from Gray's Inn Road, and took a larger house--No. 6 Bloomsbury Square, then a favourite situation for leading lawyers and men of business. A more important step was his formal withdrawal from the Jewish congregation. The reasons for it, as given by himself in his 'Genius of Judaism,' were the narrowness of the system, the insistence that the Law was of perpetual obligation, while circumstances changed and laws failed of their objects. 'The inventions,' he says, 'of the Talmudical doctors, incorporated in their ceremonies, have bound them hand and foot, and cast them into the caverns of the lone and sullen genius of rabbinical Judaism, cutting them off from the great family of mankind and perpetuating their sorrow and their shame.' The explanation is sufficient, but the resolution was probably of older date. The coincidence between the date of his father's death and his own secession points to a connection between the two events. His mother's impatience of her Jewish fetters must naturally have left a mark on his mind, and having no belief himself in the system, he must have wished to relieve his children of the disabilities and inconveniences which attached to them as members of the synagogue. At all events at this period he followed the example of his Spanish ancestors in merging himself and them in the general population of his adopted country. The entire household became members of the Church of England. The children read their Prayer Books and learned their catechisms. On July 31 in that year Benjamin Disraeli was baptised at St. Andrew's Church, Holborn, having for his godfather his father's intimate friend the distinguished Sharon Turner.