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SK's Sephardic Jewish Portuguese birth, her early years in Judaism, and her father's boyhood as a street urchin and his high-profile but scandalous career (associating with political radicals while lending money to socialites and eventually marrying into the English nobility), made her an outsider in English society.
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Although AL herself, in attempting to adopt an unequivocally English identity, implicitly claimed that she was white, evidence suggests that while her father was probably Welsh (he had lived in Middlesex) and presumably white, her mother was quite possibly Eurasian. If this is the case then AL suppressed her mixed-race origins. Anna was multi-lingual and from childhood could speak Hindustani, English and Guzerati (also called Gujarati), which was taught to her by her mother. She also became fluent in Sanskrit,French ,Thai , Malay, Arabic, Persian, Latin and Pali. She knew some Russian from her travels. AL was Presbyterian but also studied Hinduism and Buddhism. She believed that she was too good a Christian not to be something of a Buddhist, and too good a Buddhist not to be something of a Christian.
AL often visited the Reclining Buddha at the temple Wat Po in Bangkok. Her Thai teacher gave her frequent instruction on Buddha's teachings. Later in Siamese Harem Life, Anna recalled that she had learned that the prophet's object was not only a religious but a social revolution. A good deal of what was venerated as religion he found to be merely social usage, for which a Divine sanction was feigned. [Buddha], without hesitation, rejected all of this . . . . His greatest blow to the old religion, however, was in his explicit repudiation of caste. He offered his religion to all men alike . . . . Buddha boldly expounded to the people that, according to their own books, all men were equal.
CD was a teenager when her Jewish parents divorced; presumably she was brought up in Judaism until this event; probably she completed her upbringing as an gentlewoman. She must have been to a greater or lesser extent an outsider in English society, not only because of her Sephardic Jewish Portuguese heritage but because of her father's highly visible but anomalous character, as a Londoner but an outsider, an ex-street-child and boxer, author of inflammatory political pamphlets, moving in high society and privy to its financial secrets while not himself a member of it.
The Anglican baptism of CD's children may—perhaps—represent a final severing of her Jewish roots.
Both of GA's parents were presumably white and of Jewish descent; her family belonged to the middle class. Her father's family was from Spain and her mother's family was from Portugal. GA was English by birth, and she was full of praise for her country as a land of tolerance and freedom: England offers a rest and home of perfect freedom to the exile and oppressed . . . . Much of her writing about Jews served to counter the claims of those such as Thomas Carlyle, who argued that Jews could not be fully loyal to any country except Zion. GA's writings treat in detail the Jewish faith to which she strongly adhered, and she often focuses on the persecution and prejudice which Jews suffered throughout the nineteenth century, as well as historically. As critic Michael Galchinsky argues, the practices and culture of crypto-Judaism, whereby Jews evaded the Inquisition by passing for Catholic while retaining their ancestral faith in private, considerably influenced both the form and content of her work. Despite her intense commitment to improving the standing of her people through her writing, her friend Anna Maria Hall avers that she and her husband could only with difficulty get GA to speak on religious topics and were quite unacquainted with her religious habits. However, her continuing dedication to Judaism, and her identification of herself with her Sephardic Jewish heritage—which she also considered a nationality —was obvious to those who knew her, and she may have been a proto-Zionist the natural and unaffected eloquence of her words, when referring to the past history of the Jews . . . and the positive radiance of her countenance when she spoke of the gathering of the tribes at Jerusalem, could never be forgotten.
In Devon she developed the religious tolerance that distinguishes her writing and helped her to bridge the gap between the Jewish and Christian literary communities. Here she came into contact with provincial English Protestantism, which she distinguished from the intolerant Catholicism that had persecuted her family on the Continent. She made Christian friends with whom she discussed religious issues, attended church—she altered the forms of praise and prayer where necessary to accord with her own—and came to the conclusion that Christianity and Judaism had much in common in spirit, even if they diverged in form. She later argued in Sabbath Thoughts that Christianity was the Kingdom of Iron prophesied by Daniel, which would prepare for the Jewish messiah. Her lack of adequate religious education meant that she frequently had to rely on Christian texts about Judaism. Critic Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams joins some contemporary critics in calling her a Jewish Protestant; however, others have argued that though she was reformist, she was a dedicated Jew nonetheless, and above all.