Sir Moses Montefiore
To the Editor:
The prefatory note to the interesting extracts from the diaries of Sir Moses Montefiore published in your issue of February last, gives, I submit, a somewhat misleading impression as to the reasons for his outstanding position in the history of British Jewry. . . .
Moses Montefiore was a member of a wealthy family of British Jews of Italian descent; he himself had been born in Italy while his parents were on a visit there. As far as education was concerned, he had the usual “formal schooling” common in those days to the sons of gentlemen who were destined for a business career. He married a daughter of the most prominent member of the Ashkenazic community, when the Ashkenazim were beginning not only to equal, but to outvie Sephardim in their position in the community—Levi Barent Cohen, whose descendants are among the most distinguished of the community, including Lord Cohen, Sir Andrew Cohen (the Governor of Uganda), and Miss Ruth Cohen, the recently appointed principal of Girton College, Cambridge. Among other sons-in-law of Barent Cohen was N. M. Rothschild, the first Rothschild to settle in England, and it was largely through his transactions in alliance with his brother-in-law that Montefiore was able to retire from business at the age of forty and to engage for the rest of his life in those philanthropic efforts which made him deservedly famous. He did not “inherit,” he created the office of “Shtadlan,” for no one had preceded him in that particular function, and he was able to do this because in 1835 he was elected President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, an office which he held with one or two short intervals until his retirement in 1874. He was, therefore, the recognized spokesman of British Jewry vis-à-vis Her Majesty's and foreign governments. As further evidence of his social position, he was in 1837 elected Sheriff of London and Middlesex and was the first English Jew to be knighted. Subsequently he was created a Baronet. The favor showed him by the Royal Family began when he had a wicket gate opened at his seaside villa at Ramsgate in order to enable Princess Victoria, afterwards Queen, who lived with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, in the adjoining house, to use his grounds as well as their own. This courtesy Queen Victoria did not forget, and one of her marks of favor was the right conferred on him to add “supporters” to his Coat of Arms, in recognition of his distinguished services on behalf of his oppressed brethren. This right is confined to members of the Peerage and to holders of high orders.
Sidney Salomon
Richmond, England
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