Moses Montefiore Research Articles

Surnames of Jewish People in the Land of Israel from the Sixteenth Century to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

This paper outlines a study of surnames used by various Jewish groups in the Land of Israel for Ashkenazic Jews, prior to the First Aliyah (1881), and for Sephardic and Oriental Jews up to the end of the 1930s. For the 16th–18th centuries, the surnames of Jews who lived in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron can be mainly extracted from the rabbinic literature. For the 19th century, by far the richest collection is provided by the materials of the censuses organized by Moses Montefiore (1839–1875). For the turn of the 20th century, data for several additional censuses are available, while for the 1930s, we have access to the voter registration lists of Sephardic and Oriental Jews of Jerusalem, Safed, and Haifa. All these major sources were used in this paper to address the following questions: the use or non-use of hereditary family names in various Jewish groups, the geographic roots of Jews that composed the Yishuv, as well as the existence of families continuously present in the Land of Israel for many generations.

Can Damascus 1840 be Re-oriented? From Shami historical memory to Sephardi and Mizrahi agency

ABSTRACT The Damascus blood libel of 1840 had a significant role in shaping modern Jewish historical memory. It generated a sense of solidarity demonstrated by Western European Jewish men of affairs (such as Moses Montefiore) with their less fortunate non-European brethren, setting the stage for the global practice of both Jewish politics and philanthropy for the betterment of the latter. Zionist historiography expanded on this theme while enhancing the gulf between Western Jewish saviours and the historical passivity of helpless Middle Eastern Jews. This essay demonstrates how the direct beneficiaries of the original event, the Shami (Syrian and specifically Damascene) Jews, while gracious to their saviours, attributed in fact no meaning to this event in their own communal construction of the past. The one native account of what happened was facilitated to begin with, and its rabbinic author largely oblivious to the significance of what had transpired. Even the presence of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in fin di siècle Damascus, a direct outcome of 1840, failed to further generate native historical consciousness. Subsequently the essay probes early Zionist efforts to codify a more regionally rooted memory of the affair for the sake of harnessing the local Jewish community to a land of Israel centred future. These efforts, however, failed to prevent Sephardi and Mizrahi Israelis from feeling sidetracked by an emerging Eurocentric Zionist foundational narrative. By revisiting the Israeli Pillar of Fire affair we conclude by identifying a specifically Syrian-Jewish predicament of being left out of this drama.

Pricing Moses Montefiore

Pricing Moses Montefiore

The Jewish community in nineteenth century Palestine: evidence from the Montefiore censuses

Initial findings from five recently transcribed censuses of the Jewish community in nineteenth century Palestine, commissioned by Sir Moses Montefiore. This article discusses each census and presents uncorrected population figures. It describes how the Jewish community was rapidly changing: the population increased almost fourfold between 1839 and 1875, primarily due to immigration from Ashkenazi countries. The Jewish community was majority Ashkenazi by 1875. Analysis of the census data gives us detailed information about the community, such as the fact that Ashkenazim were significantly more likely than Sephardim to be engaged in full-time Torah study, whereas individuals who had immigrated to the land of Israel were slightly less likely. It also suggests that immigrations occurred at all ages, although the average age of an immigrant when they came to Palestine was 36.

PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN THE ANGLO-JEWISH COMMUNITY DURING THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY (1850–1880)

During the past decade, historians and social scientists have begun extensively to research the issue of philanthropy and charities in general, and that of Jewish philanthropy in particular. This paper reviews some of the main characteristics of philanthropic activity of the Jewish elite in post-emancipation Europe (1791–1878) and especially in Britain. Elite philanthropy was not the only form of philanthropy in the Jewish community. Middle-class philanthropy was another form, and traditional charitable activities constituted a third form. This paper focuses solely on elite philanthropy in England between c.1850–c.1880. Moses Montefiore and Lionel de Rotshchild were two of the most influential leaders of the Anglo-Jewish philanthropic elite. The paper deals mostly with the activities of these leaders of the Jewish community in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.

Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero – By Abigail Green

Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero – By Abigail Green

Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, by Abigail Green

Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, by Abigail Green

Sir Moses Montefiore's 1846 visit to Vil'na and its reflection in local maskilic literature

This article discusses the 1846 visit of the leading Anglo-Jewish figure Sir Moses Montefiore to Vil'na in the Russian Empire. Invited by leading figures of the city's Jewish community, Montefiore had a broader agenda at hand – the investigation of Jewish education in the empire. The visit had a profound and enduring effect on the Jews of Vil'na. This was reflected in the varying literary responses, especially among the city's maskilim. It forms the central theme of this article.

250 Years of Convention and Contention: A History of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1760-2010 (review)

Reviewed by: 250 Years of Convention and Contention: A History of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1760-2010 William D. Rubinstein 250 Years of Convention and Contention: A History of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1760-2010, by Raphael Langham. London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010. 292 pp. $69.95. Founded in 1760, the Board of Deputies of British Jews is the central representative body of the Anglo-Jewish community. Although based in voluntary membership in the Jewish community, it has always had a number of features which more closely resemble a European kehilla than the totally voluntary and polycentric American Jewish community. Since 1836 it has been granted a number of legal privileges by the British Parliament, including the right to certify Jewish marriage celebrants and, from the 1930s, the right to grant exemptions for Orthodox Jews to laws prohibiting the opening of shops on Sundays. These legal powers are quite extraordinary for an entirely voluntary body. More significantly, the Board and its Presidents are generally recognized as the central spokesmen for the Anglo-Jewish community, and have a long tradition of taking visible public stances on Jewish issues. For many years in the nineteenth century the Board was headed by Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), the giant figure of Victorian England's Anglo-Jewish community, and then, until the 1930s, by members or associates of the wealthy "Cousinhood" families like the Rothschilds and d'Avigdor-Goldsmids. In 1940 what is often termed a revolution occurred in its leadership when Professor Selig Brodetsky became its President. Brodetsky was born in Russia and grew up in poverty in the East End; he was a practicing Orthodox Jew and, more important, one of Britain's leading Zionists. Ever since, the leadership of the Board has remained in the hands of post-1881 eastern European migrants and their progeny, keenly Zionistic and Jewishly conscious in a post-Holocaust sense. It should also be noted that members of the Board have generally been selected (as "deputies," hence its name) by organizations, especially synagogues, rather than directly elected by Anglo-Jewry, and there have been many fights over membership. Raphael Langham has written a genuinely outstanding history of the Board of Deputies, always mastering this complex story and using all significant primary and secondary sources. Although commissioned by the Board of Deputies, in no sense is the work a whitewash or hagiography, and discusses all of the controversies surrounding the Board in a fair and balanced way. His personal conclusion (p. 263) is that "when I started researching and writing [End Page 205] this book I could be ranked among the cynics and sceptics" of the Board, but, after his research, now believes that "the Jews of Britain need a representative body and the Board has fulfilled that function, warts and all," a conclusion which seems quite justified. The Board and its associated bodies were chiefly responsible for bringing 75,000 German Jewish refuges to Britain from 1933 to 1939, and of mounting effective campaigns on behalf of post-war Soviet Jewry and in support of Israel. Compared with its equivalent bodies in other English-speaking countries, however, it often seems notably low-keyed and lacking in chutzpah, especially towards the anti-Israel bias of institutions like the BBC and left-wing sources like the Guardian newspaper. This may be the British Way, and it may be effective in the long run, but the Board also often does itself no favors in Anglo-Jewish eyes by its perceived weakness. Raphael Langham's excellent work is an important and very valuable addition to the many recent studies of Anglo-Jewish history. William D. Rubinstein University of Aberystwyth Copyright © 2011 Purdue University

Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (review)

Reviewed by: Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero Aviva Ben-Ur Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, by Abigail Green. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 2010. 540 pp. $35.00. The scion of a wealthy Livornese Sephardic family, Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) made his fortune as a London stockbroker before, from his early 40s, devoting the rest of his life to philanthropic endeavors and the struggle for social and religious emancipation in the United Kingdom and abroad. Montefiore volunteered primarily on behalf of beleaguered Jews, but, in the cross-confessional spirit of mid-Victorian society, this "global celebrity" also made Middle Eastern Muslims and Christians recipients of his largesse and humanitarian-political intercession. Abigail Green, a historian specializing in modern history at the University of Oxford, is a descendant of the Sebag-Montefiore family on the distaff side. Despite her ancestry and the "hero" in the subtitle, Green's Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero is neither hagiography nor filiopietism. We read of Montefiore's snubby opposition in the 1850s to his congregation's newly elected Reform deputies and the resulting chaos and police intervention (p. 226), his ill-situated Jerusalem windmill (p. 328), the failure of his diplomacy to solve modern political antisemitism in Romania (p. 355), and his lack of vision for a coherent philanthropic plan (p. 396). Nor does Green fall into the biographical trap of separating a man's public from his private life, or assessing the latter as unworthy of the reader's attention. We learn of Montefiore's unbending refusal to ever again speak with his brother after the latter joined London's newly founded Reform congregation, his "tactless and ill-judged" condescension toward colleague Adolph Crémieux during the 1840 Damascus Affair (p. 155), and what Green considers Montefiore's "probable infidelity," which possibly resulted in illegitimate children (p. 295). Moses Montefiore was a man who transcended religious, communal, and national borders; Green's project therefore demanded a multi-lingual foray into archival and printed documents from three continents, as well as a bevy of research assistants, transcribers, and translators. Her family links only enhanced the reach of her sources, including oral traditions, family rituals, and—most notably—a fertility amulet Judith Montefiore acquired upon her visit to the Tomb of Rachel in 1827. Produced especially for her by Sephardic [End Page 171] rabbis who served as hereditary guardians of the monument, the amulet is the "earliest concrete evidence of a fertility cult" at this Bethlehem pilgrimage site (p. 80). Lady Montefiore's self-edited diary of her Eastern journey contains no hint of this nor of the agony she must have experienced, still childless in her early 40s. Green's retrieval of this artifact adds a special poignancy to the design for Judith's gravemarker: a replica of the Tomb of Rachel erected by her husband. Like no work before, this biography places Moses Montefiore's entire life within a broader historical context. Green focuses on the public domain, moving from one local or international political event to another, usually with a keen eye for Jewish culture and history. She sheds new light on the Anglo-Jewish colonization of Palestine movement by linking it to 1830s abolitionist plans to transport freed slaves to Africa and train them as farmers. Here, a greater focus on the Jewish context could have benefited Green's discussion. Montefiore's second trip to Jerusalem took place one year before 1840, which many Jews (and Christians) anticipated as millenarian. Around the same time, European Sephardi rabbis, including Sarajevo-born Judah Alkalai (1798-1878), had reinterpreted teshuva (Hebrew for repentance, or a "'return' to righteousness") as a literal return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, a precondition for national redemption. If Montefiore was staunchly orthodox, and—as Green argues—more so than Judith, his awareness of these Jewish trends might have been as important as broader socio-political movements. Sometimes, Green illuminates the context so brightly that one loses sight of Montefiore, and some chapters end up being more about the context rather than the man. For certain periods or themes, such as the Mortara Affair, rightly so. But this over-focus on context obscures Montefiore...

From Bola d'Amour to the Ultimate Cheesecake: 150 Years of Anglo-Jewish Cookery Writing

The Jewish Manual, published in Britain in 1846, is regarded as the first Anglo-Jewish cookery book. It has established its author Judith Montefiore, wife of British philanthropist Moses Montefiore, as a seminal cookery writer defining Jewish food in Britain. Yet the recipes contained in the cookery book no longer correspond to the construction of ‘Jewish’ food in modern Britain. The article surveys three groundbreaking Jewish cookery writers—Judith Montefiore, Florence Greenberg and Evelyn Rose—offering a close textual reading of their work to determine the historical and cultural processes which inform our ideas about the identity of Anglo-Jewish food.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND JEWS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY MALTA

This essay examines the role of Jews in Britain’s imperial strategy and asks whether Britain could have built its empire without them. Recent scholarship concerning Jews and the British Empire places Jews in the “informal empire”, in economic and other activities outside political rule. This was the case in nineteenth‐century Malta, where Jews established themselves in commercial activities in support of Britain’s military ambitions in the Mediterranean. They received some political recognition, though this was short‐lived. Despite the efforts of Moses Montefiore, the British government refused to yield space for building a synagogue. The success of Malta’s leading Jews, in the early and mid‐century, meant that they were never above suspicion. In the late nineteenth century, the British government shielded the Jewish community from an accusation of ritual murder, but this had more to do with promoting British interests vis‐à‐vis the Catholic Church in Malta than advancing Jewish interests. Colonial policy concerning Jews did not result from a coherent rationale concerning Jewish interests nor consistent Jewish influence.

The Emergence of the Ladino Press: The First Attempt at Westernization of Ottoman Jews (1842-1846)

This article discusses the emergence of the first Ladino periodical in the Ottoman Empire, Sha'arei Mizrach (Gates of the Orient), which came out in Izmir in 1845-1846. Based on the analysis of this newspaper and the contemporaneous European Jewish press, the essay clarifies the common misconception about the name and the background of the periodical's editor, and claims that it was published by a Jew of Italian extraction and a resident of Izmir in association with two Italian Jews from Trieste connected with Moses Montefiore. Sha'arei Mizrach lasted only a few months because it failed to receive enough subscriptions.

Thomas Hodgkin: Medical Immortal and Uncompromising Idealist

Thomas Hodgkin was born into a devout Quaker family in Pentonville, England, in 1798 (Table ​(Table11). His upbringing imbued him from early life with honesty, discipline, and concern for the less fortunate (1, 2). As a Quaker, Thomas wore plain clothes and spoke in a formal manner. At age 21, he wrote an “Essay on the Promotion of Civilization,” in which he criticized the imperialistic behavior of colonists that led to the degradation or death of North American Indians and other native peoples. Thomas also developed an interest in science. From 1817 until 1820 he served as apprentice to an apothecary and “walked the wards” at Guy's Hospital in London. While a medical student at Edinburgh, Hodgkin visited European medical centers during 1821–1822 and met Rene Laennec in Paris. Laennec had recently devised the stethoscope and taught Hodgkin how to use it. He received his medical degree from Edinburgh in 1823, the same year he met Moses Montefiore, a wealthy financier and philanthropist who was to become his lifelong patient and close friend. Table 1 Chronology of the life of Thomas Hodgkin In 1826, Hodgkin was appointed first lecturer in morbid anatomy and museum curator at the new Guy's Hospital Medical School in London. During the next 12 years at Guy's, Hodgkin made a number of major contributions (Figure ​(Figure11). Despite his brilliance Hodgkin was rejected for a clinical staff position in 1837, after which he resigned from Guy's Hospital. 1857 marked the first of five journeys with Moses Montefiore on behalf of Jews, Christians, and Arabs in various countries. In 1865 Samuel Wilks wrote his paper using the term “Hodgkin's disease.” In the following year Thomas Hodgkin died of dysentery in Palestine. He is buried in Jaffa. Figure 1 Thomas Hodgkin. Reproduced courtesy of Gordon Museum, Guy's Hospital, GKT, King's College London.

Rethinking the ?Islamic City? from the Perspective of Jewish Space

In December 1863, Moses Montefiore, the prominent British philanthropist and self-styled defender of world Jewry, came to Morocco. As had been the case with several of his previous visits to the Muslim world, his trip was motivated by reports of the mistreatment of his coreligionists: three Jews from the coastal town of Saffi had been falsely accused of conspiring to murder a Spanish tax collector. By the time Sir Moses arrived on the scene, one of the men had already been publicly executed in the main marketplace of Tangier, and the remaining two awaited judgment under disastrous conditions in the city's Kasbah (the symbolic if not always actual residence of the sultan).' Thanks no doubt to his great diplomatic skills, Montefiore secured the prisoners' freedom after just one brief meeting with the Spanish minister. He then headed south to Marrakesh to plead the case of Moroccan Jews more generally at the royal court. His efforts once again met with success: Sultan Muhammad IV was persuaded to enact a royal edict (dahir) promising that his Jewish subjects would henceforth be protected from oppression in accordance with Islamic law. A satisfied Sir Moses returned home to England. The Montefiore visit is often seen as a watershed in Moroccan Jewish history, insofar as it set into motion a pattern of foreign diplomatic

Disaster and Change in an Ottoman Sephardic Community: Moses Montefiore and the Monastir Fire of 1863

Disaster and Change in an Ottoman Sephardic Community: Moses Montefiore and the Monastir Fire of 1863

Rethinking the "Islamic City" from the Perspective of Jewish Space

In December 1863, Moses Montefiore, the prominent British philanthropist and self-styled defender of world Jewry, came to Morocco. As had been the case with several of his previous visits to the Muslim world, his trip was motivated by reports of the mistreatment of his coreligionists: three Jews from the coastal town of Saffi had been falsely accused of conspiring to murder a Spanish tax collector. By the time Sir Moses arrived on the scene, one of the men had already been publicly executed in the main marketplace of Tangier, and the remaining two awaited judgment under disastrous conditions in the city's Kasbah (the symbolic if not always actual residence of the sultan).1 Thanks no doubt to his great diplomatic skills, Montefiore secured the prisoners' freedom after just one brief meeting with the Spanish minister. He then headed south to Marrakesh to plead the case of Moroccan Jews more generally at the royal court. His efforts once again met with success: Sultan Muhammad IV was persuaded to enact a royal edict (dahir) promising that his Jewish subjects would henceforth be protected from oppression in accordance with Islamic law. A satisfied Sir Moses returned home to England. The Montefiore visit is often seen as a watershed in Moroccan Jewish history, insofar as it set into motion a pattern of foreign diplomatic [End Page 118] pressure intertwined with European Jewish involvement that would serve as a backdrop to Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco from that point onward. Aside from its broader ramifications, however, Montefiore's visit also left its mark—to some extent quite literally—on an altogether more local level. While in Marrakesh, Montefiore, despite being Jewish (not to mention of probable Moroccan descent),2 chose not to reside in the house in the city's Jewish quarter that had been prepared for him and the (Christian) physician accompanying him, as would have been customary for foreigners, especially a foreign Jew. Instead, the two men stayed in a much finer house in the medina, the Muslim residential and commercial area. And in so doing, they transgressed a fundamental rule of the so-called "Islamic city": the segregation of non-Muslims from the living spaces of the Muslim population. It is not surprising, then, that upon Montefiore's departure the house in question was immediately sealed up and "regarded as unclean and unfit for the dwelling of a true believer" thereafter.3 The "Islamic city," it may be recalled, is the model developed by colonial (mainly French) urbanists to describe the defining characteristics of cities in the Middle East and North Africa, implicitly if not explicitly in contrast to those of Europe.4 Among its central tenets is that Islam, which is understood as a fundamentally urban religion, gave rise to cities whose morphologies were determined primarily if not exclusively by the fulfillment of the religious obligations of Islam. Thus a "real" city is identified as such by the presence of institutions like a Friday mosque (jƒmi') for conducting prayers, a market complex or bazaar (s¡q), where the various "guilds" organized according to religious strictures were found, and communal baths (¬ammƒm) for maintaining ritual purity. No less critical to the model's coherence than the presence of the above institutions is the corresponding absence of any significant non-Muslim influence on the life, and hence topography, of the city. When it comes to Morocco, however, such an explanation for how the city looks and functions falters when confronted with the long and multi-valenced history of Moroccan Jewry. The only surviving indigenous religious minority in Morocco, Jews historically constituted up to 50 percent of the urban population and were by all accounts highly assimilated into Moroccan economic, social, and even political life. Nonetheless, in Morocco one institution existed to which the model's adherents could point in order to restore a degree of analytic integrity to the "Islamic city" and particularly its insistence on the...

Litigants and Neighbors: The Communal Topography of Ottoman Damascus

Litigants and Neighbors: The Communal Topography of Ottoman Damascus

Claude Montefiore and Liberal Judaism

Claude Montefiore was a member of what Chaim Bermant has aptly called ‘The Cousinhood’ – in other words, the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy. Montefiore was born in 1858, the year in which Lionel Rothschild became the first Jew to take his seat in the House of Commons. Montefiore’s father was a nephew of Moses Montefiore and his mother a daughter of Isaac Goldsmid, one of the founders of the non-sectarian University College, London and also of the West London Reform Synagogue.

Thomas Hodgkin: social activist.

Thomas Hodgkin's discovery of a lymph gland disorder is merely one event in a life of unusually varied public activities in the social reform and humanitarian movements of the mid-19th century. He wrote pamphlets on medical care for the working-class poor, public health, housing, sanitation, and the relief of cold, hunger, and unemployment. Hodgkin wrote about the problems arising from urban renewal and suburban development. His contributions to geographic explorations, anthropology, ethnology, and foreign affairs are virtually unknown today. Hodgkin's opposition to slavery and the slave trade involved him in the development of settlements in Africa for freed slaves and disputes with the abolitionists in America. He fought for social justice and human rights for native populations being oppressed by British foreign policy in South Africa and New Zealand. His criticism of the exploitation of Indians by the Hudson's Bay Company's fur trade contributed to a professional conflict in the highly politicized environment of Guy's Hospital and blocked advancement of his medical career. Closer to home he advocated reform of medical education and practice and sponsored adult education programs. As a member of its Senate, he helped in establishing London University, the first nonsectarian institution of higher learning in England. He lectured to working people on the means of preserving and promoting health and advocated prepaid medical care for the working poor. Concerned about unequal distribution of medical care, he opposed medical contracts to the lowest bidder and price-determined government plans for health care. He consistently maintained that the basic problems of the poor were not medical but socioeconomic. Since charity leaves nothing behind in exchange, Hodgkin was certain that greater benefits would result if charitable money was used to provide jobs. He denounced the evils of tobacco, practices of trade unions, and barbarous prize fights. On a trip to Jerusalem with Sir Moses Montefiore in 1866, Hodgkin contracted dysentery and died. He is buried in a protestant cemetery in Jaffa. His epitaph is fitting: "Nothing human was alien to him."