Herbert Bentwich

Herbert Bentwich (born May 11, 1856 in Whitechapel , London ; died June 25, 1932 in Jerusalem ) was a British lawyer and Zionist.

Life

Bentwich came from a family of Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. In 1880 he married Susannah Solomon, whose Jewish parents had emigrated from Prague and Vienna. They had eleven children, including the British Crown Attorney Norman Bentwich , who was appointed Attorney General in the British League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1920. Israel Friedlaender was a son-in-law.

From 1872 Bentwich studied law at University College London , which at the time was the only English university that accepted Jews and other non- Anglicans . After completing his bachelor's degree , he became a solicitor in the City of London . For financial reasons he had to postpone his wish to train as a barrister until 1901. It was not until 1903 that he was admitted to the Inner Temple . Bentwich became a specialist in copyright law , representing the publisher Raphael Tuck & Sons . He was related and friends with the publisher Adolph Tuck (1854–1926) who had emigrated from Prussia . Instead of working as a lawyer, he preferred to work as an editor, acquired a law journal in 1908 and was its author.

Bentwich was already active in the early years for English Judaism and, in the 1880s, when the assimilation pressure of English society, but also the assimilitation desire of his co-religionists increased, initiated teaching centers for middle-class Jews in north London. He also opposed the marriage of Jews to members of other denominations. He was among the founders of the "Association of Maccabeans", which promoted settlement opportunities for the persecuted Jews in Palestine after the pogroms of the 1890s in Tsarist Russia . Its first president was Bentwich's brother-in-law Solomon Joseph Solomon . In 1897 a group of Maccabeans, including the writer Israel Zangwill , took a trip to Palestine. In 1899 he was a co-founder of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland . From 1905 to 1919 he was the Grand Commander of the Maccabeans, who founded a settlement company in 1911 that acquired land in the Gezer region in Palestine, but the project failed. Bentwich was a leading member of the English section of Chibbat Zion and made Theodor Herzl public in England. He was a guest at the second and third Zionist congresses . Herzl visited him repeatedly in London and at his country estate in Birchington , Kent , which he acquired in 1900. Bentwich named his house “Carmelcourt” there, alluding to Mount Carmel, and hoisted the Zionist flag on festive days .

For the Jewish Colonial Trust he acted as a syndic and drafted the statutes of the Anglo-Palestine Bank . During the First World War he was a member of a Zionist advisory group for Chaim Weizmann in the preparation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. As a representative of the B'nai B'rith , at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 , he demanded civil rights for Jews in Central and Eastern European countries, who now became independent at the end of the war. He was President of the Maccabeans from 1927 to 1932. In 1929 he finally moved to Jerusalem .

Fonts (selection)

• with Lewis Edmunds: The law of copyright in designs . London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1908
• mit William Henry Stoker: The Military Service Acts practice: containing the consolidated acts, proclamations, regulations and orders, with notes of cases and tribunal decisions . London: Stevens and Sons, 1918
• with Norman De Mattos Bentwich; Frank Safford: The practice of the Privy council in judicial matters in appeals from courts of civil, criminal and admiralty jurisdiction and in appeals from ecclesiastical and prize courts, with the statutes, rules and forms of procedure . Sweet & Maxwell, London 1926

literature

• Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1971, Volume 4, Col. 556
• Margery Bentwich and Norman Bentwich: Herbert Bentwich: The Pilgrim Father . Gesher, Jerusalem, 1940
• Hadassah F. Davis: Dreams and their consequences: a memoir of the Bentwich family, 1880-1922 . Pafnuty Press, 2003
• Hilary L. Rubinstein, Bentwich, Herbert (1856–1932) , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed May 3, 2013
• Stuart Cohen: English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1895-1920 . Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1982
• Ari Shavit : My promised land . Translation from the American by Michael Müller and Susanne Kuhlmann-Krieg. Munich: Bertelsmann, 2015

Web links

• Literature by and about Herbert Bentwich in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hilary L. Rubinstein: Bentwich, Herbert (1856–1932), lawyer and Zionist leader , in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online
2. ↑ Stuart Cohen: English Zionists and British Jews , 1982, passim