Moses Montefiore

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Moses Montefiore (100th birthday, 1884)

Sir Moses Montefiore, 1st Baronet FRS (also Montefiori ; born October 24, 1784 in Livorno , Italy , † July 28, 1885 in Ramsgate , Kent ) was a British entrepreneur and Sephardic - Jewish philanthropist who is considered a pioneer of Zionism .

Life

Moses Montefiore came from an old Italian-Jewish family. His parents Joseph Elias Montefiore and Rachel Montefiore had married less than a year before he was born. Moses Montefiore was the couple's first child. Like many other Italian Jews, the family adopted their place of origin in their family names. For the Montefiores, this was the northern Italian city of Montefiore Conca in Emilia-Romagna . The couple was already living in London at that time . Joseph Elias Montefiore had to travel to Italy on business and his wife insisted on coming with them. So Moses Montefiore was born in Livorno.

Montefiore grew up in London. After finishing school, he began working in the tea trade and became one of the City's twelve jew brokers . In 1812 he married Judith Cohen, a daughter of Levi Barent Cohen , whose sister Nathan Mayer Rothschild married. In 1824 he withdrew from the business with his brother Abraham and devoted himself to political activities.

After his first trip to Palestine in 1827, he became a devout Jew and came up with the plan to promote emigration to Eretz Israel financially as well as through industrial and agricultural settlements. As the highest administrative officer ( Sheriff of London from 1837), the almost two meter tall Montefiore was ennobled by Queen Victoria as a Knight Bachelor on November 13, 1837 , appointed High Sheriff of Kent in 1845 and on July 23, 1846, the first British Jew to be hereditary baronet , of East Cliff-lodge in the Isle of Thanet and County of Kent.

From 1835 to 1874 Montefiore was President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews , the most important organization of British Jewry, with several interruptions . In 1840 he was sent to the Middle East to mediate together with the French Adolphe Crémieux and the orientalist Salomon Munk in the Damascus affair what they were successful in. After weeks of negotiations with the Egyptian governor, the accused Jews were released from Damascus and the Egyptian Jews were legally equated with other religious groups.

Montefiore also campaigned for the interests of Russian Jews and traveled from England to Russia in 1846 to prevent the forced conscription of the Jews there into the Russian army, as planned by Tsar Nicholas I. From 1839 he was accompanied on all his travels by the orientalist Louis Loewe , who acted as his interpreter and secretary in all oriental languages, including Hebrew , and as an assistant in his public activities.

Montefiores windmill, 2009

In 1857 he had twenty houses and an eighteen-meter-high windmill built outside of Jerusalem's old town, which is now used for scholarship holders. To prevent the persecution of Jews, he also traveled to Morocco in 1863 and to Romania in 1867 .

Montefiore was a member of the Freemasonry Association , his mother lodge was the Mount Moriah Lodge in London . Masonic lodges such as the lodge founded in London in 1864, the lodge founded in Glasgow in 1888 and the lodge founded in Tel Aviv in 1996 still bear his name.

Leaving no children behind, his baronet title expired on his death in 1885.

Honors

literature

  • Lucien Wolf : Sir Moses Montefiore. A centennial biography. With extracts from letters and journals . Murry, London 1884 ( digitized version )
  • Abigail Green : Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero , Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2010, ISBN 9780674048805 .
  • Myrtle Franklin and Michael Bor: Sir Moses Montefiore 1784-1885 , Vanguard Press, 1984, ISBN 9780814909027

Web links

Commons : Moses Montefiore  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. Abigail Green: Moses Montefiore , Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-674-04880-5
  2. Lucien Wolf: Sir Moses Montefiore - A centennial biography , Murry, London, 1884, pp. 1 and 2
  3. Lucien Wolf: Sir Moses Montefiore - A centennial biography , Murry, London, 1884, p. 22
  4. Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
  5. The London Gazette : No. 19558, pp. 2921 f. , November 14, 1837.
  6. a b Baronetage MONTEFIORE of Isle of Thanet, Kent at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
  7. ^ The London Gazette: 20618, 2391 , June 30, 1846.
  8. ^ Robert A. Minder: Freemason Politicians Lexicon. Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2004, ISBN 3-7065-1909-7 .
  9. Moses Montefiore Lodge # 78 on the Freemason Magazine website . Retrieved November 19, 2010