Montefiore, Moses, Sir, 1784-1885

Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, 1st Baronet, FRS; Born 24 October 1784, Livorno or Leghorn, Tuscany, Italy; Died 28 July 1885 (aged 100), Ramsgate, Kent, England; was a British financier and banker, activist, philanthropist and Sheriff of London; His grandfather, Moses Vita (Haim) Montefiore, had emigrated from Livorno to London in the 1740s, but retained close contact with the town, then famous for its straw bonnets. Montefiore was born while his parents, Joseph Elias Montefiore and his young wife Rachel, the daughter of Abraham Mocatta, a powerful bullion broker in London, were in the town on a business journey; he was their first child; The family returned to Kennington in London, where Montefiore went to school, but because of his family's precarious situation, Montefiore did not complete his schooling and he went out to work to help with the family's finances; In 1803 he entered the London Stock Exchange, but lost all of his clients' money in 1806 in a fraud perpetrated by Elkin Daniels; Between 1810 and 1814 Montefiore was part of the Surrey Militia; In 1812, Montefiore became a freemason, joining the Moira Lodge, No. 92 of the Premier Grand Lodge of England in London; In 1812, Moses Montefiore married Judith Cohen (1784–1862), daughter of Levy Barent Cohen. Her sister, Henriette (or Hannah) (1783–1850), married Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), for whom Montefiore's firm acted as stockbrokers; Montefiore retired from his business in 1820, and used his time and fortune for communal and civic responsibilities. In 1836 he became a governor of Christ's Hospital, the Bluecoat school, after assisting in the case of a distressed man who had appealed to Montefiore to help his soon-to-be-widowed wife and son; Physically imposing at 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m), he was elected Sheriff of London in 1837 and served until 1838. He was also knighted that same year by Queen Victoria and received a baronetcy in 1846 in recognition of his services to humanitarian causes on behalf of the Jewish people; Though somewhat lax in religious observance in his early life, after his first visit to the Holy Land in 1827, he became a strictly observant Jew. He was in the habit of traveling with a personal shohet (ritual slaughterer), to ensure that he would have a ready supply of kosher meat. Following this shift he exerted a strong influence in limiting the growth of the Reform Jewish movement in England of the time; In 1831, Montefiore purchased a country estate with twenty-four acres on the East Cliff of the then fashionable seaside town of Ramsgate; Soon afterwards, Montefiore purchased the adjoining land and commissioned his cousin, architect David Mocatta, to design a private synagogue, known as the Montefiore Synagogue. It opened with a grand public ceremony in 1833; Montefiore died in 1885, at age 100. He had no known children and his principal heir in both name and property was a nephew, Joseph Sebag Montefiore. The philanthropist Leonard Montefiore was a grand nephew of Montefiore; He was president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1835 to 1874, a period of 39 years, the longest tenure ever, and member of Bevis Marks Synagogue. As president, his correspondence with the British consul in Damascus Charles Henry Churchill in 1841–42 is seen as pivotal to the development of Proto-Zionism; In business, he was an innovator, investing in the supply of piped gas for street lighting to European cities via the Imperial Continental Gas Association. He was among the founding consortium of the Alliance Life Assurance Company, and a director of the Provincial Bank of Ireland; From retirement until the day he died, he devoted himself to philanthropy, particularly alleviating the distress of Jews abroad. He went to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1840 to liberate from prison ten Syrian Jews of Damascus arrested after a blood libel; to Rome in 1858 to try to free the Jewish youth Edgardo Mortara, who had been seized by the Catholic Church after an alleged baptism by a Catholic servant; to Russia in 1846 (where he was received by the Tsar) and 1872; to Morocco in 1864 and to Romania in 1867. It was these missions that made him a folk hero of near mythological proportions among the oppressed Jews of Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Levant; Montefiore is mentioned in Charles Dickens' diaries, in the personal papers of George Eliot, and in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. It is known that he had contacts with non-conformists and social reformers in Victorian England. He was active in public initiatives aimed at alleviating the persecution of minorities in the Middle East and elsewhere, and he worked closely with organisations that campaigned for the abolition of slavery. A Government loan raised by the Rothschilds and Montefiore in 1835 enabled the British Government to compensate plantation owners and thus abolish slavery in the Empire; At East Cliff Lodge, he established a Sephardic yeshiva (Judith Lady Montefiore College) after the death of his wife in 1862. On the grounds he built the elegant, Regency architecture Montefiore Synagogue and mausoleum modeled on Rachel's Tomb outside Bethlehem (whose refurbishment and upkeep he had paid for). Judith was laid to rest there in 1862, and Montefiore himself was buried there in 1885. In recent years, the site has become a source of controversy as real-estate developers are eyeing it for commercial development; ewish philanthropy and the Holy Land were at the center of Montefiore's interests. He traveled there by carriage and by ship seven times, sometimes accompanied by his wife. He visited there in 1827, 1838, 1849, 1855, 1857, 1866, and 1875. In Montefiore's time, these voyages were arduous and not without danger. He made his last journey there at the age of 91; In 1854 his friend Judah Touro, a wealthy American Jew, died having bequeathed money to fund Jewish residential settlement in Palestine. Montefiore was appointed executor of his will, and used the funds for a variety of projects aimed at encouraging the Jews to engage in productive labor. In 1855, he purchased an orchard on the outskirts of Jaffa that offered agricultural training to the Jews; In 1860, he built the first Jewish residential settlement and almshouse outside the old walled city of Jerusalem, today known as Mishkenot Sha'ananim. This became the first settlement of the New Yishuv. Living outside the city walls was dangerous at the time, due to lawlessness and bandits. Montefiore offered financial inducement to encourage poor families to move there. Later on, Montefiore established adjacent neighborhoods south of Jaffa Road, the Ohel Moshe neighborhood for Sephardic Jews and the Mazkeret Moshe neighborhood for Ashkenazi Jews.

Montefiore donated large sums of money to promote industry, education and health amongst the Jewish community in Palestine. The project, bearing the hallmarks of nineteenth-century artisanal revival, aimed to promote productive enterprise in the Yishuv. The builders were brought over from England. These activities were part of a broader program to enable the Old Yishuv to become self-supporting in anticipation of the establishment of a Jewish homeland; Montefiore built the Montefiore Windmill in an area which later became the Yemin Moshe neighbourhood, to provide cheap flour to poor Jews, established a printing press and textile factory, and helped to finance several Bilu agricultural colonies. He also attempted to acquire arable land for Jewish cultivation, but was hampered by Ottoman restrictions on land sale to non-Muslims. The Jews of Old Yishuv referred to their patron as "ha-Sar Montefiore" ('The Prince' or simply 'Prince' Montefiore), a title perpetuated in Hebrew literature and song.

A major source of information about the Yishuv, or Jewish community in Palestine during the 19th century, is a sequence of censuses commissioned by Montefiore, in 1839, 1849, 1855, 1866 and 1875. The censuses attempted to list every Jew individually, together with some biographical and social information (such as their family structure, place of origin, and degree of poverty);