MOSES MONETEFIORE: A MAN OF FORTUNE
APRIL 29, 2010
Fortune’s Ambassador
A folk hero to the persecuted, a man of fortune who helped the less fortunate.
By WALTER LAQUEUR
Moses Montefiore, a world-renowned figure in the 19th century, was virtually forgotten by the 20th and is remembered today, at times, simply by the resonance of his name. A hospital in the Bronx is named for him, another in Pittsburgh, and a Jewish quarter in Jerusalem just outside the Old City. The accomplishments of some of Montefiore’s descendants—including a pugnacious Anglican bishop—may remind us the progenitor’s renown, but his story certainly needs to be retold. It is a remarkable one.
Born in Livorno in 1784 to an Italian-Jewish family with British connections, Montefiore moved to London with his family when he was a small child. He began his working life in London’s merchant world and then becoming a broker at the stock exchange. He had a most spectacular career, marrying into the Rothschild family and eventually joining its banking enterprise. By an early age he had acquired a great fortune. He was accepted by the best social clubs and even became a member of the Royal Society. He was knighted at the age of 51 and made sheriff of the city of London, a largely ceremonial position but a highly prestigious one.
As Abigail Green (herself a descendant of the family) tells us in her thoughtful biography, Montefiore had a reputation for the utmost probity. There may have been, it is true, a darker side to his character—he seems to have been guilty of occasional philandering—but we know virtually nothing about it, in part because his private correspondence was burned after his death.
Montefiore was a man of probity in a larger, public sense. As much as he liked making money, he liked even more giving it away to those who needed it more than he did. And so, at what will now be considered early middle age, he retired from business and devoted the rest of his life (he died in 1885, at the age of 101) to acting as a one-person first-aid flying brigade, donating his money to worthy causes and traveling to places where his brethren in faith were persecuted—from Morocco to Palestine, from Russia and Rumania. He became a folk hero of the persecuted, who attributed to him extraordinary powers. He traveled everywhere at a time when travel was often difficult. He went Jerusalem for the last time at age 91, braving cholera and pirates.
It is a little hard for us to imagine Montefiore’s public role, since there is no equivalent today. He was roving foreign minister and emissary of a people without a state. In many places they called him “sar”—a Hebrew word for minister, a person of great influence. People attributed to him almost magical powers.
The belief in Montefiore’s omnipotence was of course exaggerated. Not all his missions were successful. He could hardly influence harsh czarist policy toward Russia’s Jewish subjects, and there were narrow limits to what he could achieve in the Ottoman Empire even in its weakened state in the 19th century. But even symbolism was important. That Montefiore had been received for an audience by Czar Nicholas I, not known as a philo-Semite, did matter. The czar had given orders, on the occasion of Montefiore’s visit to the Russian capital, that the guard in front of his palace be constituted of Jewish soldiers, whom he praised as being as brave as the ancient Maccabeans.
Montefiore’s intervention did help at the time of the Damascus scandal (1840), when local Jews were accused of blood libel (slaughtering Christian clergymen to use their blood for Passover) and some of them were tortured and killed. Montefiore alleviated the misery in Palestine, Morocco and other places by generously financing new initiatives aimed at providing better health services and better education and curtailing the abuses of a hostile bureaucracy in Eastern Europe and parts of the Ottoman Empire.
To what did he owe his success? He was a man of imposing stature and great dignity. Britain at the time was a great power, and he was known to have influential friends in the highest circles. But there must have been in addition some personal qualities that made him likable and persuasive—a person not to be ignored or trifled with.
Montefiore had not been particularly religious in his younger years but became more observant later on, and Jerusalem was closest to his heart. On his four-poster bed in Ramsgate, the English town where he lived for part of his life, there was the inscription: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem” (Psalms 137). Jerusalem was a miserable place at the time—and remained so for years after. The situation of the Jews there, existing in abject poverty, was certainly miserable—the great majority lived from handouts from their more fortunate and pious co-religionists in Europe. Montefiore tried to help in many ways. He built alms houses and, perhaps most important, bought farm land to encourage young Jews to engage in productive labor. At one stage there seems to have been a chance for obtaining from the Ottomans something approaching political autonomy for the Jews, provided that European Jews would come with their money and help in the development of the
country. But Montefiore ruefully admitted that he did not know a single Jew in Britain who would settle there.
Ms. Green writes deftly and tells Montefiore’s story with a admirable thoroughness. (She is herself a professional historian.) “Moses Montefiore” is mercifully free of academic theory. It is exactly what a good biography should be—fair and illuminating without ever descending to hagiography. Still, it is clear that Montefiore was a genuinely good man. Their number in history is not substantial, and praise should be given where it is due.
Mr. Laqueur is the author, most recently of “Best of Times, Worst of Times: Memoirs of a Political Education” (University of New England Press, 2010).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703465204575208361266632790.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion#printMode
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