Leslie Mitchell
Uniting The Diaspora
Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero
By Abigail Green
Harvard University Press 540pp £24.95 order from our bookshop
Once a year, apparently, there are strange rustlings in Ramsgate. Members of the Haredi sect descend on the town to honour a man who was from a very different Jewish tradition. Quite simply, Sir Moses Montefiore was a man of such formidable reputation that all strands of Jewry would be happy to claim him as their own. This intriguing and well-researched book explains why.
Montefiore was allegedly one of the richest men in nineteenth-century Britain. He had come to great wealth by working prodigiously hard, and by marrying a Barent Cohen, who was in turn related to the Rothschilds. The clan carried the financial burden of the Napoleonic Wars on behalf of
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