'The most famous Jew in the world': Life, times, legacy of Moses Montefiore

The British baronet and religious Jew Moses Haim Montefiore, whose name is synonymous with the Jerusalem skyline’s iconic windmill, was born in Italy 240 years ago last week, on October 24. A giant in stature (6’3 ft; 190.5 cm.) and age (he lived to 101), Sir Moses, known in his time as “the most famous Jew in the world,” was larger than life in every aspect. 

Contemporary Jewish newspapers across the globe would report on his journeys, and Jewish communities around the world would pray for his success at the meetings with heads of state that he undertook, always attempting to improve the lot of the Jews everywhere he went.

Montefiore traveled in his private carriage whenever possible, always accompanied by his own ritual slaughterer so that he could have kosher meat served to him wherever he was. 

A friend of Queen Victoria’s, even before she became a monarch, Montefiore, who had been forced as a boy to leave school to help support his family, managed to rise through the ranks of Victorian society to become akin to royalty. In the meetings he had with rulers and leaders, he represented the Jews, but he appeared to have the weight of the entire British Empire behind him.

A remarkable, inspiring, and influential political, financial, philanthropic, and religious figure, Montefiore led a life marked by his continuous attempts to improve the lives of those who were suffering.

He notably donated large sums of money for the promotion of industry, education, and health among the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire. 

On his seven visits to Jerusalem and other places in the Land of Israel between 1827 and 1875, he established or helped finance a printing press; a textile weaving workshop; a trade school for girls; the first modern Jewish clinic in Jerusalem; several agricultural projects; Mishkenot Sha’ananim, originally an almshouse outside the walls of Jerusalem’s insalubrious Old City; the Montefiore Windmill to provide work and inexpensive flour to poor Jews; and other projects. He was also involved in the crucial task of carrying out a series of censuses of Jews living in the Holy Land.

Not just Jews

But it was not only Jews who were the beneficiaries of the efforts of this champion of the oppressed.

Back home in Victorian England, although a member of the high society (he was knighted in 1837 and made a baronet in 1846), Montefiore had contacts with social reformers, including Protestant Nonconformists, and he was involved in initiatives to alleviate the persecution of all minorities, as well as in the abolition of slavery in his country.

In 1835, he and his friend, business partner, and brother-in-law Nathan Mayer Rothschild organized a loan for the British government so that it could compensate plantation owners under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and thus be able to finally abolish slavery in the British Empire. 

He also later worked with the Goldsmids and the Rothschilds toward the emancipation of British Jews so that they might become members of parliament.

In 1866, true to his nature, with the help of The Times, Montefiore began a fundraising campaign by donating £200 and raising over £20,000 in relief funds for the Christians of Syria, the equivalent of millions of dollars today.

‘HaSar Montefiore’

Montefiore visited the Land of Israel in 1827, 1838, 1849, 1855, 1857, 1866, and 1875, making the first five trips with his wife, Judith. From 1839 to 1875, Montefiore organized six censuses of Jewish inhabitants and institutions. 

The Jews of the Old Yishuv (those who lived in the Land of Israel under Mamluk and Ottoman rule) referred to him as “HaSar Montefiore,” or “Prince Montefiore,” on occasion even going as far as to kiss the hem of his coat. For them, he embodied an almost messianic persona and became the recipient of hundreds of letters with requests for assistance that he attempted to fulfill. 

The son of Italian Jew Joseph Elias Montefiore (one of 17 children) and of Rachel (daughter of Sephardi Abraham Lumbroso de Mattos Mocatta, a bullion broker), Sir Moses, born in 1784 when his parents were in Leghorn (Livorno) Italy on business, grew up in the underprivileged London neighborhood of Kennington. 

Apprenticed to a grocer, the boy had to work hard, but eventually, with the help of their maternal uncle Moses Mocatta, he and his brother Abraham got their big break in 1803, becoming two of the only 12 Jews accepted as brokers in the London Stock Exchange that year. Three years later, however, he lost his license due to the fraud of a co-worker. 

From 1810 to 1814, for two years before and after he married Judith Cohen – her sister Henriette (Hannah) married Nathan Mayer Rothschild – daughter of the Ashkenazi Levi Barent Cohen, Montefiore served as a captain in the Surrey Militia, where he developed his stately bearing.

In 1814, he was appointed treasurer of the Bevis Marks Sephardi Synagogue in London. He attended synagogue regularly and was a member of the burial society there, known as the Society of Lavadores. Judith had been brought up as an observant Jew and knew Hebrew. 

Montefiore eventually returned to the stock exchange, where he began successfully investing with his brother-in-law (Rothschild), retiring from it in 1821.

Together with Rothschild, Montefiore was among the founders of the Imperial Continental Gas Association, which brought piped gas to the street lights of the main European cities in 1821. Three years later, the two friends were among the founders of the Alliance Assurance Company. Montefiore also became one of the original directors of the Provincial Bank of Ireland one year later.

In 1827, at the age of 42, childless and free to travel with his wife, Montefiore set off for the Land of Israel, returning as a much more observant Jew than when he had left, having decided to keep strictly kosher and observe the Shabbat laws entirely, even those that prohibited traveling on the day of rest. The Montefiores were horrified by the state of the Jews living there and decided to prioritize improving their lot.

A Zionist even before the term was coined (it was first used in 1885, the year of his death), Montefiore paid his seven visits to the Holy Land when journeys were undertaken by carriage, train, foot, and boat and were fraught with danger.

Devoted to the community

From their very first visit, Montefiore and Judith donated money for the promotion of health, education, and industry in the Jewish community.

A few years after his return to London, Montefiore decided to purchase an estate in the fashionable upper-class seaside resort of Ramsgate in Kent. The verse “If I forget you, O Jerusalem” was placed on the wall of a room in his Ramsgate home. In 1833, he built an adjacent synagogue. 

The following year, Montefiore met Princess Victoria at Ramsgate, three years before she was to become queen. She was staying nearby with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and Montefiore invited them to make use of his gardens, which were close to their estate. 

Montefiore’s large-scale and widespread charitable initiatives led him, in 1834, to be appointed governor of the charity school Christ’s Hospital (founded by King Henry VIII). The following year, he was elected sheriff of the City of London and Middlesex (all those who would become mayors had previously been sheriffs) and was responsible for judicial duties in the courts of law. In 1836, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.

Also in 1836, the Land of Israel experienced an earthquake that caused catastrophic damage to the northern communities of Tiberias and Safed, resulting in many deaths and much disease. Montefiore and his wife launched a relief program in 1837.

That same year, upon Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne, she knighted him for his “noble services.”On November 9, 1837, Montefiore wrote in his diary: “With the exception of the day I had the happiness of dedicating our synagogue at Ramsgate and the day of my wedding, [this is] the proudest day of my life... On m y kneeling to the Queen, she placed a sword on my left shoulder and said, ‘Rise, Sir Moses.’”

Global advocate 

Wherever Jews were oppressed, he traveled to relieve their suffering.

In 1840, Montefiore embarked on the first of a series of intense journeys, racing across continents and against time to argue the causes of Jews in trouble at various points on the globe. He traveled to Constantinople during the Damascus Affair to request that Sultan Abdulmejid I issue a firman, a decree against a blood libel accusing the Jews of murdering a Christian priest and his Muslim servant to use their blood in making matzah for Passover.

With the support of Henry John Temple (3rd Viscount Palmerston and future British prime minister from 1855-1858 and 1859-1865), Montefiore also visited the Khedive of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, to obtain the release of the imprisoned Jews. He refuted the allegations against them and secured their freedom.

In 1844, Montefiore established the Moroccan Relief Fund for the Jews of Mogador. 

Two years later, he traveled to Saint Petersburg to meet Tsar Nicholas I and request that he revoke a decree imposed upon the Pale of Settlement that included the expulsion of some Jews, along with educational and cultural restrictions.

Queen Victoria honored Montefiore by making him a baronet in 1846, and Montefiore then served as high sheriff of Kent in 1847, undertaking the duties of deputy lieutenant and magistrate. 

A couple of years later, he purchased an orange orchard on the outskirts of Jaffa to provide agricultural work and training to the Jews of the area and managed to bring attention to the famous Jaffa oranges.

Then, in 1859, he traveled to Rome to request the help of Pope Pius IX in the case of a boy who had been kidnapped by priests and baptized.

Three years later, Judith Montefiore died and was buried in the mausoleum adjacent to their Ramsgate home and synagogue. The mausoleum was modeled after the Tomb of Rachel on the road to Bethlehem (which Montefiore had refurbished on one of their voyages to the Land of Israel). He said that in her loss, he felt like Jacob when Rachel died. Montefiore left instructions that a Jerusalem stone be placed over his grave when it was his turn to join her.

After his wife’s death, Montefiore established, in her memory, the Judith Lady Montefiore College, a Sephardi yeshiva at East Cliff Lodge in Ramsgate.

In 1864, he fought blood libels again by meeting with sultan Sidi Mohammed IV in his palace in Marrakesh and requesting that the ruler issue a firman to protect the Jews.

During this and other of Montefiore’s missions, Jews in synagogues across England and other countries prayed fervently for him to find grace in the eyes of rulers he met with. 

In 1867, Montefiore traveled to Bucharest to ask Prince Carol I to revoke Romania’s anti-Jewish laws.

Over the years, Sir Moses was promoted to the highest positions in Bevis Marks synagogue and served as its warden-president six times.

As for his synagogue at Ramsgate, he offered every young couple who married there a monetary gift; and in an effort to encourage what to him was the unification of the Jewish people through mixed Sephardi-Ashkenzai couples such as his and his brother’s marriages, he doubled the sum for a “mixed marriage.”

From 1838 to 1874, he was president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The Moses Montefiore Memorial Fund for needy Jews in the Land of Israel and elsewhere was established in 1874 to celebrate his 90th birthday.

Ramsgate, where every local church and charity was a beneficiary of his philanthropic mindset, would celebrate Montefiore’s 99th and 100th birthdays in high style.

On Montefiore’s 99th birthday, in 1883, Queen Victoria, her husband, Albert, Prince of Wales, and hundreds of distinguished British citizens sent the baronet letters and telegrams of congratulations. That day was a public festival in Ramsgate.

In Russia, to mark Montefiore’s 100th birthday – celebrated in Jewish communities across the world – HaMelitz, the first Hebrew-language newspaper in that vast country, ran the headline “From Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses” – a play on the inscription that appears on the grave of Maimonides in Tiberias.

That same year, in a Russian shtetl called Motol, an 11-year-old Chaim Weizmann, who was to become one of the founding fathers of Zionism and the first president of the State of Israel, wrote a letter in Hebrew to his rebbe, outlining his philosophy for the Jewish future and noting that all Jews should “thank the patriot Moshe Montefiore.”

The famed Montefiore Windmill Jerusalem landmark

As Moses Montefiore traveled back to England in 1855, he thought about the almshouses he was going to have built for the poor of Jerusalem, to be known as Mishkenot Sha’ananim, and also realized that it made sense to provide the needy with a means of livelihood.

He decided to use further funds from the Judah Touro bequest to enable the Jews to produce their own flour by building a windmill on a piece of land he owned, known as the Judy and Moses Orchard.

When he returned home to Ramsgate, Montefiore contacted the Holman Brothers of Canterbury, Kent (previously of Ramsgate) millwrights to design and build the windmill in the style of Kentish mills. 

Little did he know that the windmill was to become a famed Jerusalem landmark. Its sails and mechanism were engineered and constructed in Canterbury and, in 1857, shipped to Beirut, and from there to the Jaffa port. 

Using ropes, it took 40 men with small boats to bring the cargo ashore. This was followed by camels and donkeys that carted the machinery 72 km. to Jerusalem, over four months. 

The cornerstone of the mill tower, made from locally sourced Jerusalem stone, was laid on May 5, 1857, and the structure was completed by 1860. The work was supervised by the three Holman brothers – Thomas Richard, John James, and Charles – along with other millwrights who had also traveled from Kent.

The windmill was only in use for 16 years, but it was another of Montefiore’s inspirational agricultural projects that were to lead to more successful spin-offs in the creation of the Jewish state that was on the verge of being born.

The Ramsgate miracle

In 1948, during the last days of the British Mandate, the windmill was miraculously saved from destruction. Following the United Nations’ decision to partition British Mandate Palestine between Jews and Arabs, and the latter’s refusal to accept this decision, fighting broke out. This led to the Hagana (the precursor to the IDF) installing a military post with a machine gun at the top of the mill. As a result, the last British high commissioner, Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham, gave orders to destroy the windmill. 

About to carry out this mission, British soldiers suddenly noticed the Montefiore plaques and the name of their hometown, “Ramsgate,” on the windmill’s walls. They bravely chose to “reinterpret” their orders and only blew off the top of the mill.

Permanent exhibit and winery

In 1982, The Jerusalem Foundation was instrumental in the creation of a permanent exhibition dedicated to Montefiore inside the windmill. Over the years, it also has supported various educational activities about the famed landmark.

From 2008-2012, the Jerusalem Foundation, in association with the Dutch-based Christians for Israel charity, decided to restore the windmill to full working order. A Holman family member and the Holman Brothers archives were enlisted, along with British windmill expert Vincent Pargeter and Dutch engineers Arjen Lont and Willem Dijkstra.

The reconstruction was celebrated on July 25, 2012, with the reinstallation of the windmill’s sails in the presence of Montefiore’s great-great-great-grandnephew Adam Montefiore (The Jerusalem Post wine columnist and first Montefiore to make aliya) and his brother, historian (and author of Jerusalem:The Biography) Simon Sebag Montefiore; dignitaries; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The mill’s sails continue to turn for two hours every day. There are monthly tours of the interior mechanism that is still maintained by Dutch engineers, with the aid of Christians for Israel, who come to Jerusalem once a year and stay at Mishkenot Sha’ananim. The Jerusalem Foundation, through its charity Mishkenot Sha’ananim, has converted the windmill into an educational site and a working tourist attraction. 

As well as a café, the windmill also houses a visitor’s center for the Jerusalem Vineyard Winery, which uses grapes grown in vineyards in the Jerusalem Mountains, the Judean Plains, and the slopes of Mount Carmel to produce its wines. 

The wines of the Jerusalem Vineyard Winery Windmill Project, which bear a drawing of the Montefiore windmill on their labels, are part of the Jerusalem Agricultural Association’s wineries. 

For more information, visit jerusalemwineries.co.il/en.

The Montefiore carriage

From 1834, Moses Montefiore utilized his personal carriage to travel through Europe, Russia, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire on philanthropic missions to assist far-flung Jewish communities. This same carriage that had transported him on many adventures was drawn through his hometown of Ramsgate during the celebrations that marked Montefiore’s 100th birthday. 

On January 11, 1907, The Jewish Chronicle reported that the carriage had disappeared after the ceremony and was presumed to have been destroyed.

Interestingly, a similar carriage belonging to the Montefiores was eventually discovered in the possession of Rev. William Hechler in Vienna. Lithuanian-born artist and sculptor Boris Schatz (1866-1932) had it shipped to Jerusalem in 1910. It was kept in the backyard of the Bezalel Art School he founded. Exposed to the weather, it badly needed restoration, which took place in 1967.

In 1910, when Schatz had brought the carriage to Jerusalem, the Ha’or newspaper printed the following on February 18 of that year:

“In 1816, the Montefiores decided to travel to the cities of France and Italy. At the time, no railway had been built and the roads were so winding and rutted that the traveler was forced to walk half of the way and suffer greatly from the sun’s heat by day and frost by night. What did Sir Montefiore do? He built a wonderful traveling coach, a carriage unlike any other at the time in beauty, size, and strength, costing four thousand and two and seventy francs.” 

The Jerusalem municipality restored the carriage and put it on permanent display next to the Montefiore Windmill in 1976. 

The Israel Film Archive at the Jerusalem Cinematheque has footage of Montefiore’s carriage being brought to the place of honor it now occupies, a glass case opposite the Montefiore Windmill. The procession left “from the backyard of Bezalel Art School to Mishkenot Sha’ananim,” with the carriage driven by Yihya Dahabani (Theodor Herzl’s private coachman), pulled by two horses, and pushed from behind as it followed a children’s marching orchestra. 

Then-Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek; Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israeli Oriental Studies Prof. Yosef Yoel Rivlin; and British circuit judge, barrister, and politician Harold Sebag Montefiore followed at the rear in a convertible.

View the footage at jfc.org.il/en/news_journal/60869-2/98156-2/

The carriage was destroyed by a fire in 1986. Four years later, the Jerusalem Foundation undertook to have it reconstructed by artist Itamar Newman, making use of remaining fragments from the original. It was reinstalled in its display case, where it can be viewed today.

Montefiore’s Jerusalem neighborhoods

• 1860: Mishkenot Sha’ananim became the first Jewish residential settlement and housing for the Old City poor. The Montefiores, appalled by the conditions inside the city, wanted the poor to have a safe and sanitary place to live outside the walls. The land was bought from Ahmad Agha Duzdar, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem from 1838-1863. The funds came from the estate of American businessman Judah Touro, who had appointed his friend Moses Montefiore executor of his will, charging him to make use of the capital to alleviate conditions for the Jews in the Holy Land.
• 1883: A further two neighborhoods, both situated in present-day Nahlaot, Ohel Moshe (”Moses’ tent”), originally built with the Sephardi community in mind, and Mazkeret Moshe (“memorial to Moses”), intended for Ashkenazim, were founded for additional Old City residents who wanted to move out of the Old Yishuv, the original settlement. They were paid for by funds from Montefiore.

• 1892-1894: Seven years after the death of Montefiore, the now upmarket Yemin Moshe (“Moses’ right hand”) neighborhood was established next to the Mishkenot Sha’ananim almshouses and opposite Mount Zion, to further alleviate the overcrowding in the Old City. Paid for by the Montefiore Welfare Fund, the neighborhood originally had two synagogues and a communal oven.
• 1906: The Zichron Moshe (“memorial for Moses”) neighborhood was built around Jerusalem’s third Jewish school (named Simon von Lamel), close to Mea She’arim, by Jews belonging to the Enlightenment movement, making it popular with Jerusalem’s intellectuals and wealthier inhabitants. It was paid for by Elise Herz Lamel of Vienna, in memory of her father, Simon von Lamel. Over the years, it has become an ultra-Orthodox enclave. 
• 1923: Kiryat Moshe was a garden suburb founded on the west side of Jerusalem by a National Religious group with funding from the Moses Montefiore Testimonial Fund in London and named for its benefactor. The neighborhood was originally cordoned off on Shabbat to discourage vehicles from entering. 

Montefiore’s six censuses

The six censuses that Sir Moses Montefiore commissioned between 1839 and 1875 are a historical, sociological, and genealogical record of Jewish life in the Land of Israel of that period.

According to the Montefiore censuses, in 1839 the total Jewish population of the Land of Israel was 6,173; in 1849 it was 8,722; in 1855 it was 9,499; in 1866 it was 12,633; and in 1875 it was 18,672. Records include personal and family details, countries of origin, and occupations. An estimated less than 1% of the Jewish residents refused to participate.

Nine hundred and sixty-eight Jewish institutions were surveyed; they included agricultural communities, benevolent funds, burial societies, synagogues, yeshivot, and establishments that cared for the orphaned, poor, and infirm.

The Montefiore Endowment website includes the 25,535 families listed in the censuses, together with the 968 institutions that were surveyed.

For access to these, go to montefioreendowment.org.uk/census-search/