MONTEFIORE, SIR MOSES HAIM Jewish philanthropist, was born at Leghorn on Oct. 24, 1784, of a family of Jewish merchants who had settled at Ancona and Leghorn in the 17th century. His uncle purchased for him the right to practice as one of the 12 Jewish brokers licensed by the city of London, and Montefiore entered the Stock Exchange, where he amassed a fortune sufficient to enable him to retire in By his marriage with Judith, daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, whose sister was the wife of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, a close business connection between the houses of Rothschild and Monte fiore was established. From his 43rd year Montefiore devoted all his energies to ameliorating the lot of his co-religionists. On his return from his first pilgrimage to Palestine in 1837, which resulted in a friendship with Mohammed Ali, Montefiore assisted the British Jews in their struggle to obtain full political and civil rights. In 1837 he became the City of London's second Jewish sheriff, and was knighted.
In 1838, accompanied by Lady Montefiore, he started on a sec ond voyage to Palestine, in order to submit to Mohammed Ali a scheme for Jewish colonization in Syria. Though political dis turbances rendered his efforts again unsuccessful, the year 184o brought Montefiore once more before Mohammed to plead for some Jews imprisoned at Damascus. He obtained their release, and also wrung a decree from the Porte giving Jews throughout Turkey the utmost privileges accorded to aliens. In 1846 the threatened re-issue in Russia of an Imperial ukase (first promul gated in 1844) ordering the withdrawal of all Jews from within 5o versts of the German and Austrian frontiers, caused Montefiore to interview the tsar, and he succeeded in getting the ukase rescinded. On his return, Queen Victoria, on the recommendation
of Sir Robert Peel, made him a baronet. In 1859 a case of in justice brought Montefiore to the gates of the Vatican, and four years later he obtained from the Sultan, Abdul Aziz, the con firmation of his predecessor's decrees in favour of the Jews. The year 1864 found him in Morocco combating an outbreak of anti Semitism ; 1866 in Syria, relieving the distress resulting from a plague of locusts and an epidemic of cholera; and 1867 in Ru mania, pleading the cause of the Jews with Prince Charles. His seventh and last pilgrimage to the Holy Land was made in 1875, of which he wrote an account in his Narrative of a Forty Days' Sojourn in the Holy Land, published in that year. The last decade of his life was passed upon his estate near Ramsgate, in Kent, where he died on July 28, 1885. Montefiore was a strictly ortho dox Jew, scrupulously observant of the Scriptures; in his grounds he had a synagogue built where services were held twice a day, a college where ten rabbis lived and expounded the Jewish law, and a mausoleum for himself and Lady Montefiore, who died in 1862.
See The Diaries of Sir M. Montefiore and Lady Montefiore, 1812 1883 (189o, 2 vols.) ; Lucien Wolf, Sir M. Montefiore (1884) ; E. Wolbe, Sir M. Montefiore (1909).