The Maccabaean

THE Jewish people have always avoided erecting memorials of bronze or marble to their great men. They have always regarded the memorials which the dead have raised for themselves in the hearts of the people as worthier and more enduring. The Jewish race has not deviated from this custom down to the present day, and yet the memory of its illustrious sons is cherished and perpetuated, and it exercises everywhere a beneficient influence.

On the ıoth of the month of Ab of the past Jewish year was a quarter of a century since the death at patriarchal age of a man who, in the days of our fathers and grandfathers, displayed a ceaseless endeavour on behalf of the Jewish people, and whose beneficent activity yielded results that continue down to the present day. Moses Montefiore, the scion of a noble family that had been driven from Spain in the year of the great expulsion, was born on the 8th of Cheshvan, 5645 (October 24, 1784), and throughout the hundred years of his life he devoted himself incessantly tc, the national cause of the Jewish people. Whenever and wherever it was necessary to appeal on behalf of his oppressed people, he showed a marvellous activity. Now he was in the wintry clime of Russia, now under the burning sun of the Barbary States, next in his own English mother- country, and on the morrow in the Arabic Orient seething with unrest. The power of his name, the influence and esteem that he enjoyed, and the indefatigable endeavours that he put forth, were crowned with success often enough; and even his atiempts that practically failed were nevertheless of considerable moral worth.

Sir Moses Montefiore was a national Jew in the fullest sense of the word. He regarded the honor and welfare of his race above everything else. Even his marriage must be regarded as a proof of his racial pride. In espousing Judith Cohen, he broke

through the prejudice of the Sephardim of Northern Europe, who had hitherto scorned to ally themselves with the Ashkenazim. Nor had he any grounds to regret this step, for Judith Montefiore was a worthy consort who for fifty years co-operated with her husband in all his benevolent undertakings. In his native country, England, he took his full share in the struggle for the civil emancipation of hıs fellow-Jews. He accepted the high office of Sheriff of London and Middlesex in 1837, not because he thought of any self-aggrandisement, but rather because honor was thereby done to his race. In 1845 he hastened to Russia in order to appeal on behalf of his brethren. He obtained a ukase which allowed the Jews to acquire estates and landed property and to enter the commercial guilds. But on the whole he hardly achieved any greater success here than when he attempted later to reclaim from the Catholic Church the child Edgar Mortara, who had been violently robbed from his parents. In other countries, too, where Jews were and still are brutally treated, in Roumania and Morocco, he intervened and tried to obtain from tke rulers an amelioration of the lot of his brethren. He undertook all these labors with the greatest willingness on behalf of his race, to which he clung with perfervid love.

Out of his love for his nation arose a similar devotion to the land in which the glorious history of Israel was enacted, and to which, despite all the persecution and oppression which they had to endure, the Jews remained faithful. In 1827 he was able for the first time, accompanied by his wife, to realize his longing to visit the land of his forefathers. The acquaintance which he then made of the Khedive Mohammed Ali enabled him on his second journey in 1838 to obtain from him a legal concession for the establishment of some hundred Jewish settlements in Pale-