Drawing on her magisterial new biography, Green revisits Montefiore’s career as a campaigner for Jewish rights at home and abroad. She shows how he leveraged business contacts with men like the anti-slavery campaigner Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton and the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell to bring Jews into the mainstream of British politics during the era of slave emancipation and the Great Reform Act. The alliance Montefiore forged with the evangelical and dissenting middle classes in the name of ‘civil and religious liberty’ would enable Montefiore to engage a broad political coalition in support of international Jewish relief as a humanitarian cause during the Damascus Affair of 1840 and the decades that followed.
Abigail Green is Tutor and Fellow in Modern History at Brasenose College, Oxford. She is the author of Fatherlands: State-building and Nationhood in 19th century Germany, and of Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero. Her wide-ranging interests include regionalism and nationalism in Germany, humanitarian philanthropy and religious internationalism.
