Said Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, “There are three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of royalty, but the crown of a good name is above them all [1].” Sir Moses Montefiore [2] had the crown of a good name, but such a crown can come with negative as well as positive consequences.
Montefiore was well known internationally for his concern for persecuted Jewish communities, his involvement in developing Palestine, his wealth and his generosity. Queen Victoria, who had stayed at his seaside home in Ramsgate when she was a child, made him a baronet in 1846 in recognition of his services to humanitarian causes on behalf of the Jewish people.
Sir Moses Montefiore’s home in Ramsgate, England
Although he had visited Alexandria, Constantinople, Rome, Russia, and Romania, Montefiore had never visited Cape Town – perhaps because its small Jewish population did not need to be rescued. Even so, his good name on account of his wealth and generosity was known to the local inhabitants.
Born in Leghorn (Livorno), Italy on 24 October 1784 to a visiting British Sephardi family, Moses Montefiore left school early to help support his struggling family financially, working for a wholesale tea merchant and grocer. Knowing poverty firsthand, when he became wealthy later, he was always willing to involve himself in trying to alleviate poverty endured by others, particularly in Jewish communities at risk.
By the time he was 20 Montefiore had entered the London Stock Exchange, but all his clients’ money was lost through a fraud. In 1812, he married Judith Cohen (1784–1862), whose sister was married to Nathan Mayer Rothschild and with whose assistance he rejoined the Stock Exchange in 1815 as one of the twelve “Jew brokers” of the City of London [3]. Rothschild recognised his abilities and used him as his stockbroker. They became business partners and in due course the poor schoolboy became a very rich man. Among other things Rothschild and Montefiore invested in the supply of piped gas for street lighting to European cities, founded the Alliance Assurance Company and in 1835 raised a loan to enable the British Government to compensate plantation owners whose slaves had been freed under the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, thereby assisting in the abolition of slavery in the Empire. When he was forty, Montefiore retired to devote his time and money to assisting oppressed Jews everywhere as well as to Jewish communal affairs. Among other things, he served for 39 years as President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
In 1827, he and Judith visited the Holy Land, returning in 1838, 1849, 1855, 1857, 1866, and 1875. For him, that first visit was a “spiritual transforming event”. He became strictly observant, keeping kosher (travelling with a shochet to ensure a supply of kosher meat), refrained from traveling on Shabbat, belonged to the Society of Lavadores (the Sephardi Chevra Kadisha, through which he helped perform tahara) and attended synagogue on Shabbat, Mondays and Thursdays. In 1833 his cousin, the architect David Mocatta, designed a private synagogue for him at his Ramsgate home, known as the Montefiore Synagogue.
Collotype of Moses Montefiore, c. 1885–1900, Jewish Museum of Switzerland
In 1841 Benjamin Norden, who had arrived in Cape Town as one of the group of British immigrants known as the 1820 Settlers, gathered a group of Jews in his home to establish a Jewish congregation originally called the Society of the Jewish Community of Cape Town, Cape of Good Hope (Tikvath Israel). The first services were held in Norden’s home, now located in the grounds of today’s Mount Nelson hotel. When Montefiore learned about this, he sent a generous donation [4]. He made a further donation when the congregation’s first synagogue was opened in 1849. [5]
Norden and Montefiore developed a warm relationship. In 1853 Norden was the only one to respond to an appeal from Montefiore who was raising money for a proposed Jewish college in England, giving a year’s subscription. The next year Montefiore wrote soliciting donations to relieve famine in Palestine. Unlike a college in faraway England, this was a cause close to the hearts of the Cape Town community. Tikvath Israel voted £10 from its funds, and Norden and Aaron de Pass [6] initiated a private donations list that raised £58/1 from the Cape Town Jews, £37 from those in Grahamstown and £5/5 from Port Elizabeth. In total they were able to send Montefiore £101/3s for the distressed Jews in Palestine. In today’s terms that would be the equivalent of more than £14,119. Considering that there were only 170 Jews living in Cape Town in 1855 it was a remarkably large sum and it indicates the strong hold that the Holy Land held on South African Jews long before Theodore Herzl came onto the scene. The British Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler was most impressed and responded, writing that Montefiore had personally travelled to Palestine to distribute the funds. Montefiore also sent letters of thanks to the congregation and to Norden personally [7]. Norden remained president of the new synagogue until 1857, when he returned to England. Like Montefiore, he bought a house in Ramsgate [8] .
In 1860 Montefiore was soliciting funds throughout the Jewish world for the Syrian Relief Fund, for the Jews of Tangier, who were struggling because of war with Syria, and for the Jews of Morocco [9]. He had maintained a keen interest in the plight of the Syrian Jews, having travelled to Syria in 1840 after ten Jews had been arrested and tortured after being accused of killing a monk and his servant to use their blood for matzah. Jewish children had been taken as hostages to persuade their mothers to reveal the blood, and 600 Jewish houses had been demolished looking for the body of the priest [10]. Montefiore managed to persuade the Sultan to release the men. The Tikvath Israel congregation responded to this appeal, undertaking to donate £75 and as well as collect money from Jews in other parts of the Cape Colony. The Jewish community managed to send the amazing sum of £756/0s/6 (close to £120 000 today).
When Montefiore travelled to the Holy Land in 1875 aged 91, the Tikvath Israel congregation recited special prayers for his safety, like the Jews in Britain.[11] In 1884, Montefiore turned 100. To put this in perspective, the life expectancy at birth in Britain at the time was around 43 years and even in 2025 when it had reached 81.9 for males, centenarians made up only about 0.02% of the total UK population. It was indeed something to be celebrated.
Montefiore on his 100th birthday
How should the Tikvath Israel congregation celebrate this achievement? After all Montefiore had donated generously to it when it was founded and when its first synagogue was established and they had supported his appeals for distressed Jewish communities in Syria and Palestine. At first, they thought of establishing a scholarship for Hebrew at the South African College (later the University of Cape Town) but the subscription list did not raise enough. Instead, they installed three beautiful stained-glass windows in their St John’s Street Synagogue as a tribute to the eminent British philanthropist, together with a suitably inscribed plaque. The synagogue, consecrated in 1863, now serves as the entrance to the South African Jewish Museum, where these beautiful windows can be seen above and on either side of the ark.
A special synagogue service was held at which a prayer composed by the British Chief Rabbi was recited, their children were given a special treat on his birthday and an eloquently worded address and an illuminated address from the Port Elizabeth congregation was sent to Sir Moses [12]. Independently, Durban Jews sent Montefiore an elaborately engraved and illuminated address, the decision to do so being taken at the newly established Durban congregation’s first annual meeting in 1884 [13]. Montefiore died on 28 July 1885 aged 100 years and 9 months and was buried at his home in Ramsgate next to his wife Judith. They were childless.
Entrance to the South African Jewish Museum, with the Montefiore windows
When, in 1989, an antique, commemorative pressed-glass plate featuring the portrait of Sir Moses Montefiore produced around his 100th birthday was auctioned at Christies, Amsterdam, the Cape Town Jewish Museum purchased it as an addition to its Montefiore windows. Embossed in the glass are the Hebrew letters “M” and “T”, for Mazal Tov. This plate is now displayed in a cabinet at the Cape South African Jewish Board of Deputies.
These are not the only reverberations resulting from Sir Moses Montefiore’s crown of a good name. The name of Montefiore is mentioned in Charles Dickens’ diaries, in George Eliot’s personal papers and in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses [14]. More relevant to this article, he is also mentioned in the 1856 diary by Robert Wilmot, son of Sir Henry Wilmot, fourth Baronet of Chaddesden Hall, Derbyshire, a visiting Englishman who arrived in the Cape in 1855 and toured the Cape frontier, examining army fortifications, collecting plants and birds, meeting Xhosa chiefs, and illustrating his journey with sketches [15]. This diary was in the manuscript collection of the University of the Witwatersrand and was published in 1984 by the Friends of the Library, a copy of which the writer of this article owns. Before he left South Africa, Wilmot included several pages describing the excitement in Cape Town at the news of the arrival of Montefiore’s nephew. Two letters from Baring Brothers, a trusted British merchant bank, founded in London in 1762, a symbol of British imperial finance and global trade, to the house of merchants Hamilton Ross preceded the nephew’s arrival.
1986 was the year of Johannesburg’s Centenary Celebrations. As its contribution, the Kaplan Kushlick Foundation, with the SA Jewish Board of Education and the SA Zionist Federation, decided to present an illustrated biographical exhibition at the King David High School, Linksfield, Johannesburg, in a Sir Moses Montefiore Centenary Festival. One of the people involved was Dr Joseph Sherman, then editor of Jewish Affairs, who wrote that they had tried “to find any possible connections which might have existed between Sir Montefiore and South Africa. All that has come to light (was) an entry in A Cape Traveller’s Diary 1856.” This was published “in the hope that other possible connections between Sir Moses Montefiore and South Africa may come to light.” [16]
They did not try very hard, as the information in this article shows! The Jewish Affairs February 1986 issue includes the full section in the diary that mentions Montefiore.
Edward Horace Montefiore, a 28-year-old civil engineer, arrived in Cape Town at the end of August 1855 on the steamer Lightning. He brought a letter of introduction dated 6 July from Chalmers, Guthrie & Co., the London agents of the Cape firm H Ross & Co referring to a letter Hamilton Ross had sent them on the Meteor dated 2 July. The first paragraph of the letter of introduction stated, “The Lightning having delayed her departure we are still enabled to address you by that opportunity through the kind offices of Mr. Montefiore whom we desire to introduce to you. His bills are on us or on his own friends and will be duly honored. We have therefore to request for him your best attention.” [17]
Edward gave a letter dated 5.6 1855 to Thomas Jones, a cashier at the Good Hope Bank. It stated “ I am desired by the managing directors of this bank to introduce to you the bearer Mr Edw. H Montefiore, who proposes spending a year’s leave of absence from the East in travelling. Mr Montefiore has with him drafts of his own friends with the endorsement of this establishment, and it is particularly requested that you will grant him any assistance, pecuniary or otherwise, that he may require [18].” It did not specify which establishment but was stamped L&W B London, which was presumed to be the London & Westminster Bank.
John Ross gave him a cheque book and Montefiore drew a cheque for £10 (about £1,578. today) and deposited two from a set of three Bills of Exchange drawn Bears Bros Bros upon Russell & Co of Canton in favour of Mr. Edw. H Montefiore for £5,300 as for value received from Messrs Montefiore & Brothers. Ross told him the bills were too large to be negotiated at the Cape – £5,300 would be worth £836 489 today. The bills were placed in the safe.
Wilmot wrote that when it was reported that Montefiore’s nephew had come “in search of desirable investments” the interest which Capetown (sic) “ever feels in monied men increased to fever pitch. No matter that he was lame and ill looking, odious in appearance and manners, all flocked to the temple of Plutus [19] which Parkes Hotel for the time became. [20]“
Wilmot was also staying at Parkes Hotel. He further wrote, “Dock companies,water companies,railway and mining companies flung themselves at his feet: schools, libraries, churches, chapels and races all craved his attention and none were sent away empty handed. Ten pound notes were flying about the streets and as fast as applications poured in, his desire to give ran faster, until not only were Jews, Malays, Baptists, Dutch, Scotch, Wesleyans, Independents and Romanists sent away rejoicing, but the cathedral fund and Lady Grey’s school found ten pounds each to their credit one morning without the trouble of asking. How the money flew about that glorious month! Even now the Capetonians smack their lips and their eyes glisten as they recall it.”
Soon Montefiore was driving about in a showy dray [21] drawn by four white horses. This was too much for the antisemitic aristocrat Wilmot: “Cabs were found sufficient for Christians but a dray [his italics] was too small to hold the Jew’s friends, and all day long and every day it might be seen dashing crammed with storekeepers, military, merchants, and all who preferred good feeding at a snob’s expense to a sandwich and a glass of sherry at their own.”
Not only did Montefiore keep open house at Parkes, but he took his newfound friends for drives to Rathfelders [22], a popular mail-coach halt near Wynberg famous for its hospitality, a comfortable outing for day trippers and the headquarters of the Cape Hunt. As races would soon be held, Montefiore ran a horse himself, even donating a cup and unlimited lunch! He arrived for the event in his dray preceded by outriders “dressed in liveries that dazzled all beholders”, looking every bit the aristocrat his money allowed him to appear.
He flaunted his wealth at the ball after the races, so that it became known as “the Montefiore ball”. The venue – the exchange rooms – were decorated in white, blue and scarlet and the ladies’ rooms were provided with every scent available, as Wilmot, tongue in cheek, wrote “in anticipation of bad smells”. Furthermore, every lady was presented with a bouquet of flowers on arrival. Such liberality had never before been seen – but then never before had a Montefiore visited. The ladies “loved him from the first as everyone did, but they adored him now.”
Rival banks eyed Montefiore’s account with jealousy. “Could it be permitted for one house to monopolise all this wealth?” wrote Wilmot. JB Embden, founder of the Cape of Good Hope Bank, “was deputed to kowtow before the illustrious stranger and, on his knees if necessary, induce him to leave the house of Ross and Co. and honour the bank by his patronage. How he cringed and bowed, how he wriggled and buttered came out afterwards in court, but he effected his horrid purpose and the Rosses with rage and despair beheld their prize carried off in triumph and joy reigned at the bank. Poor Hamilton Ross!”
But Montefiore’s month’s stay in Cape Town was coming to an end as he was booked to travel to Ceylon on the Owen Glendower which would be arriving in a week. He hosted a farewell dinner at Parke’s Hotel with newly furnished pavilions erected outside for the Scottish Highland 73rd (Perthshire) Regiment of Foot band. There were “gold printed cards of invitation in bad English, with gold printed bills of fare in bad French, sealed with gold arms and motto in bad Latin” Wilmot wrote scornfully: “Some few who had held aloof and had feebly whispered that he was very queer looking, dreadfully snobbish, and behaved in a way that did not say much for the educational system pursued in the family of Sir Moses, now ate their words, brandished their cards, and defied the world to show his equal…. ( among the crowds outside were to be seen the wives and daughters of the wealthiest merchants….. watching their sons and husbands getting drunk at the Jew’s expense….. all eating amicably at the same mahogany and yelling out their friendship… for a limping Israelite who they had not yet set eyes on 3 weeks previously.”
As Wilmot further observed, everyone had assured him that he had “never meant to go, but seeing the light, just dropped in by mere chance, as he was anxious to see a man so much talked about.”
In due course the HMS Owen Glendower, a Royal Navy 36-gun fifth-rate Apollo-class frigate, docked and Montefiore went to the Cape of Good Hope Bank to ask for his account to be made up.
The bank, having advanced him nearly £800 (equivalent to about £126 263 today), asked Montefiore when he would settle the amount. He made two suggestions – either on drafts from friends or from the two bills for £5,500 from Baring Brothers he had produced on arrival. The third of the set was missing as he had sent it on to China having been ignorant of its importance. He would prefer the former as the exchange would be in his favour, he knew they had no branch in China and a settlement in specie would be inconvenient for both parties.
The directors looked at the bills, not noticing anything remarkable about them, but as they were passed from hand to hand some peculiarities were pointed out. Just then Mr. Watson popped into the bank to tell them he had heard that morning that someone called Mr. Montefiore had swindled a Ceylon mercantile house out of a considerable amount of money, adding “I hope this is not the same gentleman.”
Oops!!!
The Hon H E Rutherford took the two bills to the window where the light was better. A magnifying glass showed that the signatures written over in pencil were tracings as they fitted one over the other. The chairman at first was inclined to believe them genuine but then agreed with the other directors. Attorney General William Porter was called in and pronounced them forgeries. They called in Montefiore who was waiting in another room for the bills to be discounted.
Edward Horace kept his cool. He ridiculed the idea that the bills were forged – his uncle Sir Moses had given them to him! When he asked if the third bill had been spent, he replied. “I really do not know. I sign my name very often and am not a man of business and I am surprised at these questions. If you do not like the bill, give it back to me.”
He left the room very angry, got into his dray and rode to Rathfelders where he spent the next day burning papers before returning to Cape Town to another farewell dinner with his chosen friends. As he was to sail the next day his friends, many from the 73rd Regiment, carried him around the room on their shoulders “roaring a farewell ditty.”
The next day, however, found Sir Moses Montefiore’s “nephew” in prison for debt. At first the bank paid the prison for his detention, but later he was kept as a pauper debtor.
Reported Wilmot, “Capetown was beside itself. Men stood in groups talking as if some national calamity had fallen on the country… one thing was clear. Montefiore could give no dinners in jail so there was no reason to trouble themselves about visiting him there. The ladies to a woman vouched for his innocence and railed at the attorney general and the bank in no measured terms.”
Wilmot himself thought Montefiore “ill used” and imprisoned on insufficient evidence. His friend Hedley offered to bail him out if he could provide evidence that he was a Montefiore. “I know legal proof is wanting, show me any letter antedated to your arrival here or even your linen marked, any evidence in fact that will satisfy a gentleman rather than a lawyer.”
Montefiore could not but wrote to Lady Grey saying that her brother in law had given him a letter to Sir George which he had torn up finding him up country and ”begging her to identify him, which kind offer she declined.”
With the self-confident chutzpah of a confidence trickster, Montefiore wrote letters full of scorn for his fair-weather friends to the Cape Monitor[23]. Still claiming innocence, he wrote penitently to “Chairman and Directors of the Cape of Good Hope Bank” on 9 June 1856 [24]: “Gentlemen – After the long incarceration which I have endured I cannot but think that your board would now be willing to give ear to an honourable proposal on my part for the liquidation of your claim. Having myself suffered severely in many ways and not least disappointment, my mind reverts to its own resources…. It can hardly be expected owing to causes already referred to, that I am in a position to reimburse you at once, or in one lump sum, but I feel certain by means of my own industry and that of some friends who have become allied to me in the sequence of this lengthy confinement, I would be enabled to repay you in monthly or quarterly installments….In conclusion I shall only add that with my known energy and…unvaunted ability, you can not…fell the least despondency nor have the smallest fear in accepting the proposal. I wait your favourable reply.”
Unfortunately for him the bank, once bitten, trusted neither his honorable proposal, nor his known “energy and unvaunted ability”, and lacked sympathy for his severe sufferings, nor were his former drinking buddies willing to pay his debts. As for the stolen money Montefiore had so liberally dispensed, St George’s Cathedral and Lady Grey’s school returned their £20 to the bank and although the Cathedral called on others to do the same, it fell on deaf ears as few felt that the 7th Commandment applied to them if the money accepted was stolen in the first place.
Montefiore remained in prison and was brought to trial before the Resident Magistrate on charges of fraud and forgery on Friday 27 June 1856. By then Wilmot was no longer in Cape Town to record what was happening, having left on 13 May to return home sailing on the Dutch ship Fop Smit.
The Cape Monitor, however, reported on the trial in great detail. The bank had had nine months to collect evidence, and it had done its work thoroughly:
Montefiore could not have received £5,300 from Messrs. Montefiore & Brothers as that business had closed in 1816, forty years previously.
John Ross, a partner in Hamilton Ross & Co, produced Montefiore’s letter of introduction, supposed to have been from Chalmers, Guthrie & Co.
John Stein, a senior partner in H Ross & Co., knew Guthrie, their London agent, and had contacted him. Guthrie denied knowing Montefiore. “The house is Scotch and exceedingly prudent” Stein said, “and I do not imagine that for thousands of pounds they would deny any such transaction if they had once entered it.”
Mr Stein had a copy of the original letter from Chalmers, Guthrie & Co. He gave detailed evidence proving that the handwriting had been forged and traced. Although most was identical to the one Montefiore had produced on arrival, the paragraph relating to introducing him was not in the original and appeared to have been squashed into a space using smaller writing and a fainter pen.
There were declarations by Henry Fairbank, Secretary, and Jas Weldon, a Manager, of the London & Westminster Bank, stating that they had never written the letters nor endorsed the bills of exchange and did not know anyone called Edward H Montefiore.
Partners from Baring Bros stated on oath that they had never had any dealings with such a person, had never issued Montefiore with bills of exchange and any such were “false, fraudulent and fabricated”.
An affidavit was produced signed before David Salomons, Lord Mayor of London, stating that the Oriental Bank had received from its Ceylon branch bills of exchange purporting to be drawn on Baring Brothers by Burgoyne & Co of San Francisco for £3,600 to the order of E H Montefiore. The bills had been refused as forgeries.
An affidavit from Russell Sturgis, a partner in Baring Brothers stated that there was formerly a Burgoyne & Co in San Francisco and their signatures on the bills were forgeries.
An affidavit from David Wilson, partner of Wilson, Ritchie & Co. of Ceylon accused Montefiore of forgery.
A letter from the solicitors to Wilson, Ritchie & Co. acknowledged that the firm had lost a considerable amount of money due to forgeries committed by EH Montefiore.
A copy of a letter submitted by Wilson, Ritchie & Co. sent by the Colonial Secretary in Colombo, Ceylon, to the Secretary to the Government in Bombay, India, asking that E H Montefiore be arrested on a charge of forgery and returned to Ceylon.
The aftermath: Edward Horace Montefiore, if that was indeed his name, was sent to England on 9 October 1856 [25] to stand trial for forgery and fraud, having done the same without consequences in Newfoundland, Ceylon, Canada and elsewhere.
Baring Brothers lost nothing, as its documents were forged, and Hamilton Ross, who had only lost £80, must have been grateful that the groveling Embden had taken over the account leaving the Cape of Good Hope Bank to shoulder the loss instead. The home of the wealthy Hamilton Ross with its magnificent garden is today’s five-star Mount Nelson Hotel. A plaque marks where Benjamin Norden’s house had stood.
Here the trail runs cold because Edward Horace Montefiore’s name and record seem to have been scrubbed from history and neither google nor AI knows of an E H Montefiore. He might have been a relative of Moses Montefiore as the names Edward and Horace are found in the family. A Horace Montefiore was born in 1843, and a Robert Horace in 1921. Five Edward Montefiores are listed among the Montefiore families and relatives [26]. They are Edward MONTEFIORE, Edward Augustus Montrose MONTEFIORE (1867 – 1895), Edward Brice Stanley MONTEFIORE (1855 – 1918), Edward Levi MONTEFIORE (1826 – 1907) and Edward Mayer MONTEFIORE (1862 – 1927).
Could he be the Edward lacking details, the black sheep of the family, no one wanted to acknowledge? He was definitely a confidence trickster, most of whom are psychopaths, a behaviour problem that appears in childhood. He had the social charm, the ease when telling lies with plausibility and confidence, the fearless risk taking, the lack of guilt.
Was he compensating for being seen as “lame and ill looking, odious in appearance and manners”, as “very queer looking”, for being treated with ill-disguised scorn by antisemitic English upper classes? Sherman comments that Wilmot’s attitude towards Montefiore was more than usually hostile because he was not only a thief, but also a Jew [27]. Did Edward Horace, the “limping Israelite”, take pleasure watching these same antisemites fawning over him because of his famed name and imagined wealth as he dispensed – not honestly earned Jewish money to needy Jews like his uncle – but dishonestly acquired non-Jewish money to greedy non-Jews?
Who knows? After a year in prison, spent ruminating on the few weeks pleasure he had gained dispensing unimaginable wealth, he was returned to England, to prison and obscurity, leaving a stain on the good name of Sir Moses Montefiore. A crown of a good name is not transferable.
The author thanks Jacqui Rodgers from the Jacob Gitlin Library, Cape Town
Gwynne Schrire, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former Deputy Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies – Cape Council. She has authored, co-written and edited over twenty books on aspects of South African Jewish and Western Cape history.
[2] A philanthropist who fought for the rights of oppressed Jews in Italy, Russia, and Romania. He visited Palestine seven times, donating large sums of money to promote industry, education, and health amongst the Jewish community, building Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the first Jewish residential settlement outside Jerusalem’s old walled city, and the Montefiore Windmill to provide cheap flour to poor Jews.
[3] Johnson, Paul, A History of the Jews, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London,1987, 322
[4] Abrahams, Israel. The Birth of a Community: A History of Western Province Jewry fro Earliest Times to the end of the South African War, 1902, Cape Town Hebrew Congregation, 1955, 2
[5] Herrman, Louis, The Cape Town Hebrew Congregation 1841-1941-A Centenary history,Mercantile Atlas, Cape Town, 1941, 84
[6] Aaron de Pass, who was in partnership with Benjamin Norden, was the President of the congregation, his brother Elias,the Honorary Secretary. Elias brought their first Sefer Torah from England. De Pass was involved in whaling, sealing, guano, and fishing industries.
[7] Herrman, Louis,A History of the Jews in South Africa from the earliest times to 1895, Victor Gollanz, London, 1930, 188
[8] Norden, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org ›. However Hazel Dakers, in her Benjamin Norden (1798-1876) Southern Africa Jewish Genealogy SA-SIG says it was in 1858, not 1857
[10] Schama, Simon, Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900, Bodley head, London,2017, 261
[11] Abrahams (op cit) is incorrect when he stated (page 62) that the Congregation said prayers for Montefiore’s safety on his visit to Palestine in 1886. He visited Palestine seven time, the last time was in 1875. As he died in 1885, he could not have visited in 1886. See also Levine, Rabbi Menachem, ‘Sir Moses Montefiore: A Brief History’, https://aish.com › History › Modern
[23] A local newspaper set up by the conservative faction in October 1850 under editor Richard William Murray Sr. who opposed any form of local government and was notorious for his vitriol. Although he had consistently attacked Saul Solomon, he closed the Cape Monitor in 1856 and joined with Solomon and Bryan Henry Darnell to form the Cape Argus. Murray and Darnell’s fiercely imperialist views antagonized the Cape public and they left the Argus. Saul Solomon took over successfully and the Argus is still in existence today. Murrayhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_William_Murray
