Born in 1784, and living to receive congratulations on his hundredth birthday, Moses Montefiore’s long life covers a century of wonderful progress in the position of his race, a progress to which his conduct, and his presence, and his efforts very largely contributed. His circumstances permitted him to be widely and wisely generous, and whenever and wherever help was wanted for a good cause, or a blow was needed to be dealt at a bad one, Sir Moses was to the fore. His courtesy acted as a charm alike on princes and on beggars. To his far-reaching philanthropy Damascus did not seem distant, nor Russia nor Roumania remote; and Syrian Christians, when oppressed, gained his sympathy as readily and as heartily as Jews and Christians nearer home. But because his people, and especially those of them under foreign rule, needed more of his advocacy and of his help, it was to them he gave most. Seven times he journeyed to the Holy Land, trying what heart and purse could do against the rooted forces of poverty and neglect. His first pilgrimage to the city ‘sitting desolate’ was madewith his wife, when he was forty-three, and his latest, as a faithful widower, when he was ninety-one.The biography of Sir Moses Montefiore[76] makes good reading for the boys and girls of his race, who may gather from it that Jewish heroes of the old single-minded and enthusiastic type are by no means an extinct product of this prosaic age.
9. Conclusion.—And here, with this brief record of Sir Moses Montefiore, these ‘Outlines of Jewish History’ may well end. But the ‘Heroic History,’ as Manasseh ben Israel called it, the miserable glorious record of the ages, is itself, in truth, never-ending. Line upon line is still being added, and finis will never be written on the page of Jewish history till the Light which shineth more and more unto the Perfect Day shall fall upon it, and illumine the whole beautiful world. Each Jew and each Jewess is making his or her mark, or his or her stain, upon the wonderful unfinished history of the Jews, the history which Herder called the greatest poem of all time. ‘For ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord.’ Loyal and steadfast witnesses, is it, or self-seeking and suborned ones? A witness of some sort every Jew born is bound to be. He must fulfil his mission, and through good report and through evil report, and though it be only writ in water, he must add his item of evidence to the record, that all who run may read.
And on the Jews, and even more perhaps on theJewesses, of the present it depends whether the men and women of our race in the future shall be worthy of these of the past, of these kindred of ours who loved their faith in the days when ‘love was grief, and love besides.’
INDEX.
Abarbanel,
Ephraim, [253]
Abd-el-mumen, [138]
Abd-er-rahman III., [134]