Sir Moses Montefiore died on Tuesday, at his residence at
Ramsgate, at the age of a hundred years and nine months. He was one of the twelve Jewish brokers at the time when only twelve Jewish brokers were admitted to the Stock Exchange. He married in 1812, and retired from business in 1824, when he was only forty years of age, and passed most of the rest of his life in benevolent enterprises, chiefly undertaken on behalf of the Jewish people. He was, however, a very loyal subject, and nearly the last interest he had was his wedding present to the Princess Beatrice. His first visit to Palestine was made in 1827. He was Sheriff of London at the time of the Queen's Coronation, and this it was that gave him his knighthood. In the following year he and Lady Montefiore went again to Jerusalem, though the plague was then raging there, and made elaborate inquiries into the condition, or rather, no condition, of Jewish agriculture, and as to the best means of teaching the poor inhabitants of Palestine how to culti- vate the soil. After the mission of 1841 to Russia, on behalf of the Jews in Russia, he received from the Queen his baronetcy. In 1858 he made an appeal to the Pope to restore "the little Mortara,"—M. Edmond About's little Mortara,—to its Jewish parents ; but his appeal on behalf of the Jewish child was in vain. In 1860 he headed the appeal on behalf of the Christians of Syria, who had been attacked by the Druses of Mount. Lebanon. His pilgrimages to Palestine were in all seven in number, not ending till he was ninety. In Palestine he endowed hospitals, almshouses, synagogues, planted gardens, and introduced a suitable agriculture. In 1862 he lost his -wife, who was buried in the mausoleum at Ramsgate, where he is himself to lie ; so that he has survived his wife twenty-three years.
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