Claude Montefiore

Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore, also Goldsmid–Montefiore or just Goldsmid Montefiore  (1858–1938) was the intellectual founder of Anglo-Liberal Judaism and the founding president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature and New Testament. He was a significant figure in the contexts of modern Jewish religious thought, Jewish-Christian relations, and Anglo-Jewish socio-politics, and educator. Montefiore was President of the Anglo-Jewish Association and an influential anti-Zionist leader, who co-founded the anti-Zionist League of British Jews in 1917. Family Claude Montefiore was the youngest son of Nathaniel Montefiore and Emma Goldsmid. He had two sisters, Alice Julia and Charlotte Rosalind and one brother, Leonard (1853-1879). He was the great-nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore. Montefiore's first wife was Therese Alice Schorstein, who had been a student at Girton College, Cambridge. She died in 1889 and, two years later, he endowed a prize in her memory – the Therese Montefiore Memorial Prize. Their son was Leonard G. Montefiore. Montefiore remarried at the West London Synagogue on 24 July 1902. His second wife was Florence Fyfe Brereton Ward, daughter of Richard James Ward, and a Vice-Mistress at Girton, having started there as Librarian. Education Part of Montefiore's childhood was spent at his family's Coldeast estate in Sarisbury Green, Hampshire.