Only occasionally did he stray

Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero. By Abigail Green. Harvard University Press; 540 pages; $35 and £24.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IT IS unusual in a long biography for the protagonist to be already in his early 40s and in semi-retirement by page 56. But Moses Montefiore is interesting not so much for the way he grew rich (largely by riding on the coat-tails of his wife's brother-in-law, Nathan Rothschild) but for the career he pursued afterwards. Montefiore was a champion of Jewish rights—the international man of philanthropy of his time—and, as Abigail Green points out, “one of the first truly global celebrities.”

Born in 1784 in Leghorn into an Italian Jewish family that had settled in London, Montefiore belonged to Britain's Sephardi elite. They made their fortunes trading coral, diamonds and other commodities across far-flung family and social networks. Montefiore's marriage to Judith Barent-Cohen brought an alliance with the Ashkenazi Rothschilds, who helped him turn a small fortune into a large one. By middle age he was ready to devote himself to his true calling: the rescue of Jews and Judaism from persecution and poverty across much of the globe.

Montefiore was a devout orthodox Jew but no less a Victorian Englishman for that. The queen made him a knight and then a baronet; he was the first sheriff of London, it is said, to bring a kosher chicken to a formal dinner at the Guildhall in the City. He embodied the idea that the Jewish cause was also the cause of humanity in general and of Britain in particular. Montefiore pushed, cautiously, for Jews to win full emancipation. Although this did not come about until late in the 19th century, Britain's political ambitions and its moral aspirations made it possible.

He joined forces with middle-class religious dissenters and evangelicals to help end the slave trade, underwriting along with Rothschild a £15m loan to finance abolition in the West Indies. Idealistic Christians—some of whom were themselves excluded from full civil rights—in turn backed the emancipation of Jews at home and their restoration to the Holy Land. When Montefiore appealed to the Ottoman sultan to protect his Jewish subjects, Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary and later prime minister, approved: modernising the crumbling Ottoman empire would help thwart the Middle Eastern ambitions of Russia and France, he thought.

Montefiore was in the thick of all the Jewish causes célèbres of his day, sometimes competing for glory with a French rival, Adolphe Crémieux. He braved bandits, cholera and war to succour Jews in the Holy Land. He forded frozen Russian rivers, the ice giving way beneath him, to become the first Jew to meet Tsar Nicholas I. His intercession to defend the Jews of Damascus and Rhodes from blood libel was a triumph: the Ottoman sultan issued an edict denying the libel and guaranteeing Jews protection and freedom of worship. He had less luck with the pope, who refused to return Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish child who had been baptised by his housemaid and kidnapped from his family by the Inquisition. But Ms Green sees in the Mortara affair the embryo of the modern human-rights movement. Treating with potentates in his City of London uniform, Montefiore was lionised by his countrymen for his patriotism and charity; the Jewish attitude verged on veneration.

Ms Green's account is often entertaining but her intent is scholarly. Indeed, she underplays Montefiore's apparent infidelities to Judith, who crossed rivers and mountain passes with him and edited the first kosher cookbook in English. He clearly loved her. His occasional affairs amounted to a betrayal not just of his wife, but also of religious principle, and are passed over too lightly. Ms Green, herself a twig on the Sebag Montefiore family tree, is more interested in historical themes she thinks have been neglected: how Montefiore used piety, philanthropy and publicity to rally sympathy on a global scale, paving the way for today's campaigns and interventions on behalf of humanitarian causes.

Montefiore's century-long life spanned an optimistic age. By its end race-based anti-Semitism was beginning to erupt again and Jews had started to despair even in relatively enlightened western Europe. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer in the French artillery, was unjustly convicted of treason just a decade after he died.