Leo Baeck College ~»\ Library 2
g IDIZ THE SPIRIT OF ISRAEL MATTUCK This year of 1992, still so young and so cold, and especially this first quarter of it, is a season of anhiversaries. 0n the world stage, it recalls, most notably, what happened 500 years ago in Spain. For it was on 2nd January, 1492, that Ferdinand and Isabella entered Granada and so ended nearly 800 years of Muslim rule in the peninSula. In the same month they received Christopher Columbus’s demands for the voyage which was to take him to the New World. And on 3Lst March they issued the infamous decree of expulsion which sent about 200,000 Jews scurrying across the seas in search of a friendly home: the decree which will be finally and formally rescinded by the Spanish Government on the day of its 500th anniversay this year. Of the refugees, about 10,000 made it to Italy. They included a family called Montefiore who landed at Ancona and later settled in Leghorn, otherwise known as Livorno. In the course of the 18th century they came to England, and some of them were among_ the founders of the West London Synagogue, which dedicated its first house of worship, in Burton Street, 150 years ago, on 27th January, 1842. Claude Montefiore, who grew up in that Congregation, had a brilliant career at Oxford, and there, in 1892, delivered the Hibbert Lectures on "The Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Hebrews". It was an event the centenary of which deserves a mention. For by these nine lectures, which, as subsequently published, run to 552 pages, Montefiore established himself as a major Bible scholar and the first Jew in this country to think through the implications of modern Bible scholarship for Judaism.
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