What the V&A’s Montefiore masterpieces reveal about Jewish history

When it comes to highlighting the Jewish objects and stories hidden within London’s great museums, the Victoria & Albert Museum has recently led the way. In 2024, there was a sold-out study day exploring “The V&A and its Jewish Heritage”. Two years later, came the reopening of the magnificent Gilbert Galleries – a collection built by two East End Jews, containing a few prize pieces of Judaica. Now, just in time for the inaugural Jewish Culture Month, the museum is throwing a new spotlight on two remarkable pieces of Jewish historical silver associated with Sir Moses and Lady Judith Montefiore and still owned by the Montefiore Endowment.

Known respectively as “The Montefiore Centrepiece” and “The Montefiore Candelabrum”, these objects have long been admired for their scale and craftsmanship. Yet their deeper significance, particularly for British Jewish history, has been largely overlooked.

The centrepiece may well be described as one of the greatest treasures of Anglo-Jewish material culture. It commemorates the Montefiores’ successful intervention in the Damascus Affair of 1840: a notorious episode in which leading members of the Jewish community were imprisoned and tortured on false charges of ritual murder instigated by the French consul. Four died and one converted to Islam, but thanks in large part to Montefiore’s efforts, the rest were eventually released.

This was one of the very first blood libel accusations against Jews in Arab lands, and the whole community was terrorised. Butchers and gravediggers were arrested and flogged, while an entire school of Jewish children was incarcerated for two weeks in the hope of extorting confessions from their mothers. But it was the central role of the French consul that really alarmed Jews in Western Europe. How could British Jews stake their claim to equal civil and political rights if civilised Frenchmen believed Jews in Syria to be guilty of such a crime?

In retrospect, this was a pivotal moment. Not only did the Damascus Affair signal the decisive transfer of the blood libel into the Middle East, but it also heralded a new era of Jewish political mobilisation. After Montefiore’s successful negotiations, there was much to celebrate. He did not merely obtain the release of the Damascus prisoners. He returned with a decree issued by the Ottoman sultan, both refuting the blood libel and guaranteeing equal rights to Ottoman Jews. Nearly twenty years before the first Jewish MP took his seat in the House of Commons, it was an achievement worth trumpeting.

These days, no one would consider marking such an event with a large bespoke piece of silverware, three and a half feet tall. In early Victorian Britain, this was a fashionable thing to do, and the Montefiore Centrepiece has consequently been interpreted in that context. There it stands in the V&A silver galleries, and for decades nobody paid much attention. Then, amid the recent heightened awareness of the legacies of colonialism and racial injustice, an interested visitor stopped to take a closer look.

Like all pieces of presentation silver, this one has an inscription. The longest part provides an account of the Damascus Affair from a Jewish perspective, written in emotive, dignified language. Above it, in larger capitals, we read that the centrepiece was presented to Sir Moses as a “testimonial of respect and gratitude… by a large number of his Jewish brethren in the United Kingdom, Jamaica, Barbados and Gibraltar”. It was those two words – Jamaica and Barbados – that stopped the visitor in their tracks.

Many objects in the V&A inevitably have histories which are thoroughly entangled with the profits of slavery. Yet the Montefiore Centrepiece is unusual in explicitly referencing these two British plantation colonies, whose names are indelibly associated with the transatlantic slave trade, although few Caribbean Jews were plantation owners. Importantly, it was created between 1842 and 1843 – roughly ten years after the 1833 loan, which brought an end to slavery in the British Empire by compensating the perpetrators but not the victims.

Sir Moses moved in abolitionist circles. He was neither a plantation nor a slave owner, although several other people named Montefiore received compensation (confusingly, the Legacies of British Slavery database also references a second Moses Montefiore). It is perhaps worth adding that one of these Montefiores was a man of colour, almost certainly born into slavery. Sir Moses, however, worked with his brother-in-law Nathan Rothschild to raise the money for that same loan. It was a business deemed so unprofitable that no one else was willing to take it.

Given this complex history, it was not unreasonable to wonder whether the Centrepiece, which celebrates a story of Jewish deliverance through its biblical imagery and harrowing contemporary scenes of captivity and release, had been financed from the proceeds of slavery – if only indirectly.

Careful research has made clear that this was not so. The total cost of the centrepiece was £900, but individual contributions from outside London were capped at five guineas. While Barbados and Jamaica figure in the inscription, the amount that came from the colonies must have been modest. For instance, a collective donation of £10 from the Jews of Bridgetown, Barbados, has been identified, a community that included some Jews of colour. They, too had a stake in the outcome of the Damascus Affair, in the campaign for Jewish rights, and in the representative character of this testimonial.

Museum labels must be brief, but the amount of space devoted to this object in the V&A has more than doubled. The inscription is now reproduced in full, allowing the authentic Jewish voice of the object to tell its story. A reference to the “former plantation colonies” of Jamaica and Barbados is intended to remind visitors that they were sites of suffering and exploitation.

This, however, is not the main emphasis. New labels place the centrepiece firmly in its Jewish historical context. Displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, it has long been regarded as a masterpiece of British silversmithing, created by the Bond Street firm of Mortimer and Hunt. Yet recent research has revealed the extent of Jewish involvement in its commission. Montefiore’s secretary, Louis Loewe, suggested the biblical motifs and other imagery, and a Jewish engraver was brought in to render the Hebrew text accurately. It operates at once as a work of art, a political statement, and an enduring expression of Jewish historical consciousness.

Reviewing the history of this important object has provided a welcome opportunity to refresh the interpretation of its sister object: the Montefiore Candelabrum.

This is another elaborate piece of presentation silver, given to the Montefiores in 1858 by Sa’id, the ruler of Egypt, in thanks for their hospitality. He and the Montefiores enjoyed a warm friendship, although twenty years earlier Sir Moses had negotiated with Said’s father on behalf of the Jewish prisoners in Damascus.

On one side of the candelabrum, the figure and coat of arms represent the specific Jewish identity and heritage of the Montefiores, while the other reflects the cultural world of the Muslim donor. This dual narrative has been forgotten because the Jewish side was never reproduced – not in the Illustrated London News in 1859, nor on the V&A website. Now the candelabrum has been expertly photographed, and its message of harmonious relations between Jews and Muslims is clearly apparent.

These two remarkable objects have histories that are not immediately obvious to visitors. Thanks to the collaboration between the V&A and the Montefiore Endowment, the new interpretation now in place ensures their stories are finally told in greater detail. They shed light on themes of persecution and deliverance, diplomatic courage, and entanglement with the painful legacies of colonialism. They also serve as a hopeful reminder of the possibility of respectful encounters between cultures.

A guided tour, “Montefiore to Mentmore, Silver to Scandal: The V&A with a Jewish Twist”, that includes these pieces, will take place on 11 June as part of Jewish Culture Month.

• Professor Abigail Green is a historian at the University of Oxford and a leading expert on Sir Moses Montefiore.
• Michal Friedlander is Curator of Judaica and Applied Arts at the Jewish Museum Berlin.