Biographies

The nineteenth century is full of forgotten heroes. Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885)—once the most famous Jew in the world—is merely one among many. For a major public figure, he has been astonishingly neglected. There is as yet no scholarly biography, and there have been no attempts to locate his activities in a wider, non-Jewish environment.[1] …

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Pedagogic side of this undertaking: “To educate the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.” The words are from Rudolf Borchardt’s Epilegomena zu Dante, v. 1. [Berlin 1923] pp. 56–7.  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (N 1, 8), 458. Certain intellectual figures inform and …

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