Judith Montefiore College, Ramsgate. Report for the year 1st Tammuz 5651 to 30th Sivan 5652 (1891-92), with catalogue of Zunz’s Miscellenea.

The Judith Montefiore College was originally established in London in 1869 by Sir Moses Montefiore as a memorial to his late wife, Judith.  When Moses Gaster was appointed principal in 1890 the college was reorganized into a modern rabbinical training college in Ramsgate.  The college moved to London on 1965, closed in 1985 and was re-opened in London as a centre for higher Torah education in 2005.

This report gives a clear picture of the curriculum and the teaching staff which included Dr. H. Hirschfeld and Reverend B. Schewzik.  Reverend Benjamin Schewzik was known for running mass religious services for thousands of Jewish emigrants in London in the late nineteenth century. He died in 1915.  His son, Michael Sherbrooke, became a Shakespearean actor.

The second part of this 62 page book contains a catalog of the “Miscellenea” of Leopold Zunz, made by Moses Gaster.

Leopold Zunz was born in the German town of Detmold in 1794, he died in Berlin in 1886. He was a German Reform rabbi and the founder of “Wissenschaft des Judentums” (“Science of Judaism”).

After Zunz’s death, parts of his library were acquired by the Judith Montefiore College in Ramsgate.  In 1899 the bulk of the Montefiore Library and most of the manuscripts were removed to Jews’ College in London (now called: London School of Jewish Studies).

The Trustees of the Montefiore Endowment auctioned off the Montefiore manuscript collection in 2006. Most of the volumes were acquired by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. The collection is called the Foyle-Montefiore Library collection at the Leopold Muller Library at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Some Zunz volumes were sold by Jews’ College in 2011 to a private collector.