120 years ago: A Jewish obituary for Queen Victoria

From The Jewish Voice (St. Louis), February 1, 1901:

A BEAUTIFUL TRIBUTE TO QUEEN VICTORIA, FROM A PURELY JEWISH STANDPOINT.

Dr:. SALE, basing his eloquent remarks on the life of QUEEN VICTORIA upon  "Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain ; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised" spoke for and from the heart of the Jews, when be said : 

"And we, too. as Jews, have cause to mourn this woman among-queens, and this queen among women. It was in the beginning of her reign that the civil disabilities were removed from the Jew, and be was enabled to take his place among the noblest in the land. When she entered London shortly after she became Queen;-she knighted Moses Montefiore, as if to proclaim to the world that all her subjects were alike in her eyes.  Her predecessors had been busy extracting money or teeth from the poor Jews of their times. She was busy knighting them and giving them their position as men among men. In what other country but England, under other monarch but Victoria could a Lord Beaconsfield have been a Prime Minister? True, his father, driven from the Portuguese synagogue, had had his children baptized. But Benjamin Disraeli remained, as we know, as all England knew, a Jew even up to the moment of his death. Any one who bas read the testimony of friends' who knew him intimately, who has read his own productions, must know this. And yet this man, of Jewish parentage, of strong inclinations toward his father's race, of decidedly Semitic countenance and manners, rose not only to the position of Prime Minister, but is even acknowledged the favorite among the ministers that Victoria had. 

"We may seem to some a little overzealous in ascribing all this to Queen Victoria. She had, it is true, the ability to surround herself with the best men and to obtain from them their best work. Melbourne, Brougham, Cobden, Bright, and a host of others must not be forgotten. But during nearly her whole reign the Queen herself was the guiding spirit of affairs. To see how much we owe to her we have only to imagine what serious obstacles she could have placed in the way of these reforms, had she been herself a little soul. And thus the Jew of England may thank her to-day that he is politically and socially the equal of his fellow-Englishmen. "

---

---