10 - Benjamin Artom, ‘The War’, 17 September 1870, London

Summary

BENJAMIN ARTOM was born at Asti, Piedmont, in 1835. Educated by Italian rabbis, he served a congregation in Naples. At the young age of 31, he received a call to become haham of the Spanish and Portuguese congregations in London, filling this position after a vacancy of thirty-eight years, and to preach in the flagship Bevis Marks synagogue. At his installation service on 16 December 1866 he was identified as ‘Professor B. Artom’; his installation sermon, ‘The Jewish Pastor in the Present Age’, was delivered in French, then translated and printed. Within a year, however, according to one account, ‘he mastered the vernacular and then poured forth that impassioned eloquence which kindled every feature of the preacher's splendid physique’.

In 1875 he married Henrietta Habab David, a wealthy widow and sister-inlaw of Reuben Sassoon, a member of the family of international merchants. The wedding ceremony was performed by the Ashkenazi chief rabbi Nathan Adler, at Artom's invitation, signifying an effort to transcend division within the Jewish community.

Artom published one volume of sermons in 1873; the second edition of 1876 bore the phrase ‘First Series’, indicating that further publications were anti ci - pated, but he died suddenly in 1879 and no other work appeared. The volume was reviewed favourably in both the Jewish and the general press, including the English Independent and the Spectator. As is characteristic of nineteenthcentury collections, many of the sermons it contains relate to the themes of the holy days, Jewish belief, and Jewish identity. There is also a sermon on the occasion of ‘The Illness of the Prince of Wales’, delivered on 23 December 1871, when prayers and sermons in congregations throughout the country were devoted to the hope for his recovery. Israel Abrahams, who heard Artom preach on several occasions, described him forty years later as unquestionably ‘a great preacher’ (though not quite of the rank of Jellinek or Simeon Singer), and spoke of ‘His commanding presence, his beautiful voice, his dramatic gestures, his extempore delivery of carefully prepared impromptus’.

The sermon reproduced below is the only one in the book apart from that on the prince's illness that responds to a historical event. Jewish preachers in Britain, like those in America, were of course on the sidelines of this conflict. This is not to say that Britain had no interest in what was happening in Europe.