Montefiore, Joshua, 1762-1843.
Montefiore's Commercial Dictionary : American Law; English Law
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| A Commercial Dictionary, 1804 |
Joshua Montefiore was the sixth of nine children of a prominent Italian Jewish family. He was born in London shortly after the family emigrated. He claimed to be the first Jewish graduate of Oxford and the first Jewish commissioned officer in the British Army. He was admitted to law practice in 1784, and in 1791 he accompanied an expedition that attempted to establish a British colony on the African coast. Conflicts with the native inhabitants led to the colony's failure. On his return to England he declined a knighthood offered by George III and entered the army as a captain. In 1802 Montefiore published the first of a number of successful law books aimed at merchants and businessmen. By 1803 he was in Philadelphia and remained in the United States the rest of his life.
Montefiore's Commercial Dictionary: Containing the Present State of Mercantile Law, Practice, and Custom was first published in London in 1803, and was followed by a 3-volume Philadelphia edition the following year. It was the first law dictionary published in the U.S. The preface of the American edition boasts of the addition of "two hundred new and interesting articles," and adds that the preceding English edition "has been seen to possess the humble merit of minuteness, and at the same time to be sufficiently comprehensive; it has been received as the temporary relief of indolence, and seized as an adequate guide in laborious research; and therefore, the studious and desultory reader, the timid and the enterprising merchant, have with one consent remunerated the services, and flattered the production of the Author."
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