Marion Hartog

Marion Moss Hartog (22 October 1821 – 29 October 1907) was an English Jewish poet, author, and educator. She was the editor of the first Jewish women's periodical, The Jewish Sabbath Journal.[3]

Marion Hartog
BornMarion Moss
(1821-10-22)22 October 1821
Portsmouth, England
Died29 October 1907(1907-10-29) (aged 86)
Kilburn, London, England
GenrePoetry, fiction
Literary movementRomanticism
Spouse
Alphonse Hartog
​
​
(m. 1845; died 1904)​
[1]
ChildrenHéléna Darmesteter
Marcus Hartog
Numa Hartog
Philip Hartog
RelativesCelia Levetus (sister)
Hertha Ayrton (niece)
Ada Ballin (niece)[2]
Signature

Biography

Early life

Marion Moss was born at Portsmouth on 22 October 1821, one of twelve children of Amelia (née Solomons) and Joseph Moss.[4] Her great-grandfather was one of the founders of the Portsmouth Jewish community, and her grandmother, Sarah Davids, was the first Jewish child born in Portsmouth.[2] Moss was educated by her parents, and at an early age began with her sister Celia the composition of poems and stories.[4]

In 1838 the sisters published by subscription a book of poems entitled Early Efforts, influenced in part by classical Jewish texts and the works of Late-Romantic female poets like Felicia Hemans and L.E.L.[5] Among other poems, the volume includes various laments for Jerusalem and a narrative documentary of the York Massacre of 1190, as well as thematically-non-Jewish poems such as The Battle of Bannockburn and Amy Robsart's Complaint to the Earl of Leicester.[6] The book was successful enough for a second edition to be called for the following year.

Career

In 1840 she and Celia published three volumes of tales entitled The Romance of Jewish History, along the lines of Leitch Ritchie's Romance of French History.[7] Each chapter consisted of a "Historical Summary" of some particular period of Jewish history, followed by a story which the authors had woven round the principal events. Among the subscribers to the work were Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (to whom it was dedicated), Lord Palmerston, and Sir Moses Montefiore.[2][8] These volumes were followed by Tales of Jewish History (1843).[9]

By this time, Moss was engaged in literary work for different publications. She contributed "The Gift and the Loan," and other tales, to the Bradford Observer, which were afterwards reproduced by Isaac Leeser in the Occident. She also contributed to the Metropolitan Magazine, and subsequently the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish World.[10]

A little later Moss went to London and gained a livelihood as a teacher.[10] In August 1845, she married Paris-born Alphonse Hartog, with whom she had been taking French lessons, and shortly after her marriage established a boarding and day school for young children, which she continued to conduct until her retirement in 1884.[10] Hartog's pupils included her niece Sarah Marks,[11] who moved in with the Hartog family upon the death of her father in 1861.[12][13]

The Jewish Sabbath Journal

In early 1855, Hartog founded the first Jewish women's periodical, The Jewish Sabbath Journal; A Penny and Moral Magazine for the Young, consisting of stories, verses, and religious addresses.[14][15] The disapproval of Abraham Benisch, however, precluded her from publishing notices in The Jewish Chronicle, and subscriptions soon fell off.[16] The journal's fourteenth and final issue was published on 8 June 1855, and ended with the poem "On the Death of My Beloved Child".[17]

Later life and death
Grave of Marion and Alphonse Hartog at Willesden Jewish Cemetery

Hartog wrote little for the remaining 52 years of her life.[4] She died on 29 October 1907 at her home in Kilburn, London, at the age of eighty-six.[3] Many of her children were eminent. Of her sons, Numa Edward Hartog was Senior Wrangler at Cambridge; Marcus and Sir Philip Hartog were distinguished men of science. Her daughters were Héléna Arsène Darmesteter, the portrait-painter, and Cécile Hartog, the composer and pianist.[8][10]

Partial bibliography
  • Moss, Celia and Marion (1839). Early Efforts; A Volume of Poems, by the Misses Moss, of the Hebrew Nation, Aged 18 and 16 (2nd ed.). Portsmouth: Whittaker & Co.
  • Moss, Celia and Marion (1840). The Romance of Jewish History. Vol. 1–3. London: Saunders & Otley.
  • Moss, Celia and Marion (1843). Tales of Jewish History. Vol. 1–3. London: Miller & Field.

References

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Jacobs, Joseph; Lipkind, Goodman (1904). "Hartog, Marion". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. p. 245.

  1. "Nouvelles diverses". Archives Israélites: Recueil politique et religieux (in French). Vol. 56, no. 35. Paris. 29 August 1895.
  2. "Jewesses of To-day: Marion Hartog". Young Israel: A Monthly Magazine. Vol. 2, no. 13. March 1898. pp. 185–197.
  3. Galchinsky, Michael (2009). "Marion Hartog". Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 24 September 2020.
  4. Klass, Traci M. (2007). "Moss, Celia (1819–1873) and Marion (1821–1907)". In Berenbaum, Michael; Skolnik, Fred (eds.). Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed.). Detroit: Macmillan Reference. ISBN 978-0-02-866097-4.
  5. Valman, Nadia (2014). Jewish Women Writers in Britain. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. pp. 38–41. ISBN 978-0-8143-3914-5. OCLC 903760938.
  6. Weisman, Karen (June 2013). "Anglo-Jewish Culture and the Condition of England: The Poetry of Marion and Celia Moss". BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History.
  7. "Гартог, Марион" . Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (in Russian). Vol. 6. 1910. p. 189.
  8. Rubinstein, William D.; Jolles, Michael A.; Rubinstein, Hillary L., eds. (2011). "Hartog (née Moss), Marion". The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 404. ISBN 978-0-230-30466-6. OCLC 793104984.
  9. Calisch, Edward N. (1909). The Jew in English Literature, as Author and as Subject. Richmond, Va.: The Bell Book and Stationery Co. OCLC 1135887570.
  10.  Jacobs, Joseph; Lipkind, Goodman (1904). "Hartog, Marion". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. p. 245.
  11. Harris, Emma Tanya (2007). Anglo-Jewry's experience of secondary education from the 1830s until 1920 (PDF) (Thesis). University College London. OCLC 1006088362.
  12. Bruton, Elizabeth (Autumn 2018). "The Life and Material Culture of Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923): Suffragette, Physicist, Mathematician and Inventor". Science Museum Group Journal. 10 (10). doi:10.15180/181002/002.
  13. Morse, Elizabeth J. (2004). "Hartog, Sir Philip Joseph". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33742.
  14. Shahaf, Michal (Spring 2014). "The Jewish Sabbath Journal and Its Friends and Subscribers in the Anglo-Jewish Community in 1855 / עיתון השבת היהודי, ידידיו ומנוייו בקהילה האנגלית-יהודית בשנת 1855" [The Jewish Sabbath Journal and Its Friends and Subscribers in the Anglo-Jewish Community in 1855] (PDF). Kesher (in Hebrew) (46): 88–99. JSTOR 23922591.
  15. Galchinsky, Michael (2004). "Levetus [née Moss], Celia". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/59417. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8.
  16. Galchinsky, Michael (2018). The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England. Wayne State University Press. doi:10.1353/book.67406. ISBN 978-0-8143-4445-3.
  17. Galchinsky, Michael (1998). "Engendering Liberal Jews: Jewish Women in Victorian England". In Baskin, Judith R. (ed.). Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (2nd ed.). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. pp. 208–226. ISBN 978-0-8143-2713-5.
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