Benjamin Benjamin[1] (1834–1905) married Henry’s grand-daughter, Fanny (1839–1912), daughter of his daughter Sophia and Abraham Cohen, in Sydney, on _________ 1857.
“The Hon. Sir Benjamin Benjamin, Kt., jp, died on 7th March 1905. He had been the second Jew in Australia to receive a knighthood. Born in 1834, he was the son of Moses Benjamin and a relative of the founders of the Melbourne Synagogue. Benjamin Benjamin arrived in Victoria in 1843, aged nine years, and was educated at an academy conducted by one Rev. W. H. Jarrett. He became a partner with his father and brother Elias in M. Benjamin & Sons, merchants and importers, and in 1846 he joined Edward Cohen in conducting a tea importing and general commission agency.
“He was with Cohen until 1878 [sic][2], when, aged 44, he retired from business and devoted the rest of his life to public service. In 1870 he was elected to the Melbourne City Council as representative for Albert Ward; he became an Alderman in 1881, and was Mayor of Melbourne from 1887 to 1889. He was a member of the Legislative Council from 1889 to 1892. He acted as a Commissioner for the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition in 1888, and it was in recognition of his services and hospitalities for this exhibition that he was knighted.
“Sir Benjamin had many philanthropic interests, among them the Hospital Sunday Fund and the Jewish communal charities. He was many times President of the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation—from 1968 to 1875, 1879 to 1880, and 1885 to 1891, a total of fourteen terms! He was one of Jewry’s finest representatives.”
[AJHS, Vol. 4, Pt. 2, pp.70–71. (+pic)]
Benjamin and Fanny had 16 children:
Maurice Edward (1858–____) married Diana Hart (née Levey)[3] (1860–1898), daughter of Montague Levey and Kate née Levey (who were first cousins).[4] Maurice changed his surname to Blaine.
Catherine (1860–1875) unmarried.[5]
Herbert Abraham (1862–____) unmarried.[6]
Florence Sophia (1863–____) married Bernard Sinauer.[7]
Percy Lionel (1865–____) unmarried.[8]
Edith Fanny (1867–____).[9]
Frank Redford (1868–____) unmarried.[10]
Howard Elias (1870–____) married ____________.[11]
Minnie Violet (1871–____) unmarried.[12]
Ida Rose (1874–____) unmarried.[13]
May Constable (1876–____) married Alfred Phillips,[14] the son of Louis and Clara Phillips.
Leslie Ronald (1878–____) married Dorothy Sternberg.[15]
Gerald Septimus (1879–____) married Isabelle/Kate Davis.[16]
Stanley (____–____) unmarried.
Oswald Deronda (1884–____) married Marjorie Bloch.[17]
Myra Lilian (1885–1958) unmarried.[18]
Other references:
Benjamin Benjamin, AJHS, Vol. 6, Pt. 3, March 1967, pp.129–144. (+pic). [errors]
Biography, Benjamin Benjamin, ADB, Vol. 3, 1851–1890, pp.139–40.
Benjamin, Rodney. “Early Melbourne and the Benjamin Brothers”, AJHS, Vol. 13, Pt 3, November 1996, pp.367–394.
Elias Blaubaum (1847–1904), in 1877, married Henry’s grand-daughter Agnes Rebecca Cohen (1849–92), the daughter of Samuel Henry Cohen and Eliza (née Hyams).
The following is distilled from a lengthy monograph by Hilary L. Rubenstein, PhD, which appeared in the AJHS, Vol. 9, Pt. 8, 1985:
Rabbis and ministers such as Abrahams and Cohen, A. T. Boas, A. B. Davis and D. I. Freedman have been accorded their due places in the annals of our community. They are the subjects of entries in the ADB. The failure to include Rev. Elias Blaubaum in that invaluable and prestigious reference work is a serious sin of omission. Blaubaum, minister of the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation for thirty-one years and editor of the Jewish Herald for almost twenty-five, was one of the most significant figures—clerical or lay—in the entire Australian Jewish story. He was certainly the most Jewish creative.
Australian Jewry should be more aware of this remarkable man and his place in our history.
Elias Blaubaum came from an orthodox German Jewish family. He was born towards the close of 1847 in Rotenburg, a country town on the River Fulda in Hesse-Kassel. His parents were Aaron Blaubaum (Aharon ha-Levi), a drapery merchant, and Miriam, née Nussbaum. The Jews of Hesse-Kassel, who were finally emancipated in 1866 when the principality came under Prussian rule, had been settled in small rural communities such as Rotenburg for centuries. The unusual name Blaubaum, meaning “blue tree”, may have derived from the distinguishing shield outside the family residence, a common practice among Jews of that part of Germany, who adopted surnames long before they were compelled to do so by law.
Throughout his life Blaubaum exhibited the traits of a cultured and enlightened German gentleman while remaining a proud and passionate Jew. He did not believe that the conferral of civil rights upon Jews obligated them to dilute their Jewishness. On the contrary, he believed that the acquisition of rights of which their forefathers never dreamed behoved the Jew to cling all the more tenaciously to their ancestral religion. His attitude exemplified that of the established Australian Jewish community, with its pursuit of integration without assimilation, and its resolve to resist both the honey and the sting of the wider society.
He was a gifted scholar, and he graduated about 1870 from the Royal Provincial College of Kassel, where he apparently trained as a teacher. Upon graduation he became assistant minister and Hebrew teacher at Gudensberg, a little town in the Kassel region. In 1873 Melbourne businessman Isaac Hallenstein, on a business trip to Europe, interviewed him for the post of St Kilda’s first minister. He was then twenty-five years old, a young man of “prepossessing appearance” as the Australian Israelite put it: slight, dark, and unmistakably “semitic”. He was not an ordained rabbi, but his three years’ experience at Gudensberg was sufficient to persuade a rather desperate St Kilda congregation, which had been searching for a suitable man for months, to accept Hallenstein’s recommendation that he be appointed.
Leaving Germany in October 1873, Blaubaum travelled to London for an audience with Chief Rabbi Nathan M. Adler. Blaubaum boarded the steamship Great Britain at Southampton knowing hardly a word of English. By the time he arrived at Sandridge (Port Melbourne) eight weeks later, on 23 December 1873, he had taught himself enough to be understood. Interestingly, his shipboard journal begins in German and ends in English.
Blaubaum was “a ripe scholar and an indefatigable student” who saw it both as a duty and a pleasure to share with others what he had learned. “Improve yourself! Then endeavour to improve others!” was the rabbinic dictum which served as his watchword. He had a deep sense of history and was always very conscious of his ministerial role as a steward of Judaism, whose task it was to guard and to hand on his heritage to the next generation.
Rabbi Dr. Abrahams, who arrived in Victoria in 1885 and quickly became one of Blaubaum’s most devoted admirers, remarked that never had he met anyone with such “restless energy”:
The mainspring of his life’s work was the desire for improvement. This influence was magnetic and contagious and induced me to take up certain studies which otherwise I would have neglected. He sought at the close of each year to be able to answer satisfactorily the question “Am I richer in knowledge and good deeds than I was twelve months ago?” Indeed, every evening he wished to look back on something attempted, something done, to the glory of God and the well-being of his fellow creatures.
In 1877 Blaubaum married Agnes Rebecca Cohen, daughter of Samuel [Henry] Cohen of East Melbourne and later of St Kilda, an official assignee of insolvent estates. Samuel Cohen was a Londoner whose family originated in Amersfoort, Holland, and was related to the Waley-Cohens, distinguished in Anglo-Jewry.
For the first few years of their married life the Blaubaums lived close to the synagogue in Charnwood Grove, St Kilda. Later, as their family increased in size, the Blaubaums moved to Mozart Street, and there the minister lived for the rest of his life. The Blaubaums had seven children. Two girls, Meta and Zilla, were followed by five boys: Athol, Hubert, Eric, Otto and Ivan. Mrs Blaubaum died in 1892, when the youngest child was still a baby. Blaubaum never remarried.
All his children were academically gifted and he sacrificed his own comfort in order to pay for their education. Meta, a piano student at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, became a well-known accompanist and eventually married David Phillips of Dunedin. Zilla, who won a Melbourne University exhibition for French and German, went on to study medicine. She abandoned her course on her marriage in 1903 to Isidore Marks, dentist son of a former president of the Ballarat Hebrew Congregation. Blaubaum’s sons, particularly the two eldest, excelled at Wesley and carried off a truly impressive number of prizes and scholarships. Athol was, in addition, a good sportsman and a member of the Wesley College football team. Blaubaum encouraged his children to pursue careers which would benefit humanity. Athol, Hubert and Ivan became doctors in Melbourne. Otto became a dentist in Launceston, Tasmania. Eric, who suffered from ill-health, worked for Michaelis-Hallenstein’s Dunedin branch, and was killed in France during the First World War.
Athol and Otto married out of Judaism and the entire male line of the Blaubaums ceased to be Jewish by the next generation. It was an ironical twist of fate for the descendants of a man who strove to make young Jews “proud of their lineage and conscious of their religion” and who had declared that “we are not now so often exposed to the shame of seeing our men of intellect and ability abandon their inheritance for a mess of pottage.” The situation was a salutary reminder of the fragile ties binding Jews to their heritage in Australia’s easy and tolerant society during the first half of the twentieth century.
Blaubaum was a staunch and outspoken believer in the equality of women, their right to social emancipation, higher education and economic independence.
It was in the Jewish Herald, the journal Blaubaum established in December 1879 and edited until his death, that his moral and intellectual greatness became apparent. He had been a passionate advocate of the abortive Colonial Jewish Times, which Moritz Michaelis and others had intended as a successor to the defunct Australian Israelite. Blaubaum was justifiably proud of the high journalistic reputation of the Jewish Herald.
Blaubaum’s strong, dogmatic personality brought him his share of opponents and detractors. The Jewish Herald conceded as much when, in an una tributed obituary for him, it observed that no man who ever lived was entirely free of enemies.
In 1902 Blaubaum’s health began to deteriorate. In 1903 he left Melbourne on a nine week vacation to Sydney, the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. His elder daughter Meta accompanied him. From each place on his route this diligent (and, as it proved, dying) man sent long, entertaining and informative articles back to Melbourne for inclusion in the Jewish Herald. They show that, ill as he was, his writing had lost none of its verve and vigour. These last offerings from Blaubaum’s pen are marvellous social and historical documents. They give more than a tourist’s superficial impressions. They provide a vivid and valuable insight into Pacific life and administration at the turn of the century.
He returned from his travels refreshed and apparently cured. But his illness was more serious than his doctor imagined. He had an obstructive tumour of the bladder and in April 1904 was admitted to hospital where he underwent surgery. The operation was considered a success, but less than a fortnight afterwards, on 21 April 1904, Blaubaum died. Two days later he was buried beside his wife in St Kilda cemetery.
Blaubaum was only fifty-six when he died, and tributes arrived at St Kilda from Jewish communities throughout Australia.
Blaubaum’s anonymous obituarist wrote that even those who had crossed swords with him must agree that he was “a good man and a good Jew.” Rabbi Abrahams recalled that Blaubaum’s “efforts were not showy or ostentatious, but modest, quiet and practical.” Blaubaum’s lasting legacy was the Jewish Herald. Happily the quarter-century’s issued which he edited are still extant. They are an indispensable source for the history of Australian Jewry. They illustrate the timelessness of Judaism, and remind us that its adherents can communicate not only across continents but across centuries. They help us to understand ourselves, for their pages consider the sorts of problems and issues which our Jewish community is confronting today. The busy pen of Elias Blaubaum can still instruct and inspire.
Elias and Agnes had seven children:
Meta (____–____) in 1908 married David Phillips of Dunedin.
Zilla (1879–1972); in 1903 married a dentist, Isidore Jacob Marks (1877–1962), son of Solomon Marks (no relation).
Athol (____–____) became a doctor in Melbourne.
Hubert (1883–____) became a doctor in Melbourne; in 1911 married Telka Kate (1883–1935) daughter of Louis Hart (1849–1884) and Dinah née Levy (1860–1898). [Louis Hart was a brother of Alfred David Hart.]
Eric (1890–____) worked for Michaelis-Hallenstein’s Dunedin branch, and was killed in France during the First World War.
Otto (____–1904) became a dentist in Launceston.
Ivan (____–____) became a doctor in Melbourne; in 1920 married Lylie May Nelson, daughter of Solomon Nelson and Abigail née Sanders.
[Reference: Extensive biography: Rubenstein, Hilary L. “Rev. Elias Blaubaum (1847–1904)”, AJHS, Vol. 9, Pt. 8, 1986, pp.567–581.]
