Frederick de Sola Mendes was a rabbi, author, and editor.
Background
Frederick de Sola Mendes was the son of the Rev. Abraham Pereira and Eliza (de Sola) Mendes. He was born on July 8, 1850 in Montego Bay, Jamaica, British West Indies, where his father was minister. He was a descendant of David Pereira Mendes, who, after fleeing from Spain to Bayonne, settled in Jamaica in 1768. His mother's mother, Rica Meldola, traced her ancestry to Isaiah Meldola of Toledo, who was born in 1282. When Frederic was a year old, his family went to England, and spent the next seven years in Birmingham. From there they moved, in 1858, to London.
Education
Young Mendes received his education at his father's private school, at University College School, London, and at London University (B. A. 1869). Proceeding to Germany, he studied at the University of Breslau, receiving the degree of Ph. D. at the University of Jena in 1871. At the same time, he obtained his rabbinic training in the Jewish Theological Seminary, Breslau, 1870-73.
Career
Returning to England, Frederic was licensed to preach in 1873 by the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Benjamin Artom. After serving as preacher for a few months in the New Synagogue, London, in December 1873 he accepted the call to become assistant to Rev. Samuel M. Isaacs, minister of Congregation Shaaray Tefila in New York, taking office on January 1, 1874. Isaacs, who had served the congregation since its organization in 1845, retired in 1874, whereupon, Mendes was elected preacher, and after the death of Isaacs, on May 19, 1878, he became the rabbi of the congregation, a position which he held until elected rabbi emeritus on October 1, 1920. His death in New Rochelle, New York, closed a career of almost fifty-four years with the one congregation.
Achievements
Mendes belonged to the generation of scholarly rabbis who came to America from Europe in the last third of the nineteenth century. He inherited from his father, and from his maternal ancestors in the learned De Sola and Meldola families a tradition of scholarship which influenced him towards a literary rabbinate. In 1876 he helped to found and conduct the Independent Hebrew, a magazine which lived for only three months. He took the lead in establishing the American Hebrew in 1879, and was its editor from 1879 to 1885. He edited two volumes of The Menorah Monthly, 1901-02; he was revising editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia and chief of its translation bureau until September 1902; and was a contributor to Johnson's Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana. Mendes took part in the development of the Jewish community of New York in its critical years of prodigious growth at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. After the massacres of Jews in Russia in 1881 and the promulgation of the May Laws in 1882, Russian Jewish refugees began to find their way in large numbers to the United States. Mendes was actively interested in trying to keep them out of the cities, and gave much time to the founding and the administration of the agricultural village alliance near Vineland, New Jersey. He was also one of the founders and a president of the New York Board of Jewish Ministers, and one of the founders of the Young Men's Hebrew Association in New York.
In the weekly magazine, the American Hebrew, which for decades was devoted to the conservation of historical Jewish tradition, Mendes expressed his religious views. Though in later years he reluctantly moved with his congregation more towards reform Judaism, he always remained a conservativeJew. He was strongly opposed to the radical reform Judaism of his day, and was one of those who in 1885 uncompromisingly denounced the Pittsburgh Program of Reform Judaism.
Personality
Frederic was small in stature, but his geniality, tolerance, culture, and humane scholarship gave him an unvarying dignity, and commanded general respect.
Interests
Frederic's interests were broad, including such subjects as chemistry, poetry, anatomy, music, Semitic languages, scientific farming and gardening.
Connections
On February 14, 1877, Mendes married Isabel, daughterof Aaron N. and Isabel Frances Cohen, who bore him two sons and four daughters.
