Lady Rachel Simon

Lady Rachel Simon (née Salaman) (1 August 1823 – 7 July 1899) was an English Jewish author.

Lady Rachel Simon
BornRachel Salaman
(1823-08-01)1 August 1823
London, England
Died7 July 1899(1899-07-07) (aged 75)
London, England
Resting placeGolders Green Jewish Cemetery[1]
LanguageEnglish
Spouse
Sir John Simon
​
(
m. 1843; died 1897)

Biography

Lady Rachel Simon was born in 1823, the fifth daughter of Alice (née Cowen) and Simeon Kensington Salaman.[2][3] Her father was clothing supplier to the British Army and warden of the Western Synagogue,[4] and she was the sister of Annette, Charles, and Julia Salaman.[5] Lady Simon grew up amid the intellectual and refined surroundings of a home which was the rendezvous of many distinguished people.

On 12 July 1843, she married barrister John Simon, who would later serve as Serjeant-at-Law and Liberal Member of Parliament.[6] A month after their marriage, the young couple left England for Jamaica, and on arrival there took up their residence in Spanish Town.[7] Their daughter Zillah was born in 1844, the first of eight children, not long before the family immigrated to England when Rachel's health suffered in the tropical climate.[8] They lived for a number of years in Wavertree, Liverpool and settled in London in 1856.[7]

Lady Simon kept from her seventeenth year a diary, from which she published a selection covering a period of fifty years under the title Records and Reflections. The book, with which Lady Simon sought "to remove some of the prevailing misconceptions in regard to [her] ancestral religion," was released in 1894 to favourable reviews.[9][10] She wrote also a work on the Psalms, entitled Beside the Still Waters (1899).[11]

She died in London on 7 July 1899. Lady Simon was outlived by her five surviving children—two sons and three daughters.[12] Her son Oswald John Simon (1855–1832) was a prominent communal worker and author, who served as member of the Council of the Anglo-Jewish Association from 1882 to 1911, and then as vice-president until his death.[13]

Bibliography
  • Simon, Rachel (1894). Records and Reflections Selected from Her Writings During Half a Century (April 3rd, 1840, to April 3rd, 1890). London: Wertheimer, Lea & Co.
  • Simon, Rachel (1899). Beside the Still Waters: Reflections on the Book of Psalms, Illustrated by Parallel verses from Other Portions of the Scriptures. London: Greenberg & Co.
gollark: The hilarity of a joke is directly proportional to the square of its length, you know.
gollark: (note: I like Linux and this is a joke, do not potato me)
gollark: What do Linux users do to change a lightbulb?First, a user creates a bug report, only for it to be closed with "could not reproduce" as the developers got to it in the day. Eventually, some nights later, someone realizes that it is actually a problem, and decides to start work on a fix, soliciting the help of other people.Debates soon break out on the architecture of the new lightbulb - should they replace it with an incandescent bulb (since the bulb which broke was one of those), try and upgrade it to a halogen or LED bulb, which are technically superior if more complex. or go to a simpler and perhaps more reliable solution such as a fire?While an LED bulb is decided on, they eventually, after yet more debate, deem off-the-shelf bulbs unsuitable, and decide to make their own using commercially available LED modules. However, some of the group working on this are unhappy with this, and splinter off, trying to set up their own open semiconductor production operation to produce the LEDs.Despite delays introduced by feature creep, as it was decided halfway through to also add RGB capability and wireless control, the main group still manages to produce an early alpha, and tests it as a replacement for the original bulb. Unfortunately it stops working after a few days of use, and debugging of the system suggests that the problem is because of their power supply - the bulb needs complex, expensive, and somewhat easily damaged circuitry to convert the mains AC power into DC suitable for the LEDs, and they got that bit a bit wrong.So they decide to launch their own power grid and lighting fixture standard, which is, although incompatible with every other device, technically superior, and integrates high-speed networking so they can improve the control hardware. Having completely retrofitted the house the original lightbulb failed in and put all their designs and code up on GitHub, they deem the project a success, and after only a year!
gollark: Minetest is already a thing.
gollark: It really isn't.

References

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Jacobs, Joseph; Lipkind, Goodman (1901–1906). "Simon, Lady Rachel". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. 11. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. p. 373–374.

  1. "Rachel Salaman Simon (1 Aug 1823 – 7 Jul 1899)". Find a Grave. 8 July 2015. 148866437. Retrieved 26 May 2019.
  2. Mair, Robert Henry, ed. (1882). Debrett's Illustrated House of Commons, and the Judicial Bench. London: Dean and Son. p. 204.
  3. Rottenberg, Dan (1995). Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy. Genealogical Publishing Company. p. 343. ISBN 978-0-8063-1151-7.
  4. "Visiting card of Sir John and Lady Simon, 36 Tavistock Square" (20 August 1893). Gaster Papers, ID: GASTER/1/A/SIM/1. London: GB 0103, University College London Archives.
  5. Klaidman, Stephen (2015). Sydney and Violet. New York: Anchor Books. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-307-74211-7.
  6. Russell, Cyril; Lewis, Harry Samuel (1900). "Jewish Books for Jewish Readers". The Jew in London. London: T. Fisher Unwim.
  7. Peixotto, George D. M. (1888). Peixotto, Benjamin F. (ed.). "The Lesson of a Life: Biographical Sketch of Sir John Simon, Q.C., M.P." The Menorah. New York: Menorah Publishing Company. 5: 309–313.
  8. Green, David B. (9 December 2016). "1818: Jamaican Who Wouldn't Become a Rabbi but an English MP Is Born". Haaretz. Retrieved 27 May 2019.
  9. Summers, Anne (2017). Christian and Jewish Women in Britain, 1880-1940: Living with Difference. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42150-6. ISBN 978-3-319-42150-6. OCLC 967265250.
  10. Law, Alice (1894). Abrahams, Israel; Montefiore, Claude Goldsmid (eds.). "Review: Records and Reflections, Selected from Her Writings during Half a Century (April 3rd, 1840, to April 3rd, 1890) by Lady Simon". The Jewish Quarterly Review. London: D. Nutt. 7 (1): 164–168. JSTOR 1450338.
  11. Berenbaum, Michael; Skolnik, Fred, eds. (2007). "Salaman". Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed.). Detroit: Macmillan Reference.
  12. Carlyle, E. I. (2004). "Simon, Sir John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25576. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  13. Rubinstein, William D.; Jolles, Michael A.; Rubinstein, Hillary L., eds. (2011). The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 918. ISBN 978-0-230-30466-6. OCLC 793104984.
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