Simon Sebag Montefiore
British historian
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore ( SEE-bag MON-tə-fee-OR-ee; born 27 June 1965) is a British historian, television presenter and author of history books and novels,
including Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003), Jerusalem: The Biography (2011), The Romanovs: 1613–1918 (2016), and The World: A Family History of Humanity (2022). In 2026, Knopf published his history of the modern Mid-East, The Cauldron, and how violence forged the modern Middle East.
Early life
Simon Sebag Montefiore was born in London into a family of Jewish descent that had escaped Romanov Russia's pogroms. His father was psychotherapist Stephen Eric Sebag Montefiore (1926–2014), a great-grandson of the banker Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore, the nephew and heir of the wealthy philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore.
Simon's mother was Phyllis April Jaffé (1927–2019) from the Lithuanian Jewish branch of the Jaffe family. Her parents fled the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. They bought tickets for New York City, but were cheated, being instead dropped off at Cork, Ireland. In 1904, due to the Limerick boycott, her father, Henry Jaffé, left the country and moved to Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Simon's brother is Hugh Sebag-Montefiore.
Sebag Montefiore was educated at Ludgrove School and at Harrow School, where he was editor of the school newspaper, The Harrovian.
“Simon Sebag Montefiore” enters the record as british historian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Simon, Sebag and Montefiore can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Simon Sebag Montefiore” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Simon, Sebag and Montefiore provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q315262. VIAF identifies the subject as 22399708. The Library of Congress control number is no98074514. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 2003, 2011 and 1613.
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This entry incorporates text from “Simon Sebag Montefiore” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.