He has been married since 1989 to
Aviva Burnstock, the head of the Department of Art Conservation & Technology at the
Courtauld Institute in London. His brother
Simon Sebag Montefiore is also a writer, besides being an historian. His cousin Denzil was a platoon commander at
Dunkirk. Through his paternal grandmother Audrey Haldinstein, he is a great-great-grandson of
Herbert Leon, who owned
Bletchley Park until he sold it to the British government in 1938. Cecil Sebag-Montefiore, the author's great-grandfather, committed suicide after serving with the
Royal Engineers on the western Front of World War I. Montefiore's father, Stephen Eric Sebag-Montefiore, was descended from a line of wealthy
Sephardic Jews who were diplomats and bankers all over Europe. At the start of the 19th century, his great-great uncle, Sir
Moses Montefiore, became a banking partner of
N M Rothschild & Sons. His mother, Phyllis April Jaffé, comes from a
Lithuanian Jewish family of poor scholars. Her parents fled the
Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century; they bought tickets for New York City, but were cheated, being instead dropped off at
Cork, Ireland. During the
Limerick Boycott of 1904 they left Ireland and moved to
Newcastle, England. The father of his namesake, Bishop of Birmingham
Hugh Montefiore, was the great-great-nephew of Sir Moses. == Books ==