In 1870 official――or it would perhaps be more correct to call it semi-official――relations with Roumania were established temporarily, by the appointment of a consul-general of the United States in Roumania. The man chosen by President Grant for this position was a prominent Jewish attorney-at-law, Benjamin Franklin Peixotto (b. in New York, 1834; d. there 1890), who later served as United States Consul at Lyons, France (1877–85), and when he returned to New York founded (1886) the “Menorah,” a monthly Jewish magazine which existed for more than two decades. The Jewish official became an intimate friend of Prince (now King) Charles, but Roumania continued on its old way, and the riots of Ismail and Bessarabia occurred during Peixotto’s stay in Bucharest. “His reports to the United States Government resulted in that government addressing letters to its ministers at the various European courts inviting co-operation in the humane endeavor to stop Jewish persecution in Roumania. Peixotto’s reports were also the cause of a great meeting at the Mansion House in London, which called forth Lord Shaftesbury’s message of sympathy. Peixotto was instrumental, too, in founding the Society of Zion in Roumania, an organization with similar aims to the B’nai B’rith; and it was his influence as a United States official, his intimacy with the European philanthropists and the force of his own personal magnetism that finally caused the calling of the conference of Brussels, to which he was a delegate, and which culminated in the action taken by the Berlin Congress of 1878, when Roumania acquired the status of a sovereign kingdom only upon the express condition that the civil and political rights of the Jews should be recognized.” (E. A. Cardozo, in _Encyclopedia_ IX, p. 582, s. v. Peixotto.)