October 24

The British financier and philanthropist Moses Montefiore, later a tireless advocate for Jewish communities worldwide, was born in Livorno, Tuscany.

The French explorer and writer Alexandra David-Néel, an early Western student of Tibetan Buddhism, was born on 24 October 1868 near Paris.

Fuat Sezgin, the historian whose Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums catalogued the sciences of the medieval Islamic world, was born in Bitlis.

Rainer Stadelmann, the German Egyptologist known for his studies of the pyramids at Dahshur and Giza, was born on this day in 1933.