Following his father’s key role in the birth of the Jewish Museum in London, the historian Edgar Samuel, who has died aged 94, oversaw its move from Woburn House to an early Victorian listed building in Camden Town in 1994.

In 1932 Wilfred Samuel co-founded the Museum with his friends Cecil Roth and Freddie Rubens. The young Edgar trained to be an ophthalmic optician but became frustrated by his first 20 years in that profession, and as an Orthodox family man with practical skills and an aesthetic bent, he created an original succah design that appeared three times in the pages of the JC.

He followed his father into the Jewish Historical Society of England and, combining his optics and love of the visual with his history, he published an original theory about the optically distorted skull in the famous painting by Holbein, The Ambassadors.

In middle age, he requalified as a historian, with particular expertise in the role of Jewish Portuguese traders.

By this time, the Jewish Museum had become a very down-at-heel affair in Woburn House, London. Its trustees appointed Samuel as curator and director.

He launched into this task by making the exhibits presentable with clear captions and cataloguing all the exhibits. He also recruited a professional museum curator and sought funding from grant-giving bodies.

He established the museum as a serious player in the world, earning grants for its development and receiving requests for loans from institutions internationally. Both would have been unimaginable a few years earlier.

Above all, Edgar worked with Kenneth Rubens and Raymond Burton to move the museum to a purpose-built new building in Camden Town. On his retirement, he left behind a beautifully laid out and exhibited collection easily visited and publicly acclaimed by museum visitors regardless of religion.

Edgar published a collection of his Jewish Historical Society papers in a book: At the End of the Earth –- Essays on The History of The Jews in England and Portugal.

They touched different people in many ways. To Jewish genealogists his essay on Jewish naming customs is an invaluable tool for family history research. Anyone researching the origins of Decca, and indeed the musical instruments and gramophone player history, should read his paper, found in the book on the Decca years.

This outlines the origins of Decca and the Barnett Samuel business that invented it. Books and articles online on musical instruments and the early recorded music industry frequently refer to Samuel’s paper as the source of what is known on the subject.

His article on dispute resolution by the Mahamad, the governing body of the London Spanish and Portuguese Community in the 18th Century, reflected Samuel’s role in working on and ultimately digitising that community’s archives as part of the Miriam Pereira Mendoza team.

Presenting accounts taken from the synagogue’s records of how the lay leadership dealt with members’ disputes, it opened up the study of this form of secular dispute resolution and crossed over into the study of arbitration generally.

In “retirement”, Edgar gave lectures on Anglo and Portuguese-Jewish history. His eye for pictures made some of his later efforts a visual feast, notably those on the 350th Anniversary of the Jewish return to the UK and his Richard Barnett Memorial Lecture on the Portuguese Inquisition. He also wrote the Dictionary of National Biography on Jewish figures.

Samuel had an almost otherworldly integrity. He was totally trustworthy, reliable and he was honest, to a fault at times.

He did not do trimming (except on a sailing boat), a fact which the late Rabbi Abraham Levy said probably cost him a great deal. His uncanny ability for friendship led to his maintaining relationships for many years with people who adored him. He was also a man who laughed long and loud.

Samuel married Ruth Cowen in July, 1956. After her death in 1987, he married, in 2001, Louise Hillman, née Shalom, the widow of his first nursery school friend, Ellis Hillman.

She, along with his daughter Debbie Nevo, and his son Jonathan Samuel, survive him, alongside his nonagenarian brothers, Oliver and Andrew Samuel, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Edgar Samuel: born December 13,1928. Died January 8, 2023