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‘The entry for Isaac Nathan (1790-1864), the musician and associate of Lord Byron, in the online edition of the Australian Dictionary of Biography states that he was born in Canterbury, England, the eldest son of the cantor [hazan] Menahem Mona, a Polish refugee language master. It makes no mention of the legend, which first appeared in print in the Sydney paper, The Australian, shortly after Isaac’s arrival in his new home in 1841, that his father was the illegitimate son of Stanislaus II, the last king of Poland, and his Jewish mistress. There is actually no evidence that his father Menahem, the Canterbury hazan, had ever make such a claim; the myth seems to have originated with Isaac and then only after his arrival in Australia.’ (p. 5)
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