HENRY PEREIRA MENDES, born in Birmingham, England, in 1852, counted among his lineage three branches of leaders of the British Sephardi community. His father, Abraham Pereira Mendes, minister of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, published in 1855 one of the earlier collections of English-language sermons, succeeded Benjamin Artom as haham of the London community, and in 1883 moved to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. His mother, Eliza, was the daughter of David Aaron de Sola, haham of the Bevis Marks congregation in London and sister of Abraham de Sola, who took up a rabbinic position in Montreal. Eliza's mother was the daughter of Raphael Meldola, haham of the London Sephardim in the first half of the nineteenth century. Here, then, was someone who grew up exposed to fine models of the homiletical art.

H. P. Mendes received a fine general education in addition to his training in Jewish texts, studying at Northwick College (a Jewish boarding school established by his father) and University College London. Later, he earned an MD degree from New York University. After serving for several years as minister of the Sephardi congregation in Manchester, he was chosen in 1877 as cantor and preacher of Shearith Israel in New York, the flagship congregation of American Sephardim, succeeding J. J. Lyons. He remained with that congregation for the rest of his active career. Like his elder colleague Morais in Philadelphia, he combined a staunch commitment to tradition with an openness to non-Jewish culture, a willingness to work with non-Orthodox rabbis on Jewish and humanitarian causes, and an engagement with broad social and political issues. He was instrumental in establishing the New York Board of Jewish Ministers, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Between seventy-five and a hundred sermons, some in the preacher's own manuscript and others in the form of clippings from newspaper accounts, have been preserved in the Piza Mendes Collection of Shearith Israel. Rabbi David de Sola Pool, who heard Mendes preach many times, wrote that he was ‘gifted with a clear, ringing voice of unusually sympathetic quality, precision of diction, and a rich and poetic vocabulary. His emotional and hortatory messages lifted him to a spiritual and tender kind of oratory. The Bible was the constant source of his inspiration.’ Towards the end of his career, he taught homiletics at Yeshiva University's Isaac Elhanan Seminary.