He returned to Paris and suffered a relapse of his heart trouble in early 1884. Natalie Benjamin had the last rites of the Catholic Church administered to her Jewish husband before his death in Paris on May 6, 1884, and funeral services were held in a church prior to Judah Benjamin's interment at Père Lachaise Cemetery in the St. Martin family crypt. His grave did not bear his name until 1938, when a plaque was placed by the Paris chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Edgar M. Kahn, in his journal article on the 1860 California sojourn, wrote, "Benjamin's life is an example of a man's determination to overcome almost insurmountable barriers by industry, perseverance, and intelligent use of a remarkable brain." This brilliance was recognized by contemporaries; Salomon de Rothschild, in 1861, deemed Benjamin "the greatest mind" in North America. Nevertheless, according to Meade, "he was given to quixotic enthusiasms and was sometimes too cocksure of his knowledge." Ginsburg said of Benjamin, "he rose to the top of the legal profession twice in one lifetime, on two continents, beginning his first ascent as a raw youth and his second as a fugitive minister of a vanquished power." Davis, after Benjamin's death, deemed him the most able member of his Cabinet, and said that the lawyer's postwar career had fully vindicated his confidence in him. According to Brook, "in every age, a heroic sage struggles to rescue Benjamin from obscurity—and invariably fails." Benjamin left no memoir and destroyed his personal papers, by which "the task of future researchers and historians was made exceedingly difficult and laborious". After his death, Benjamin was rarely written about, in contrast to Davis and other Confederate leaders. Part of this was due to Benjamin depriving his potential biographers of source material, but even Davis, in his two-volume war memoir, mentions him only twice. Evans suggests that as Davis wrote the books in part to defend and memorialize his place in history, it would not have been characteristic of him to give much credit to Benjamin. Davis, in the midst of postwar business struggles, may have resented Benjamin's success as a barrister, or may have feared that allegations of involvement in Lincoln's assassination would again be made against the two men. Brook concurs that Benjamin's postwar success, that began as Davis lay in prison and other Confederates struggled for survival, may have soured Southerners towards the former secretary, but that anti-Semitism was also likely a factor.