Emile and Isaac Pereire

Bankers, Socialists and Sephardic Jews in nineteenth-century France

Helen M. Davies

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526110947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Emile (1800–75) and Isaac Pereire (1806–80) were pivotal and sensational figures, their lives and careers a lens through which to re-examine the history of France in the nineteenth century. Among the first generation of Jews emancipated by the French Revolution, they became significant Saint-Simonians, contributing to its philosophy of financial and economic reform. They were the first to implement the new rail technology in France and to launch the first investment bank of any size in Europe, the Crédit Mobilier. The Pereires ultimately came to stand behind banks and railways throughout Europe and in the Ottoman Empire. They were thus major players in France's and Europe's industrialisation and the modernisation of its banking system. This book is equally a social and cultural history of the Jews in France, addressing the means through which the Pereires managed their business empire and the contribution of family life to its success. It is their first full-scale biography in English.

1

Bordeaux: a Sephardic childhood

Jacob Rodrigues Pereire and Miriam Lopès Dias were married in a synagogue in Bordeaux in 1766. Both Sephardic Jews, he had negotiated a circuitous path from Spain, to Bordeaux and then to Paris, she a simpler one from St Esprit-lès-Bayonne, a town across the River Adour from Bayonne. The groom was 51 years of age, his bride thirty years younger. He had come to matrimony late although there had been no lack of desire to find a partner, simply absorption in his vocation, that of teaching deaf-mute children how to speak.¹ For this he had received accolades and honours from the King and his court, the nobility and the academy. Influential members of the French Académie des Sciences had successfully proposed his membership to The Royal Society of London. A year before the marriage Louis XV appointed him secretary and interpreter in Spanish and Portuguese, an honorific but not particularly taxing position awarded in acknowledgement both of Rodrigues Pereire’s skill and of his comparative penury.

Miriam Lopès Dias was unlikely to have been well-acquainted with Jacob Rodrigues Pereire before their wedding for this was an arranged marriage and the bridegroom had lived in Paris for some fifteen years. They were, however, distantly related, for there is evidence of a marriage between the Rodrigues Pereire and Lopès Dias families in the seventeenth century.² The match clearly would have delighted her family, for Jacob was highly regarded as a teacher in a difficult and worthy field. Aside from his eminence in Paris, he also held an official position at court as representative of the Sephardic communities of Bordeaux and St Esprit. The Lopès Dias family, for its part, was prominent and well-to-do in the Sephardic world of southwest France, the bride bringing a dowry of 10,000 livres with her.³ This is the extent of what is known about Miriam, however, a young woman who remains a shadowy figure and whose place in the literature serves only to confirm her role as the bearer of Jacob’s heirs.

This chapter deals with the ‘making’ of their grandsons, two Jewish boys born after the Revolution into the close-knit Sephardic community of Bordeaux, a community confronted with the revolutionary decision of emancipation, bringing equality of citizenship and opportunity. Opportunity was, however, difficult to identify in a city afflicted by economic disaster brought on by the loss of the slave trade, constant war and British naval blockades. The effects of all these different elements – religious, social, economic and political – were to shape significantly the direction the Pereires took, the life choices they made or which were made for them, and the manner in which they confronted the opportunities when eventually they arose.

What is known of the early lives of Jacob’s and Miriam’s grandchildren Emile and Isaac Pereire must be reconstructed – from certain comparatively rare documents of the period, from documents relating to other Sephardic Jews, from archival material relating to the place where they lived, and from clues emerging from their later lives. Teasing out the significant moments as well as the trivia of daily life is thus a hazardous undertaking.

Despite the lack of material which might give greater solidity to an account of their early lives, however, some elements can be outlined with confidence. Bordeaux and its Sephardic community are crucial to an understanding of Emile and Isaac Pereire. For three centuries the port city had sheltered and supported Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal, in the course of which the Sephardim had established their own community, carving out a valued role within the mercantile infrastructure. Before the French Revolution a mix of circumstances had determined their favourable situation: their financial acumen, their financial resources built up judiciously over a century or more, their commercial networks throughout the Sephardic diasporas, their utility to the Bordeaux economy in providing financial and banking services, and their stable community structure. From 1550, a series of letters patent signed by the monarch assured their legal status in France.⁴

A measure of the Jews’ confidence and successful integration within the structures of Bordeaux can be seen in the organisation of their own community. Writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jewish historian and lawyer Francia de Beaufleury noted that in 1699 the Sephardim instituted for the first time a voluntary tax to support their own needs, including sustenance for their poor, sedaca, to which forty families contributed.⁵ From a very early time, then, the provision of sedaca was at the heart of the organised life of the Jews of Bordeaux.

The rapid expansion of the Bordeaux economy in the eighteenth century brought advantages to its Jewish population as well, and great wealth to certain of them. There were stock brokers, négociants, maritime insurers and bankers, and some even became ship-builders and merchants themselves, the Furtados and the Rabas particularly becoming immensely wealthy through Sephardic networks in the Caribbean.⁶ Another, David Gradis, in 1763 alone exported goods to Canada valued at nine million livres.⁷ When in 1741 Jacob Rodrigues Pereire, his mother and his siblings arrived in Bordeaux from Spain, they found themselves in a Catholic city which welcomed their contribution to its economic strength and wellbeing and, in turn, had begun to tolerate Jewish religious observance. Numbering about 2,000 by the end of the eighteenth century, the Jews were an integral part, financially and legally, of this mercantile success. In 1760 the Bordeaux Sephardim were granted the status of a corporation, charged with regulating their own religious and commercial affairs, and directed by an oligarchy which stipulated the personal qualities and financial stability of its leaders. The oligarchy governed efficiently and well virtually every aspect of the lives of its people.⁸

Another town in France’s southwest and another marriage also contributed to the social and cultural formation of Emile and Isaac Pereire. In April 1775, again in a synagogue, one of many in St Esprit-lès-Bayonne, the 27-year-old Mardochée Lopès Fonseca wed Esther de Daniel Delvaille. The groom, described as ‘Master of laws’, was of a well-established Sephardic family. The bride, with a similar background, brought a dowry of 10,800 livres, most of it in silver. Their respective families had escaped from Portugal early in the eighteenth century, taking refuge in St Esprit where individual members eventually became figures in the organisational life of the Sephardim.⁹ They were the maternal grandparents of Emile and Isaac Pereire.

Despite constraints on their participation in the economic life of Bayonne and enforced anti-Jewish prohibitions concerning their living arrangements, the circumstance of living side by side in a small town helped the Jews of St Esprit to emerge from their status as pseudo-Christians and crypto-Jews earlier than their co-religionists in Bordeaux, asserting their identity as Jews from the seventeenth century. They were encouraged by the crusading mission of the financially ascendant Jews of Amsterdam, determined to revive Judaism in those centres where conversion to Christianity had proved overwhelmingly seductive. Spanish books of devotion printed in Amsterdam found a ready underground market in St Esprit. The liturgy of St Esprit conformed to that of Amsterdam and rabbis were drawn from the northern congregation.¹⁰

Recognition of the usefulness of the Sephardic Jews to the French economy culminated in letters patent of 1776, signed by Louis XVI. Significant on two counts, they were the result of negotiation between the then Controller-General Jacques Turgot and Jacob Rodrigues Pereire as official representative at court of the Jews of the southwest of France, and they were written in terms which advanced the situation of the Jews considerably compared with those promulgated earlier.¹¹ Permitted to live and work where they chose in France even before the French Revolution and the decree of the Assemblée Nationale in January 1790 which granted them emancipation, the Sephardic Jews of the southwest had already been extended considerable liberties in recognition of their commercial and financial skills, their utility and, in the case of the Bordeaux Jews, their effective integration with the city’s merchant community.¹² When the question of their admissibility as citizens was first posed before the new Assemblée late in 1789, the Sephardim were able to argue their own case with confidence.

The debate on Jewish emancipation during 1789–91 was not without rancour, however, hinging as it did on the particularity of Jewish communities, whether, by the nature of their religion and the demands it placed on communal life, Jews were capable of entering fully as citizens into the affairs of the nation – capable, that is, of being both Jews and Frenchmen. This perceived conundrum was most clearly expressed in the oftenquoted statement of the deputy from Paris and member of the nobility Stanislas, comte de Clermont-Tonnerre: ‘We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to the Jews as individuals.’¹³ A fiery debate was finally decided on 28 January 1790 by 374 votes in favour of emancipating the Sephardic and Avignon Jews and 224 against, but the kernel of Clermont-Tonnerre’s dictum was not dissipated by this decision. It remained a predicament.¹⁴

In contrast, the Ashkenazi Jews of France waited a further twenty months before achieving emancipation in September 1791, during which time they had been subjected to repeated attacks of anti-Jewish violence. Numbering some 40,000 comparatively poor people at the Revolution the Ashkenazim, originally from central Europe, lived in small rural towns and villages in France’s northeast, in Alsace-Lorraine, observing traditional Jewish customs and ways of life. The degree of integration with business achieved in Bordeaux by the Sephardim was missing in Ashkenazic communities. Indeed, many French regarded the Ashkenazim as unassimilable. This disparity was played on shamelessly throughout the eighteenth century by the Sephardim who went to great lengths to distance themselves from their co-religionists in the northeast, particularly in the face of anti-Jewish attack from Voltaire and Rousseau among others, which they countered with claims of superiority over the Ashkenazim in their own communal and religious practices. Jacob Rodrigues Pereire had commissioned one polemic from the Sephardic philosopher from Amsterdam, Isaac de Pinto, in which de Pinto was at pains to distinguish between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, to counter the ‘disadvantageous and unjust prejudices that one has against … the Portuguese and Spanish Jews’.¹⁵ This antipathy remained an irritant well into the nineteenth century.

Jacob Rodrigues Pereire did not live to see the Revolution, dying nine years before the fall of the Bastille. His sole surviving son Isaac, the father of Emile and Isaac, was nine years old...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Bordeaux: a Sephardic childhood
• 2 The new society
• 3 The new entrepreneurs
• 4 The adventure of rail
• 5 Capitalism and the State
• 6 The family business
• 7 Private lives of public men
• 8 Boom and bust
• 9 Epilogue
• 10 Conclusion
• Appendix: Pereire companies
• Select bibliography
• Index