Jewish Women in Nineteenth-Century France

A new book by Dr Helen M. Davies (Honorary Fellow, History) explores the lives of two remarkable Jewish women in nineteenth-century France. The book sheds light on gender, family, and Jewish experiences in France, from the Napoleonic period through to the Dreyfus Affair. This adapted excerpt introduces the book’s main themes.

My book, Herminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish Women in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester University Press, 2024), explores the lives of two remarkable Jewish women in nineteenth-century France: Herminie Pereire, who was born into the Rodrigues family in 1805, and Fanny Pereire, born in 1825. They married respectively Emile and Isaac Pereire, two of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the nation. Emile and Isaac were brothers, Herminie and Fanny were sisters-in-law. But Herminie and Fanny were not only married to exceptional men whose deeds were prodigious — they were mother and daughter, a surprising circumstance that encapsulates something of the complications of Jewish lives in nineteenth-century France. Their story has much to tell us about women of the Jewish elite in the longue durée.

Writing an earlier monograph on Emile (1800–75) and Isaac Pereire (1806–80), I was drawn to the family context from which these extraordinary men emerged and through which they flourished. Sephardic Jews from Bordeaux, the Pereire brothers have been much discussed, analysed, interpreted, and reinterpreted in their own lifetime and subsequently. In the first fifteen years of this century alone three biographies have been published, including mine.

The brothers left a permanent mark on the spatial and financial face of Paris and their influence was felt as far afield as Bucharest, Istanbul, Madrid, Melbourne, New York, and St Petersburg. Bankers, railway entrepreneurs, urban developers, hotel magnates, department store owners, ship-builders, owners of utility, transport, and insurance companies – even of sardine canneries, among other enterprises – the Pereires did as much as anyone else to shape the nineteenth-century financial, commercial, and industrial landscape of France and contributed to that of other countries in Europe. Yet a major element in their success, the significance of their wives and family life, remains largely unexamined.  Over a long period, this has led me to a study of the two women who are the subjects of this work.

Herminie and Fanny Pereire, Jewish women of Sephardic origin in France, stand at the intersection of multiple strands of history. Herminie was born one year after Napoleon declared himself Emperor, in 1804, living through the Bourbon Restoration (1815–30), July Monarchy (1830–48), Second French Republic (1848–51), and Second Empire (1851–70) to see the beginning of the Third French Republic (1870–1940). Fanny entered the world in the latter part of the Restoration and lived through all the political regimes which followed into the new century.

They experienced in nineteenth-century France the full range of sentiment, from the heady post-emancipation days when the new French parliament granted equality of citizenship to Jewish men, to relative acceptance by non-Jews and governments, to a barely subterranean anti-Jewish propaganda, to the awakening of full-scale antisemitism and the Dreyfus Affair from 1894. Over this long period the experiences of Herminie and Fanny are thus touched upon by writings about gender, family, Jewish history, Sephardim/Ashkenazim communities, emancipation, acculturation and assimilation, embourgeoisement (the process of becoming bourgeois), and more (Johnson 2015). Yet, notwithstanding a certain interest in the lives of Jewish women more generally, Sephardic women of France in the process of assimilation through embourgeoisement have been relatively neglected in the historiography.

My study addresses questions that concern the personal rather than the general. What was the nature of their relationships with husbands, children, and extended family? What of relations between mother and daughter, whose individual experiences of life changed and developed over time? How did Herminie and Fanny adapt to a new set of social rules and codes? How did they assert their claim to be grandes bourgeoises? As women with a strong attachment to social causes, how did this play out over the century? How did they confront an increasingly virulent antisemitism? And, finally, what did it mean for them to be Jewish?

Jewish Life in France

There were some 45,000 Jews in France before the French Revolution. They were then concentrated in two regions: Ashkenazim in Alsace-Lorraine, the greater number of approximately 40,000; Sephardim in the southwest cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne, numbering, together with the Jews of Avignon, close to 5,000. Only 500 or so lived in Paris. 

The Sephardic Jews were originally from Spain and Portugal although they were well-established in Bordeaux by 1789, in the case of some families, for close to three hundred years. Until the demise of the slave trade on which Bordeaux depended for the produce in which it traded, predominantly sugar and coffee, Bordeaux had been a city looking outward to the New World. And many Sephardic Jews traded successfully around the Atlantic. This international mindset remained significant.

Revolution and Emancipation

The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 set off a chain of events that was to materially affect every corner of Jewish life in France. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen the following month laid the framework for an appeal for civic rights, the first by Protestants: the situation of Jews was to take a little longer, hinging as it did on the universalist aspirations of the Revolution and the suggestion of ‘any sign of Jewish particularism’ (Hyman 1998: 32). Finally, in January 1790, after heated debate, the new French Assemblée nationale voted for emancipation of the Sephardic and Avignonnais Jews; the decree enabling emancipation of the Ashkenazi Jews of France’s northeast was to take until well into the next year (Benbassa 1999: 81–83).

If the lives of Jewish men were changed forever by emancipation, so too were those of Jewish women. The Revolution did not extend citizenship to them but it did provide subtly different expectations, freedoms and constraints, channelling and regulating their subsequent actions. Nevertheless, there were certain features to life which remained constant, evolving from a long-established Sephardic cultural foundation. The very significance attached to family, to begin with; women’s central role in, and construction of, a private family life; their relatively easy adoption of bourgeois values and attitudes; and their position as facilitators in arranging suitable marriages for their children – marriages which began increasingly to involve questions of assimilation and apostasy. All these elements came into play in the lives of Herminie and Fanny Pereire over the nineteenth century.

Emancipation, which Napoleon extended to every country he conquered, heralded a period of unprecedented migration in this century, for the Pereire brothers like many others. Jews left small villages and towns across Europe for other cities, other countries, and other continents, all in the hope of finding opportunity and creating better lives for themselves, in combating oppression and an increasing antisemitism. In the process, though, they retained social and cultural links with communities back home that had been forged over centuries. The patterns and interrelationships thus woven between places of origin and places of destination were rich, varied, and complex.

For the Rodrigues, too, family and friends in far-flung places occupied a large part of their lives, providing an intricate network of influence. They had links with the New World, an uncle, Abraham Sasportas, having served with the Marquis de La Fayette in the American Revolutionary War. The extended family had also intermarried with the hugely important merchants, the Gradis family, who traded around the Atlantic Coast. Before they settled in Paris the Rodrigues thus had connections with a world larger than simply France’s southwest.

Moving to Paris in 1796, they put down roots, establishing a position in the banking and finance sector. Other bankers had made a similar journey from the provinces, notably the Ashkenazi Fould family from Lorraine. Still others moved from elsewhere in Europe – from Frankfurt, in the case of the Rothschilds. Meyer Cahen d’Anvers, born in Bonn, became a successful sugar merchant in Antwerp before he moved to Paris in 1849 to become a banker (Stoskopf 2002: 109–11). Later in the century the Camondos left Istanbul and the Ephrussis, Odessa. All these Jewish families prospered in Paris, especially under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire.

While Herminie and Fanny Pereire, the subjects of this book, were born in Paris and lived all their lives in the capital they were, nevertheless, part of a more extensive and developing international community, subject to a wide coterie of cultural influences. Their circle was cosmopolitan. From the outset also they grew up embedded in a non-Jewish society with which they dealt au quotidien.

Excavating the Experiences of Herminie and Fanny

Herminie and her daughter were not born into the elite but as the industrial development of France gathered momentum over the century, they were swept into that select group. From the relatively modest circumstances of the Rodrigues family into which Herminie was born, the Pereire brothers’ economic and financial power took root during the July Monarchy and grew exponentially under the Second Empire. They played a particularly significant part during the reign of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie who created of Paris a city of ‘splendour and radiance’.

How might we make sense of the roles and experiences of Herminie and Fanny across the dramatic decades in the families’ lives? An influential argument about public and private spheres would suggest that they were marginal to their husbands’ public activities. Elite women as Herminie and Fanny came to be were, according to Susan K. Foley, ‘groomed primarily for domestic responsibilities and to seek fulfilment in the family.’ Foley described the concept which underlay much of the nineteenth-century’s gender order in terms of ‘separate spheres’ (Foley 2004: 27 & ff).

My biographical study of Herminie and Fanny Pereire suggests some surprising nuances. The roles they played in the businesses of their husbands were by no means direct, but the effects they had on them were not insignificant either. The two women acted as sounding boards, confidantes, and consumers — the separation of spheres chez Herminie and Fanny was in the process of morphing into a more complex set of social and economic possibilities, chiselling away at the rigid confines of separation.

Aside from international connections, what were some of the intellectual influences that had their effect on Herminie and Fanny?

To begin, the religious milieu from which they emerged is important for its social and cultural effects on each of them. Sephardic Jews of France had responded enthusiastically to the act of emancipation passed in January 1790 by the new French Assemblée nationale. Some had experienced already an attraction towards secular intellectual culture through their encounters with eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature. Rousseau, Voltaire, Raynal, and Condorcet, even the Edinburgh philosophers, Adam Smith and David Hume, were quite well-known to the Jews of Bordeaux whose libraries were inhabited as much by secular as religious literature.

There was another influence at work, however. The teachings of the Berlin Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment, conveyed a dual ambition to marry a closely-held Jewish identity with an equally close integration with the host communities in which Jews made their homes. These teachings were also known to the Sephardim of Bordeaux. That this should be so is curious, since one may have expected a certain diffidence on the part of the Haskalah’s Ashkenazi leaders in forming stronger relationships with co-religionnaires, particularly those who had sought to distinguish and distance themselves through very publicly-disseminated claims to superiority. 

Prohibitions existed on the Bordeaux Sephardim consorting with Ashkenazim. Intermarriage was forbidden. Yet even before the Revolution, Bordeaux, as a principal Sephardic Jewish community and a burgeoning international commercial centre, was a city where Jewish merchants and financiers of both denominations could make common cause. The influence among the Sephardim of the Haskalah and its corollary of acculturation added to the high regard in which German Jews held the Sephardim of the Iberian past (Efron 2016), introducing a mutual respect which challenged the divisiveness of previous eras.

These influences were not lost on Sephardic women in France. Those from wealthy families had experienced relative freedom of thought and expression and acquired a sophistication enlivened by access to education and Enlightenment literature. This led to an engagement with the wider world that perhaps only some of their Ashkenazi sisters, the salonnières, had experienced to that time. And in the case of women in the Rodrigues family, the residual effects of the Haskalah and their close acquaintance with the family of its leader, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, exposed them to an environment of considerable richness and vigour.

The heavy emphasis of much writing about Jews in France during the nineteenth century has focused on issues to do with apostasy, acculturation, and assimilation. And here the Sephardim of Bordeaux have come in for some particularly critical treatment. The sincerity and depth of their religious devotion has been questioned with some frequency and they have been characterised as far too well-assimilated with the Catholic majority, even before emancipation (Malino 1978). Received wisdom has it that the Sephardim were thus more easily susceptible to apostasy, encapsulated in Todd Endelman’s summing up that: ‘Acculturated, materially comfortable, secular-minded Jews whose emancipation and integration were partial but not complete were prime candidates for baptism’ (Endelman 2015: 56).

Very little of the extensive historiography on acculturation and assimilation has captured the experience of women, however. Never fully citizens of France, they were subject to attitudes oscillating between quasi-acceptance at various phases of the Revolution and full-scale antisemitism at the end of the nineteenth century. Napoleon’s Code Civil of 1804 effectively deprived them of any real independence from their husbands, enshrining male supremacy and legalising the ‘separate spheres.’ Thus, different political regimes had an impact on how these women behaved, how they developed, and what ambitions in life they could reasonably entertain.

Indeed, the position of women within the Jewish community became increasingly a matter for concern as the process of embourgeoisement advanced over the nineteenth century. The role assigned them as teachers of Judaism to their children and keepers of the faith within the home became ever more firmly fixed in Jewish cultural and social practices. It was a point of honour, a selling feature for senior Jewish community leaders, all male, in promoting the Jewish community’s compatibility with French citizenship.

The Jewish family was also seen to be the bulwark against the dangers posed by the demands of assimilation made explicit in the Revolution’s act of emancipation, and the consequent loss of religious authority. The introduction in 1792 of civil marriage presented increasing cause for concern in its affirmation of the legality of mixed marriages. Thus, over the course of the nineteenth century the risk that Jews could be seduced into apostasy through intermarriage, or marrying out, was a subject that tested the Jewish community.

The historiography on Sephardic women is firmly bound to the early modern period, to women who were part of the Sephardic diaspora dispersed progressively around the Mediterranean and Atlantic seaboards which culminated in their final expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal after 1497. Sephardic women of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period have received less attention from historians than their grandmothers and earlier ancestors, however.

Elite Ashkenazi women have received a more extensive treatment than have the Sephardim. An early study of bourgeois Jewish life, Deborah Hertz’s Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin, painted a striking portrait of the late eighteenth-century elite Ashkenazi community there and concentrated on the rise of the Jewish salonnières who Hertz saw as personifying a new form of female emancipation. In Berlin she noted that: ‘a Jewish community achieved the social glory represented by entertaining and even marrying the cream of gentile society’ (Hertz 1988:3). Interest in the sociability of the salon has given rise to a number of arresting biographies of Jewish women who were salonnières over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Henriette Herz, Fanny von Arnstein, Rahel Levin Varnhagan, Dorothea von Schlegel (née Mendelssohn), and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.

The era of the salonnière in Berlin (and Vienna) came to an end, however, a result both of changing political circumstances including Jewish emancipation and of different emerging public spaces in which Jews and Gentiles might share ideas and intellectual pursuits. New institutions usurped the role of the salon. And the rising emphasis on domesticity as the accepted and acceptable bourgeois female role rather than a life of independence and a life of the mind that the salonnières exemplified was a further impediment to their continued existence.

Although apostasy among women is often regarded as relatively uncommon, issues of acculturation and assimilation, so significant as we know in any account of Sephardic men, are as relevant to Sephardic women. Paula E. Hyman contended that women’s domestic role in the Jewish household effectively precluded ‘their opportunities for education and participation in the public realm of economy and civic life’, thus limiting their access to triggers of assimilation (Hyman 1995: 18–19). Endelman agreed (Endelman 2015: 85). Yet both wrote principally about the experience of Ashkenazi women of central Europe – elite Jewish women of Paris escape these assessments.

But as historian Philippe-Efraïm Landau’s analysis of conversions to Christianity showed us, 48 per cent of Jewish converts in nineteenth-century France were women. In his explanation Landau pointed to a comparatively early median age at conversion, suggesting that matrimony was the foremost reason.  Landau offered further that few women converted through ‘reasons of faith’ (Landau 2002: 30). In other words, women became Christians because they wanted to marry Christians and their Jewish faith had ceased to hold a pre-eminent or constraining place in their lives.

At various points in my book, I take up the matter of apostasy in the context of conversion among members of the Pereire family to highlight the complex reasons why apostasy and/or intermarriage became the norm for some but not for others. At the same time, not every marriage with a Christian entered into by a member of the Pereire family necessarily led to conversion – thus further entangling the picture of Jewish life among the elite in the nineteenth century. Nor does the historiography allow much for a more gradual distancing from Jewish religious practice, one which nevertheless retained to the end a core attachment to a Jewish birth rite.

Sources

Letters are the most significant source of reflection on Herminie and Fanny Pereire and their families. The Archives de la famille Pereire (hereafter AFP) in Paris which is the repository of this correspondence and other family documents exists through the careful attention of Henry Pereire, the younger son of Herminie and Emile, who maintained throughout his life a significant store of letters and other material written to him and by him to various family members, as well as a large quantity of correspondence of all sorts relating to the business interests of Emile and Isaac Pereire. Well over 1,000 letters, from financial to personal in nature, are extant.

One complication concerns the time span of the documents. While the archive extends over a century, from before the French Revolution until after World War I, it is by no means comprehensive during that time and is more complete for certain eras than for others. Letters were more frequent when family members travelled away from Paris, especially when they were absent for longer periods. During the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, for instance, the whole Pereire family was separated. Emile, Herminie, their daughters, and grandchildren escaped to Arcachon, the resort established by Emile on the Atlantic coast, while Isaac and the other men of the family stayed behind in the Pereire mansion in Paris to protect their interests. Nearly 200 letters flowed backwards and forwards between the family as a result of this lengthy absence from each other. Overall, then, the letters do not necessarily represent a sequence for time and a World War have taken their toll. Nor do we have many ‘conversations’, with direct and continuing exchange between writer and recipient.

Fanny was one of the most valued friends of her aunt Félicie, Herminie’s sister, and Félicie’s husband, Charles Sarchi, whose letters to their daughter Hélène in Paris between 1862 and 1878 provide a further invaluable source. The Sarchi correspondence of over one thousand published letters is not part of the Pereire archive but its importance rests in the commentary it provides on events, or a version of events sometimes alternative to those described in the Pereire family narrative. Altogether, consideration of the Sarchis’ Lettres à Hélène in what they amplify in the Pereire archive provides sufficient evidence to observe with some confidence the part played by Herminie and Fanny in the Pereire family (Sarchi 2006).

In sum, then, through the Pereire family archive, the Sarchi letters, and further public archival research, when placed in the context of current historiography, my book sheds light on the experience of Jewish women in France’s grande bourgeoisie. It draws out the multiplicity of their roles in representing the family name and maintaining the family presence; their significance to the success of their husbands’ extraordinary and considerable business interests; their relations with their husbands, children, and extended family; their experiences of domesticity, ‘separate spheres’, and of moving beyond circumscribed roles.  In thus illuminating the lives of Herminie and Fanny Pereire my objective has been to overcome the invisibility in the historiography of women of their class, to draw attention to their remarkable qualities and to bring to light their individuality, giving them definition, form and, most importantly, agency.

References

• Benbassa, Esther, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ, 1999)
• Efron, John M., German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton, NJ, 2016)
• Endelman, Todd M., Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2015)
• Foley, Susan K., Women in France since 1789: The Meanings of Difference (Basingstoke, 2004)
• Hertz, Deborah, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven, CT and London, 1988)
• Hyman, Paula, The Jews of Modern France: Jewish Communities in the Modern World (Berkeley, CA, 1998)
• Landau, Philippe-Efraïm, ‘Se convertir à Paris au XIXe Siècle’, Archives Juives, 35: 1 (2002)
• Malino, Frances, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Alabama, 1978)
• Sarchi, Charles and Félicie, Lettres à Hélène: Correspondance de Charles et Félicie Sarchi à leur fille Mme. Van Teighem, ed. Louis Bachy (Montepellier, 2006)
• Stoskopf, Nicolas, Banquiers et financiers parisiens: Les patrons du Second Empire (Paris, 2002)

Dr Helen M. Davies has been an Honorary Fellow in History since 2006, when she completed her PhD thesis on the careers of Emile and Isaac Pereire. Since then, she has continued to work extensively in the Pereire family archive in Paris. Her many publications include Emile and Isaac Pereire: Bankers, Socialists and Sephardic Jews in Nineteenth-century France (Manchester University Press, 2015), the companion volume to this work on Herminie and Fanny Pereire.

^{Feature image: A Parisian salon, by James Tissot (circa 1875), via Wikimedia Commons.}