Remembering Hirsch: Baron Maurice de Hirsch, Philanthropy, and a Global Moment in Jewish History

• In Event: Icons of Emancipation and Modernization 1750-1900

Abstract

When the great philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch passed away in 1896, his funeral in Paris attracted a large number of distinguished guests. As the royalist newspaper Le Gaulois noted, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, who had maintained a long friendship with Hirsch, went to offer his condolences to the widow in the glamorous Hirsch residence on rue de l’Elysée. Among the attendees at the funeral, conducted by Chief Rabbi Zadoc-Kahn, the newspaper listed several ambassadors and numerous members of the aristocracy, mingling with the presidents of the Bank of France and of the Crédit Lyonnais. At the same time, Jews in the many places touched by Hirsch’s philanthropy, from the Ottoman Balkans to Austrian Galicia and to the agricultural settlements in Argentina set up by Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association, commemorated the passing of the great benefactor. Eulogies appeared in short order, including one in Judeo-Arabic printed in Livorno, others published in Yiddish.

During his lifetime, Hirsch’s philanthropy had been a truly transnational endeavor, just as his own life was that of a cosmopolitan who never identified with any of the nationalisms that came to define the European order in the late nineteenth century. His funeral, too, marked a truly global moment in the Jewish world of the fin-de-siècle. This paper will explore the responses to Hirsch’s passing in the Jewish press from different countries. It will interrogate the assumption that, by the turn of the century, most European Jews had embraced the logic of emancipation and patriotic attachment to their respective homelands, and it will ask whether one can speak of a truly transnational Jewish public sphere in the late nineteenth century, expressed in the printed press, but also in Hirsch’s own philanthropic activities and publicly marked at moments such as his death. How did philanthropy look “from below,” how did different ideologies and national contexts shape the assessment of Hirsch’s oeuvre, and what do these responses tell us about the persistence of pan-Jewish identity in the late nineteenth century?

Author

• Matthias B. Lehmann, University of California, Irvine