Herminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France

By Helen M. Davies

Herminie and Fanny Pereire were sisters-in-law, married to the eminent Jewish bankers and Saint-Simonian socialists Emile and Isaac. They were also mother and daughter. This book, a companion to the author's acclaimed Emile and Isaac Pereire (2015), sheds new light on elite Jewish families in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on the family archives, it traces the Pereires across a century of major social and political change, from the Napoleonic period to the cusp of the First World War, revealing the active role they played as bourgeois women both within and outside the family. It offers insights into Jewish assimilation, embourgeoisement and gender relations, through the lens of one of the most fascinating families of the century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526177643

Helen M. Davies

Helen M. Davies is a Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne

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Herminie and Fanny Pereire

STUDIES IN MODERN FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE HISTORY

Edited by

Julie Kalman, Jennifer Sessions and Jessica Wardhaugh

This series is published in collaboration with the Society for the Study of French History (UK) and the French Colonial Historical Society. It aims to showcase innovative monographs and edited collections on the history of France, its colonies and imperial undertakings, and the francophone world more generally since c. 1750. Authors demonstrate how sources and interpretations are being opened to historical investigation in new and interesting ways, and how unfamiliar subjects have the capacity to tell us more about France and the French colonial empire, their relationships in the world, and their legacies in the present. The series is particularly receptive to studies that break down traditional boundaries and conventional disciplinary divisions.

To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/studies-in-modern-french-and-francophone-history/

Herminie and Fanny Pereire

Elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France

Helen M. Davies

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Helen M. Davies 2024

The right of Helen M. Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 7765 0 hardback

First published 2024

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Front cover: James Tissot, Hush!, c. 1875. Copyright © Manchester s Art Gallery / Bridgeman Images.

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To Renee

Contents

List of plates

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Pereire family tree

Introduction

1 The Rodrigues family

2 Herminie and Fanny: mother and daughter

3 Relations and relationships

4 Sociability, entertainment, real estate, and servants: ‘Fêtes, because fortune obliges it’

5 Conspicuous consumption, again ‘because fortune obliges it’

6 Sedaca, charity, philanthropy

7 Children and marriage: becoming Christian or becoming Jewish?

8 Being Jewish

Conclusion

Select bibliography

Index

Plates

Figures

Acknowledgements

I am indebted first to the present-day descendants of Herminie and Fanny Pereire who, despite the global pandemic, have extended from afar so much courtesy, generosity, and interest in my work.

Géraldine Pereire Henochsberg, great-great-granddaughter of Herminie and Emile Pereire, has been that rare bonus to any historian, a custodian deeply engaged with the archival material in her possession and all its nuances while recognising and respecting the independence and objectivity necessary to the researcher. I am profoundly grateful to her.

I thank Laure Pereire, a descendant of Fanny and Isaac Pereire, for her interest in and appreciation of my contribution to the history of her family, and for her hospitality and kindness.

Antoine Desforges gave generous access to images in his family’s possession. Jacques Béjot was similarly helpful.

Since my earlier work on Emile and Isaac Pereire, two people who had been important to its success and thus to this work on Herminie and Fanny, are no longer with us. Géraldine Pereire Henochsberg’s mother, Colette Pereire, single-handedly saved the family archive from landfill. Laure Pereire’s mother, Anita Pereire, introduced me to the wonderfully fragrant ‘Mme Isaac Pereire’ rose, among many other kindnesses. It is appropriate that I record my gratitude to them both here.

As mentor and colleague, Peter McPhee encouraged this endeavour from the outset, reading and providing invaluable comment on the manuscript. I am greatly indebted to him.

Pamela Pilbeam has been a tremendously valuable sounding board for which I am grateful. Susan Foley read a chapter and encouraged me in numerous other ways. Alison McQueen helped clarify my thoughts on Chapter 5, ‘Conspicuous Consumption’. I thank them all.

For their genial preparedness to give advice, support, or help at various times, I thank Thierry Boccon Gibod, Greg Burgess, Miriam Crenesse, Julie Kalman, Alice S. Legé, Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy, Kerry Murphy, Ben Newick, and Charles Sowerwine.

I record my debt to special friends. Jane McInnis, Sherrel Djoneff, Michelle Ellis, and Damian Ellis have listened, encouraged, and supported this endeavour and been there for me. My Zoom circle of old Lowther Hall schoolfriends gave a monthly zone of comfort and encouragement. Thank you.

In the practical aspects of producing a book, I have been extremely fortunate. Christophe Fouin in Paris not only provided me with exceptional reproductions of many of the images within its covers, he also assisted in tracing some of them to source. Tony Kelly of Archiva Lucida in Melbourne enhanced many of the images and brought them together masterfully. Dina Uzhegova in Melbourne and Honduras whipped an unruly manuscript into shape. Thank you.

Over the years, the University of Melbourne has provided much-needed financial and academic support. Fellows and Friends of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies have listened with courtesy and generosity to papers that have morphed from the tentative to important components of my book. And during several COVID-19 lockdowns, the staff of the University’s Baillieu Library went to great lengths to provide me with even the most obscure resources. I am enormously grateful to you all.

I have paid tribute before to staff in libraries and archives in France who have always treated my work and my needs with respect. I do so again here.

To the Series Editors, I acknowledge the care and attention with which you considered my manuscript. To the peer reviewers, you helped to clarify my purpose and, I hope you agree, your critiquing improved the result. To editorial and other staff of Manchester University Press, especially to Alun Richards, thank you for your constancy and expertise throughout a difficult time.

I acknowledge again the affection, support, and generosity of my husband, John Nicholson. In so many ways, this volume is a product of our life together. Thank you.

Finally, in giving me my very first book, my mother, Renee, opened a world of wonder, imagination, and creativity. This one is for her.

All translations from the French are my own.

Abbreviations

Pereire family tree

Introduction

This book explores the lives of two remarkable Jewish women in nineteenth-century France: Rachel Herminie Rodrigues, born in 1805, and Fanny Rebecca 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 as they were known, 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 about 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.

In the course of writing a 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 one by this author.¹ They 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, and 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.

Other writers have hinted at the family background of Emile and Isaac Pereire, acknowledging in the process the role played by ancestors and extended family alike in the Pereire brothers’ progress through life.² But Pereire businesses depended on far more than genes and a family history of achievement, unusual as that was for Jews at that time, or relatives in Paris who were in the business of finance and thus able to provide two poor boys from the provinces with an entry to the perfect training environment.

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, living through the Bourbon Restoration, July Monarchy, Second French Republic, and Second Empire to see the beginning of the Third French Republic. 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 days post-emancipation, 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. Over this long period, the lives of Herminie and Fanny were thus touched by writings about gender, family, Jewish history, Sephardim/Ashkenazim communities, emancipation, acculturation and assimilation, embourgeoisement (the process of becoming bourgeois), and more. 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.

The stories of Herminie and Fanny will also shed light on Jewish women as they confronted and negotiated the demands of civil society and family life, on the bourgeois elite and religious conflicts, from post-revolutionary France to the Dreyfus Affair. In concentrating on women of a Sephardic family, as both women were, originally the Rodrigues family, this book will augment and illuminate the many significant volumes of historiography on the Jewish community and family in nineteenth-century France.

My study will address multiple questions that concern the personal rather than the general. What was the nature of their relationships with husbands, children, and extended family? What of the relationship 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?

Over the century bookended by Herminie’s birth and Fanny’s death, effectively the long nineteenth century, there were many changes in the lives of bourgeois women and even more when they were Jewish. If the process of embourgeoisement tended to confine women to motherhood and domesticity, it also led subtly to improved educational opportunities for them and an enhanced role outside the hearth. Women became notably expert in matters to do with maternal health, education, and childhood development – all matters for which their conditioning had prepared them well – and thus they became increasingly able to influence changes in the public sphere to social welfare policy, provisions, and initiatives.³ This in turn provided the means to essay a path with wider significance than the one in which they had been raised, enabling an influence that was the more powerful when accompanied by great wealth.

A further change concerned the nature of the endogamy which increasingly came into play over the century. Whereas both my subjects entered marriage with other Sephardim as was customary, as the century progressed some elements considered crucial at its beginning, such as the differences between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, began to lose significance. Marriages between Jews of different communities and origins became more common. Endogamy also became economic and social, bourgeois, Susan K. Foley noting that ‘there was a high level of professional and social endogamy among the bourgeoisie’.⁴ This was the case with marriages contracted by the children of Herminie Pereire in particular. It was also the experience of a growing number of subjects in Cyril Grange’s detailed study in which over the nineteenth century ‘upper class’ Jews entered mixed marriages with members of the nobility with growing frequency. Nor were the families that became entwined in this way exclusively French; they were also of other European or American origin.⁵

There were some forty-five thousand Jews in France before the French Revolution. They were then concentrated in two regions: Ashkenazim in Alsace-Lorraine, who made up the greater number of approximately forty thousand; and Sephardim in the southwest cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne, who together with the Jews of Avignon numbered close to five thousand. Only five hundred or so lived in Paris.⁶ The Sephardic Jews were originally from Spain and Portugal, although well established in Bordeaux by 1789, 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.⁷ This international mindset remained significant to their mental outlook.

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 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen 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 ‘any sign of Jewish particularism’.⁸ 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 well into the next year.⁹

If, during the debate on citizenship and the Jews in December 1789, Stanislas-Marie- Adelaïde, comte de Clermont Tonnerre, famously had cause to demand that ‘We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals’, in their profession of faith to the new Assemblée nationale, the Sephardim hastened to reassure. The Jews were no more ‘particular’ than were Catholics.

The Portuguese and Spanish Jews living in France are only Frenchmen … Some claim that their religion subjects them to a foreign cult, which often finds itself in opposition to the duties of citizen … This is to misunderstand the Jewish religion. Scrupulous observers of their duty, they know what it is to serve heaven, as well as to fulfil those of the state.¹⁰

Thus did Herminie and Fanny Pereire, born in France among the first generations of emancipated Jews in Europe, know what it was to be both French and members of a minority.

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; their 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.

This century was a period of unprecedented migration, 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.

The historian Lee Shai Weissbach’s grandfather, Menachem Mendel Frieden, moved from a small village in Lithuania to Norfolk, Virginia and thence to Palestine, remaining a devout Jew throughout.¹¹ In contrast, the wealthy Hermine and Moriz Gallia of Tim Bonyhady’s Good Living Street, who were born in small towns in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Silesia and Moravia, joined the exodus to Vienna in the latter part of the century. Having then forsaken Judaism for Catholicism, with the advent of Kristallnacht their daughters forsook Europe altogether for a New World in Australia.¹² In all these cases and whatever the distances travelled, the bonds of family and culture back home remained strong.

For the Rodrigues, too, family and friends in far-flung places occupied a large part of their lives, providing an intricate network of influence. The family itself 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. Even before they settled in Paris, the Rodrigues 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.¹³ 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.

Several Ashkenazi families like the d’Eichthals, who were originally from Bavaria, and other European bankers, like the Protestant Thurneyssens of Geneva, recognised the genius of the Pereire brothers early, providing finance and remaining part of the close family circle.¹⁴ Subsequently, they negotiated assistance and connections for the Pereires’ international businesses, the brothers receiving introductions to bankers, Jewish and non-Jewish, and politicians in every country in which they did business but particularly in St Petersburg, Vienna, and Madrid. The Pereires were beneficiaries of long-term continued support from other figures among France’s minority groups.

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. While Herminie and her daughter were not born into the elite 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, ‘fastes et rayonnement’.

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’, in which young women learned to live with constraints on their education, their behaviour, and their expectations, and to seek fulfilment in domesticity. Young men, on the other hand, while groomed along an equally inexorable path, inhabited the world of ‘public affairs’.¹⁵ Bonnie G. Smith, whose landmark work on the bourgeoises of the Nord department, Ladies of the Leisure Class, presented a complex picture of female participation in business in the early years of the nineteenth century followed by a sudden withdrawal into domesticity, also sets her subjects firmly within the constraints of ‘separate spheres’.¹⁶

There have been challenges to this interpretation of female experience, however. Through archival records in Lille and Tourcoing in the Nord department, for instance, the historian Béatrice Craig has challenged Smith’s interpretation of female behaviour, demonstrating that women either owned or participated in businesses in the textiles industry to a larger degree and over a longer period than had been reckoned.¹⁷ This biography of Herminie and Fanny Pereire suggests some surprising nuances to such arguments. The roles they played in the businesses of their husbands, in contrast with the businesswomen of the Nord described by Craig, were by no means so direct. But the effects they had on them were not insignificant either. 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 already experienced 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. Several learned societies existing in that city and that were open to Jews focused on the study of science, philosophy, and literature.¹⁸

There was another influence at work, however. The teachings of the Berlin Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment, conveying 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, were also known to the Sephardim of Bordeaux.¹⁹ 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 coreligionnaires, particularly those who had sought to distinguish and distance themselves through very publicly disseminated claims to superiority.²⁰ Prohibitions existed on the Bordeaux Sephardim consorting with Ashkenazim. Intermarriage was forbidden.²¹ 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, introduced a mutual respect which challenged the divisiveness of previous eras.²²

These influences were not lost on Sephardic women in France, particularly those from wealthy families where relative freedom of thought and expression and a sophistication enlivened by access to education and Enlightenment literature led to an engagement with the wider world that perhaps only some of their Ashkenazi sisters, the salonnières, had experienced up 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.

A corollary to this outward-looking milieu brings us to the heavy emphasis of much writing about Jews in France during the nineteenth century, one that 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.²³ 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.’²⁴

While Sephardic history had been one in which close attachment to the host community, particularly the Spanish, had ensured their survival and security, this had been insufficient to stem the Catholic triumphalism which saw them progressively evicted from Spain from the twelfth century and then definitively with the final Christian Reconquista of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Five years later, Portugal also rescinded its invitation to them to seek refuge there. Having been exiled from their home in Jerusalem with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, they were then expelled for the second time from their haven in the Iberian Peninsula.²⁵

Certainly, by the time of the French Revolution and as a result of their experiences over the centuries, the Bordeaux Sephardim had worked diligently to forge a place that was integral to the mercantile community. A number provided significant financial services. Some became major economic players themselves – ship-builders, bankers, and merchants. Their circle was notably urban. Yet despite the relatively liberated terms under which successive monarchs had permitted them to live, beginning as early as 1550 with letters patent of King Henri II allowing Sephardim to reside in his Kingdom and engage in business, none of this was to give them complete legal equality until the revolutionary act of emancipation.²⁶ Very little of the extensive historiography on acculturation and assimilation has captured the experience of women, however. Never fully citizens of France, attitudes oscillated between quasi-acceptance at various phases of the Revolution to 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.²⁷ 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.

Placed against this scholarly concentration on how the Jews adapted to their new-found status and the changing circumstances in which they found themselves then, the response of Jewish and, in this case, Sephardic, women in France to the new order calls for some consideration. Indeed, as Renée Levine Melammed wrote in 1998, ‘The world of Sephardi women is without a doubt one of the most neglected fields in Jewish history.’²⁸ Little has changed since. Their history is overshadowed by the knowledge we have of Sephardic men for whom studies have also encompassed a number of biographical and other works about particular individuals, including by this author.²⁹

The historiography of Sephardic women is firmly bound to the early modern period, however, 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. On this reading, the influence of Islam and the imposition of strict rules governing the behaviour of women and men is uppermost: women identified with the home, men with the outside world. This gendered separation of activity and interests was the norm in Sephardic life well before it became codified for the French bourgeoisie after the French Revolution. It was reinforced by the pervasive effects of Portuguese mores resulting from that period in the late fifteenth century when Sephardim briefly sought refuge there. Characterised by overprotection and the enforced seclusion of women, from the early sixteenth century these elements continued to dominate their lives in the European cities where Sephardim finally settled, most notably in Amsterdam but also in Bordeaux and Bayonne.³⁰

Sephardic women of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period have received less attention from historians than their grandmothers and earlier ancestors, however. Gérard Nahon’s Juifs et Judaïsme à Bordeaux (2003), the authoritative work on the Sephardim of that city, scarcely mentioned women except in the context of a few benevolent ‘confréries’.³¹ The much earlier but still significant Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux by Frances Malino (1978) simply ignored them.³² Les Sépharades (edited by Esther Benbassa, 2016), dealt exclusively with women of the ‘Moyen Age’.³³ Endelman’s Leaving the Jewish Fold (2015), a comparatively recent work on Jewish conversion and assimilation, is similarly lacking any substantial reference to Sephardic women.³⁴

Elite Ashkenazi women have received a more extensive treatment than 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.³⁵ In Berlin, she noted that ‘a Jewish community achieved the social glory represented by entertaining and even marrying the cream of gentile society’.³⁶ 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: Henriette Herz, Fanny von Arnstein, Rahel Levin Varnhagan, Dorothea von Schlegel (née Mendelssohn), and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel among them.³⁷ 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 the life of independence and the life of the mind that the salonnières exemplified was a further impediment to their continued existence.³⁸

An equally significant work, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class by Marion A. Kaplan, explored the development over the long nineteenth century of the female role within the German Jewish family and emphasised the ‘crucial’ role women played in creating new bonds of Jewishness. These did not depend on synagogue attendance for their strength and durability but, rather, religious ritual and ceremonies became through changing ‘values, beliefs, sentiments, and rituals … family occasions and community events’.³⁹

Writing about Jewish communities of the West (France, Germany, and the USA), Paula E. Hyman noted that ‘women were responsible for inculcating moral and religious consciousness in their children and within the home more generally’.⁴⁰ In spite of the early acculturation of the family into which Herminie was born, this orthodoxy was to cast a long shadow over her, but it was not entirely lost on Fanny either. Hyman dealt specifically with the role of gender in shaping ‘the assimilation process’. She argued that while the twentieth century opened many opportunities to women, they continued to show ‘fewer signs of radical assimilation than men’.⁴¹ She contended further that this was ‘Because their social life occurred within their domestic context and the religiously segmented philanthropic associations considered appropriate for women of their class, [thus]