David Jakobowicz Presburger
Wolf Breidenbach and his descendants: Emancipation, Integration, Assimilation
A court Jew in Hesse, financier to Prince Wolfgang-Ernest II, Wolf Breidenbach participated in the emancipation of German Jews at the turn of the 18th and 19tth centuries, working to abolish the “Leibzoll” body tax. One of his descendants, the author, explores his journey and that of the subsequent generations, between social success, emigration, conversion, ennoblement, and the Holocaust : a true saga of a great Jewish family originally from Germany.
Jean-François Schuhl
The Nathans, from Lorraine to Paris
This study traces the history of the Nathans, a Jewish family originally from Lorraine in the 17th century, who settled in Nancy before moving to Paris in the early 20th century, where Isidore, a textile manufacturer, and Gabrielle’s four children—Marcel, André, Jean, and Simonne—grew up in a close-knit bourgeois environment. The three brothers fought in World War I and together founded a new and prosperous company. Their fate changed during the Occupation. After the war, Jean relaunched the family business, but the tragedy of the 1940s left a lasting mark on the family’s descendants.
Anne-Marie Fribourg
The Lévy Brothers and the “Galeries Parisiennes”
How four brothers: Louis, Adolphe Léon and Raphaël, from a family of Lorraine origin settled in Paris, became managers of department stores in different towns of province: Meaux, Périgueux, Rochefort, Angoulême Poitiers, Elbeuf. This is the story of the social rise of the sons of a peddler who became local notables.
Laurent Moyse
The Meyer family and the Washington Post: A Franco-American story
The Washington Post, flagship of the US daily press, was run for 80 years by a family who were of Alsatian Jewish origin. The great-grandson of Chief Rabbi Jacob Meyer, Eugene Isaac Meyer, acquired a bankrupt newspaper in 1933 and, together with his descendants, turned it into a daily newspaper whose reputation would extend far beyond the political confines of the federal capital.