Who's Who

The fifth child of Horace and Anna de Gunzburg, Sasha de Gunzburg became the head of the Jewish community of St Petersburg before the Russian revolution of October 1917. He was the author of a memoir of the lives of the Gunzburgs in Russia and France.

            As a child growing up in Paris, Sasha was taught at home alongside his brothers, sisters and cousins in their own classroom in the town house at 7 Rue de Tilsitt. Their teachers were Robert Rohmann, an engineer from Odessa (head tutor), Jules Labbé (French, history and classics), Nicolas Minsky-Vilenkine (Russian), Madame Delaporte (rhetoric), Ivan Pokhitonoff (Russian and mathematics), Jules Massenet (music), Adolphe Neubauer and Rabbis Kirsch et Zadok Kahn (religious education). In 1878–1879 Sasha’s interest in geography led him, at the age of fifteen, to make a study trip to Ecuador, where he donated a modern seismograph to the observatory at Quito. From 1881 he lived in St Petersburg, where his father gathered all his children around him. After completing his military service in a regiment of uhlans in Volhynia, in 1891 he married his cousin Rosa Warburg, daughter of the the banker Siegmund Warburg and Théophile Rosenberg. After their wedding Alexandre and Rosa moved into an 18th-century palace at 14 Millionaya Street, which they renovated with the help of the architect Oscar Munts. They had seven children: Anna (b.1892), Theodore (Fedia) (b.1893), Olga (b.1897), Véra (b.1898), Marc (b.1903) – who died in infancy – Hélène (Lia) (b.1906) and Irène (b.1910).

            On a journey to Kiev (Kyiv) to attend the burial of his maternal grandmother Eleone (Elka) Rosenberg, Sasha was wounded in the pogrom of 18–20 October 1905. After his brother David’s death in 1910, he took over the family’s community and philanthropic responsibilities, and along with his wife Rosa managed the Jewish orphanage which his mother had founded. He also ran the family business of J. E. Gunzburg (goldmines, sugar, forestry, insurance and a shipping company).

            When Russia entered the war in August 1914, Sasha was over the age for mobilisation and instead he devoted himself to the welfare of Jewish communities in combat zones. From October 1914 he oversaw EKOPO, the Jewish Committee for Aid to War Victims (especially its international fundraising efforts, and the delivery of aid and co-ordination of sub-committees and other organisations). He was supported by his nephew Osip de Gunzburg, exempted from military service on health grounds. After the February 1917 revolution he backed the provisional government, taking satisfaction in the achievement of civil equality for Jews. He, Boris Kamenka and Heinrich Sliozberg formed a committee to promote vigorously subscription to Liberty bonds, calling on communities abroad to subscribe. His daughter Olga, a nurse, was a member of a Jewish delegation that distributed gifts to soldiers at the front, and his son Fedia, who had graduated from the law faculty at St Petersburg, was appointed second secretary to the diplomatic mission to Washington. Politicking in the Jewish community forced Sasha to resign his role as leader after he publicly attacked an anti-religious tendency that was splitting community authorities.

            When the Bolsheviks seized power on 25 October 1917 and the Red Terror began, Alexandre and Rosa were considered to be “enemies of the people”. Their house was confiscated, they were banned from conducting business and excluded from running their orphanage, and their family had to do manual labour to obtain food rations. In early August 1918, Sasha was arrested by the Cheka as a former officer in the Tsar’s army. Imprisoned in Kronstadt on Kotlin island, west of St Petersburg, he was freed after lengthy efforts by his family and friends, and thanks to a laissez-passer provided by his daughter Anna, who in 1915 had married Salomon Halperin and settled in Kiev, Sasha and Rosa and their daughters Olga, Véra, Hélène and Irène were able to reach Kiev, then under German occupation, and subsequently leave for Berlin in December 1918. After a stay in Switzerland, Sasha and Rosa settled in Paris where their daughter Olga married a Spanish banker, Ignacio Bauer, in 1921. Rosa died on 17 February the following year. In 1923 Véra married Paul Dreyfus, a banker from Basel. With the help of his brother Pierre de Gunzbourg, married to Yvonne Deutsch de la Meurthe, daughter of Emile Deutsch de la Meurthe, Sasha was appointed to run the Western Bank in the Netherlands, and with his two youngest children, Hélène and Irène, he settled in Amsterdam. Fedia later joined them there. Hélène married Alexandre Berline, who was also from St Petersburg, and Irène married Bob de Vries. Fedia married Wilhelmina Ptasznik. Within a few years the Nazi threat impelled Sasha and his family to seek a new exile: after a short stay in the south of France he found refuge in Basel, where he died in 1948. Witness to an era of turmoil, he left behind a valuable collection of memoirs. An oil portrait of Rosa de Gunzburg by Louise Abbema hangs in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

The eldest child of Joseph Evzel de Gunzburg and Rosa Dynin, Alexandre de Gunzburg was known for his high-spirited personality. As a mischievous boy, he once used sealing wax to glue his Talmudic teacher’s beard to his desk as he dozed. Married to Rosalie Ettinger, he had two sons, Michel (b.1851) and Jacques (b.1853), both born at Kamenets-Podolsk where the Gunzburgs had their trading agency and Alexandre worked for the family firm, centred round its concession for the production and sale of alcohol. Alexandre had an imposing physique and was well known for standing his ground in the face of anti-Semitic attacks, but he was especially noted for his enjoyment of cards and women.

In 1857 he moved to Paris with his family at his father’s invitation. From the 1860s onwards he lived apart from his wife, and for a time was the lover of the actress Sylvia Asportas, whom he showered with an apartment, horses and a carriage, and the latest fashions. Having squandered his fortune, Alexandre felt the full weight of his father’s disapproval: Joseph Evzel refused him a partnership in the Gunzburg bank (founded in 1859 in St Petersburg – his brothers Horace, Ury and Salomon all became partners) and disinherited him. When their father died in 1878, Horace sought out his brother in Italy, where he had gone to live, to sign a family agreement that softened the harsh conditions imposed by Joseph Evzel and provided Alexandre with a pension of 6000 francs a month. Shortly after his meeting with his brother, however, Alexandre died suddenly in Naples. He is buried in the family vault at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. His younger son Jacques became a well-known banker and the father of Nicolas “Nicki” de Gunzburg, the actor and later celebrated editor of Vogue.

The fourth child of Pierre de Gunzbourg and Yvonne Deutsch de la Meurthe, Aline grew up in Paris at 54 Avenue d’Iéna, in an apartment owned by the Deutsch de la Meurthe family. Emile Deutsch de la Meurthe was the founder, with his brother Henry, of the Jupiter oil company which subsequently merged with Shell France; the family lived in considerable luxury, which included having their own private petrol pump to refuel the family’s vehicles. Aline developed an early talent for golf, and her parents not only took her to North Berwick in Scotland for her summer holidays, where she played golf morning and afternoon, but had a house built at Garches, next to the Saint-Cloud golf course. Coached by the best professionals, including George Duncan, in 1934 Aline won the French women’s championship.

Her early life was marked by grief: her sister Béatrice died in 1925 in a riding accident, and her brother Cyrille died on military service with the Chasseurs Alpins, France’s mountain infantry force, in 1932. In 1934 Aline married André Strauss, son of the art collector Jules Strauss, with whom she had a son Michel in 1936, but only three years later André died of cancer.In June 1940, at the defeat of France by Nazi Germany, Aline decided the family should take refuge in the south of France, first at Antibes then at Cannes. However, shocked by the anti-Semitic mood she encountered there, and aware of the danger her family faced, she approached the US diplomatic representatives and French authorities at both Vichy and Nice, and on New Year’s Day 1941 left France with her son Michel, travelling to Spain and Portugal and from there by sea to New York. Three months later, her parents joined her. In Paris the German administration not only looted the family’s property but installed the Nazi unit in charge of the organised plunder of Jewish property (Möbel Aktion) at 54 Avenue d’Iéna. Throughout the war, Aline managed to remain in touch by letter with her brother Philippe, who had organised a resistance network in the south Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne for the British Special Operations Executive. In 1943 she married Hans Halban, an Austrian nuclear physicist who subsequently became French and had arrived in Montreal from England in 1942 to head a team as part of the allied wartime nuclear research effort; she and Hans had two sons, Pierre (known as Peter), born in New York in 1946, and Philippe, born at Oxford in 1950. At the war’s end Aline returned to Europe, not to France but to Oxford where Hans Halban was invited by Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell) to lead a team at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University. Aline and Hans divorced in 1955. Hans was invited back to France where he directed setting up the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre (CEA), and in 1956 Aline married the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, whom she had met in New York. At the end of her life, Aline’s portrait was painted by Lucian Freud.

The daughter of Eleone Gunzburg and Hessel Rosenberg and the wife of Horace de Gunzburg, Anna was a leading light in the Gunzburg family’s social rise in the mid-19th century. As a child growing up in Podolia in the Russian Empire, she received a thorough education, and when, having spoken French from a young age, she came to Paris in 1857 with her parents-in-law Jospeh Evzel and Rosa de Gunzburg and all their children, she became the linchpin of the Gunzburg family’s social acceptance.

Her good looks, intellectual qualities and grace were widely admired, and as mistress of a distinguished household she was frequently mentioned in the Parisian society columns whenever her father-in-law gave a ball. Anna was particularly attentive to the interior decoration of the town house at 7 Rue de Tilsitt, and her curiosity and sensitivity attracted many artists, among them Léon Bonnat, Auguste Ricard and Mihàly Zichy; the sculptor Mark Antokolsky; and composers Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet and Modest Mussorgsky. She also founded a Jewish orphanage in St Petersburg. She was a devoted mother on one occasion not hesitating to decline a dinner invitation at the imperial court of Napoleon III to stay at home with her children. She followed their education closely, often attending their lessons with them. Her death in childbirth with her eleventh child plunged the Gunzburg family into deep grief. Through her brothers and sisters, who made matrimonial alliances throughout Europe, Anna counted many distinguished families among her circle of friends: the Ashkenazys and Brodskys in Russia, the Warburgs and Hirsch-Gereuths in Germany, the Hertzfelds in Hungary. Anna de Gunzburg was painted several times by Edouard Dubufe, Auguste Ricard and Léon Bonnat, and Marc Antokolsky sculpted a bust of her.

A respected orientalist and bibliophile, David de Gunzburg devoted his career to promoting Judaism as a Hebrew and Talmudic scholar, community leader and defender of the rights of Jews in the Russian Empire. His exceptionnal studious character was evident in his early childhood and his parents, Horace de Gunzburg and Anna Rosenberg (he was their  second child), and his grandfather Joseph Evzel were all deeply proud of him. Joseph Evzel made the family home at 7 Rue de Tilsitt in Paris a centre for the promotion of Jewish culture, and David’s scholarly leanings were encouraged by introducing him to experts and intellectuals such as Senior Sachs, the Gunzburgs’ librarian, and Adolf Neubauer. In 1875, when he was eighteen, he became a student at the University of St Petersburg’s school of oriental languages under Baron Victor Rosen. Besides Hebrew, David studied Arabic, Syrian, and Russian literature. In the winter of 1878 his father asked him to accompany his brother Marc, ill with tuberculosis, to Madeira, where Marc died on 22 December. Having completed his military service with a regiment of uhlans at Łomza in Poland, David continued his orientalist studies with Stanislas Guyard, Arab and Persian tutor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, and Wilhelm Ahlwardt, Arab literature specialist at Greifswald, Germany. In the summer of 1883 he set out on a six-month study trip to the Caucasus, where he learnt Armenian and Georgian. (By the end of his life he spoke twenty languages.) Returning to Paris, on 18 December 1883 he married his cousin Mathilde de Gunzburg at the rue de la Victoire synagogue. The couple settled in St Petersburg, but having grown up in Parisian high society, Mathilde found it hard to adapt to the less liberal traditions of Russian Judaism. The couple had five children: Anna (b.1885), Osip (b.1887), Marc (b.1888), Sonia (b.1890) and Eugène (b.1890). Osip, who suffered from nervous disorders, was a constant source of worry; Marc, like his uncle Marc before him, sadly also died of tuberculosis, at Menton in 1891. In 1898 David bought a house on the other side of the Neva, on Vasilyevsky Island, line 1, no. 4, near the university, where he kept his library, one of the most remarkable in Europe with 35,000 volumes of manuscripts, rare editions and incunabula.

David de Gunzburg’s main works are an edition of the Tarshish of Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra (Berlin, 1886) and Le Divan d’Ibn Guzman, Texte, traduction, commentaire (Berlin, 1896). With the historian and art critic Vladimir Stasov he published L’Ornement hébreu (Berlin, 1905). He wrote a series of articles on biblical metrics, notably Monsieur Bickell et la métrique hébraïque (Paris, 1881) and published essays in the anniversary anthologies of his fellow scholars Khvolson, Rosen, Garkavi, Zunz and Steinschneider. He contributed to the Revue des Etudes juives, Revue critique, Voskhod, Ha-Yom, Ha-Melitz and Journal du Ministère de l’Instruction publique de Russie (about the first Jewish school in Siberia). In association with Rabbi Lev Katznelson, David initiated and financed the Evreyskaya encyclopedia (Jewish Encyclopaedia) published by Brockhaus and Efron between 1908 and 1913, to which he also contributed. He was a member of the Society for Oriental Studies (Russia), the Scientific Committee of the Russian Department of Public Instruction, Archeological Society of St Petersburg, Société asiatique de Paris and the Société des études juives à Paris, which he co-founded. In 1908 he was allowed to found an Academy of Oriental Studies and Judaism in St Petersburg, a private free educational centre for professors and students who had been driven out of the university.

David did not devote his life exclusively to his studies: alongside his father Horace he also worked for the Gunzburg bank until its failure in 1893, for the Gunzburg trading agency, and for the family’s sugar refinery at Mohilna in Podolia.

David was a leading authority in the intellectual, spiritual and philanthropic circles in the Jewish community in Russia. He kept open house in St Petersburg and at Mohilna for all those seeking material or legal support. Like his father Horace, he was active in the Society for Agricultural and Artisanal Labour (ORT) and the Society for the Promotion of Culture (OPE). In St Petersburg he founded the Society for Aid for Jews in Need and the Maakhol Kosher Society for Jewish Students. As a strong advocate for the development of agricultural skills in the Jewish population, he supported the establishment of a Minsk agricultural college and the agricultural college of Novopoltava in Kherson district. From 1893 onwards he chaired the central committee of the Jewish Colonisation Association in St Petersburg, and in Santa Fe province in Argentina a Jewish settlers’ village was named “Baron de Gunzburg”. With his father Horace, David was also a member of the Union for Equal Rights, which campaigned for votes for all subjects of the Emperor in the Duma elections after the revolution of 1905. He was a leading voice in denouncing the pogroms and active in delivering aid to the victims. In January 1906 he was appointed, along with Marc Varshavsky and Heinrich Sliozberg, to an enquiry to determine the needs of victims of the pogrom of Hormel, and he led a delegation to Minister Witte to demand the imperial administration take steps to end anti-Semitic violence. The Jewish community’s appeal went unheard. After the Białystok pogrom of 14–16 June 1906, David went to organise the aid effort in person with David Feinberg. In 1909 he became one of the representatives of the permanent commission for Jewish affairs set up by Jewish communities.

In 1910, at the age of fifty-three, a year after his father, David died of cancer. In contrast to the other members of his family laid to rest in the family vault of the cemetery of Montparnasse in Paris, he chose to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in St Petersburg.

After her husband’s death Mathilde de Gunzburg began the process of selling his library to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, but the First World War and 1917 revolution prevented the sale taking place. Nationalised by the Bolsheviks, the library today is partly conserved in Moscow’s national library as the “Gunzburg Library”. The text of the Haggadah shel Pesach is known as the “Gunzburg Haggadah”. David de Gunzburg’s personal archive is conserved at the Russian national library in St Petersburg.

wasThe eighth child of Horace de Gunzburg and Anna Rosenberg, Dimitri de Gunzburg lived the life of a dandy, dividing his time between St Petersburg, Paris and London.

Known by his family and friends as Berza (a nickname given him by his Breton governess), his childhood was marked by the death of his mother when he was only six years old. As a young man he rebelled against his father’s seriousness with his careless manners and taste for extravagance and high jinks. Developing a love of art and antiques, in 1907 he married Guétia Brodsky, daughter of the famous sugar magnate, but almost immediately abandoned married life, without his young wife holding it against him.

After his father’s death in 1909, bolstered by his financial independence, he became a friend and associate of Serge Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes. As “director-administrator” of the famous ballet company, Dmitri both acted as treasurer and took an active role in mounting its shows. The dancer Nijinsky wrote in his journal that “the baron de Gunzburg is a good man” and “an artistic amateur and costume designer of great talent”. His sketches of his journey to Egypt inspired the sets and costumes of Michel Fokine’s ballet, Nuit d’Egypte. In 1913, when Diaghilev withdrew at the last moment from a tour of South America with L’Après-midi d’un faune, he entrusted the company to Dimitri. The First World War interrupted the Ballets Russes’ touring, and Dimitri enlisted in 1916 in the imperial Russian army, joining the “Savage Division”, a cavalry division composed mainly of Muslim volunteers from the Caucasus. His choice was probably influenced by his liking for the division’s Caucasian uniform, which caused a sensation when he wore it in St Petersburg. Sent on a mission to the Caucasus, he disappeared there in 1918 in unknown circumstances, at the height of the civil war provoked by the Bolshevik revolution the year before. The accounts of the Ballets Russes that Dimitri left behind were so muddled that Diaghilev found himself having to pay bills every time he passed through Paris for several years afterwards. No one knows what became of the art collections Dimitri left in his apartment in St Petersburg, among them busts by Antokolsky of Horace and Anna de Gunzburg and an unsigned portrait of his great-grandfather Gabriel de Gunzburg (1793–1853) which he had inherited.

Jacques de Gunzburg was a renowned international banker. The second son of Alexandre de Gunzburg (1831–1878) and Rosalie Ettinger (1829–1897), Jacques spent his first four years in Kamenets-Podolsk before moving to Paris where his grandfather Joseph Evzel had settled with his family in 1857. His parents were not close to each other and quickly led separate lives. In contrast to his father Alexandre, whose careless behaviour aroused paternal disapproval, Jacques showed himself a worthy heir to Joseph Evzel and was his favourite grandson. With a science degree from the University of Poitiers, Jacques began working for the Gunzburg trading agency and the family bank, spending lengthy periods in Russia. While he was there he completed his military service in the imperial Russian army, just as Joseph Evzel succeeded in persuading the tsarist administration to pass a law that included Jews in the obligation for military service. After first joining the Narva lancers in Vilna as a volunteer, Jacques joined a model squadron in St Petersburg, where, at the razvod (the annual military ceremony), Tsar Alexander personally congratulated the excellent officer cadet. Jacques later took part in the Turkish campaign of 1877–78 and was “decorated, for personal deeds in combat with the enemy, with the Order of St Stanislas with Sword”.

            After nearly a decade of military service, Jacques returned to France and the Paris branch of the Gunzburg bank, where he worked until the bank’s failure in 1893. After a stay in London, where he worked for the British bank Hirsch & Co., in 1911 Jacques started a banking house, Jacques de Gunzburg et Cie, taking on his nephew Jean de Gunzburg, son of Salomon, to work with him. A connoisseur of the workings both of the Bourse de Paris and of foreign markets, he invested in mining (Compagnie française des mines d’or de l’Afrique du Sud-Cofrador) and energy sectors (Société générale d’électricité, Westinghouse). Jacques was also a co-founder of the Société de l’Hôtel Ritz, of which he was financial director.

            In 1901 the merger of the Banque d’Afrique du Sud and the Banque internationale de Paris resulted in the creation of the Banque française pour le commerce et l’industrie, of which Jacques de Gunzburg was appointed a director. He was also among the investors who contributed to the creation of the Crédit franco-égyptien in 1907. In 1910 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur for his role in bringing about France’s closer relations with Japan and Brazil, two countries whose industrial economies were expanding rapidly.

            Little is known of Jacques’ private life. In 1902 he married Quêta de Laska, who had recently divorced the jeweller Germain Bapst, and they had a son Nicolas (Nicky), who would become a leading figure in Parisian café society and the celebrated editor of Vogue. Jacques was a member of the Cercle de l’Union interalliée and a founder of the Golf de Dieppe golf course – for a while he owned a house at Pré-Saint-Nicolas, built in orientalist style by his diplomat friend Count Gaston de Saint-Maurice, now destroyed. His generosity towards family members is well documented: he paid the debts of his uncle Gabriel de Gunzburg and contributed towards the marriage of his niece Olga de Gunzburg in Paris in 1921.

The third child of Salomon de Gunzburg and Henriette Goldschmidt, Jean grew up in Paris but kept his Russian nationality, faithful to the wishes of his grandfather Joseph Evzel de Gunzburg, and returned to Russia to complete his military service. As a graduate of HEC (Ecole des hautes études commerciales de Paris), he was destined for a career in banking, honouring tradition on both sides of his family: having worked briefly for Westinghouse, he joined his cousin’s banking house, Jacques de Gunzburg et Cie.

On 26 August 1914 he volunteered for the Foreign Legion for the duration of the war. As an interpreter for the French military mission with the British Army, he was posted to the front in March 1915 as an interpreter attached to a field artillery group. Decorated with the Croix de guerre, at the war’s end he requested, and was granted, French naturalisation. In March 1924 he married Madeleine Hirsch, daughter of the banker Louis Hirsch. Jean moved to work in his father-in-law’s bank, becoming Hirsch’s associate in 1926 then his successor, as co-director with his brother-in-law André Louis-Hirsch. With a preference for industrial investment, he was notably one of the creators of CSF (Compagnie française de télégraphie française, later Thomson), of which he became one of the directors.

In the autumn of 1940, after a short stay on the Basque coast, Jean moved with his wife and three children – Alain (b.1925), François (b.1927) and Pierre (b.1930) – and his mother-in-law Alice Hirsch to Châtel-Guyon, not far from Vichy, where the Hirsch bank had based itself when the occupied zone was established in northern France. He made efforts to prevent the Aryanisation of the bank, emphasising its existence since the 18th century and its long-term commitment to support the French state, and recalling the distinguished military service of members of both the Gunzburg and Hirsch families: David Hirsch had fought in Napoleon’s army at Waterloo, he himself was a veteran of 1914–18, and his brother-in-law André had been taken prisoner in 1940 and sent to a POW camp in Germany. But it became too risky to remain, and in June 1942 Jean, Madeleine, their children and Jean’s mother-in-law obtained a permanent visa for the United States and they moved to New York. Their Paris apartment in the Avenue du Maréchal Fayolle was requisitioned by the German Navy. Their son Alain joined the Free French, reached England and went to the Ecole des Cadets de la France libre. Through 1944 and 1945 he took part in the military liberation of France and Germany. After the war both he and André Louis-Hirsch made numerous approaches to the Commission de récupération artistique to seek reparation for property looted by the Nazis.

Portrait of Josef Evzel de Gunzburg Photo by courtesy of Dimitri de Gunzberg[/caption]Portrait of Josef Evzel de Gunzburg Photo by courtesy of Dimitri de Gunzberg[/caption]

The founder of the J. E. Gunzburg bank, Joseph Evzel Gunzburg was the architect of an extraordinary economic and social ascent which made him one of the wealthiest men in tsarist Russia. In 1874, following his son Horace, he received the title of baron, granted by the prince of Hesse-Darmstadt in recognition of financial services rendered. Tsar Alexander II subsequently recognised the title and made it hereditary, but several decades later Nicolas II retracted the recognition, refusing to include the barons de Gunzburg among the Russian Empire’s hereditary nobility.

A leading actor and moderniser in the great Russian century, Joseph Evzel remained loyal to the Jewish traditions of his family, descended from a distinguished line of rabbis and businessmen originating from Günzburg in Swabia. He grew up in Vitebsk with his sisters Eleone and Bella, in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. His parents, Gabriel Iakov Gunzburg and Léa Rashkes, gave him a thorough religious education in the Vilnius tradition (his father’s home town). His marriage to Rassia (Rosa) Dynin, the daughter of the postmaster in Orsha, south of Vitebsk, produced five children: Alexandre (b.1831), Horace (b.1832), Ury (b.1840), Mathilde (b.1844) and Salomon (b.1848). He was soon brought in to help his father in his business affairs, successfully expanding the Gunzburg trading agency in Kamenets-Podolsk; in 1833 he became a merchant of the First Guild. Deciding to concentrate on the drinks industry, to begin with he worked as supervisor for a Polish nobleman who owned breweries and subsequently as a manager for Alexander Borozdin, owner of an alcoholic beverage concession in Kamenets-Podolsk, before himself becoming an otkup (concessionaire) in 1839 for numerous districts in the Pale of Settlement. In recognition of his business skills and contribution to the Russian treasury, he was awarded the title of “honorary citizen” in 1849. Contracted to supply vodka and beer to the imperial armies during the Crimean War, he was awarded the Order of Saint Andrew “for zeal” by the tsar in 1856, who later granted him the high-ranking title of “commercial counsellor” in 1874.

In tandem with his business activities Joseph Evzel was a tireless defender of the rights of his co-religionists. In 1850 he sent to the imperial administration a “Note Regarding the Situation of of the Jewish People in Russia” which proposed measures to enhance the freedom to settle and access to training, education and agriculture. In 1859 he was among the Jewish businessmen who secured official permission from Tsar Alexander II for Jewish merchants of the First Guild to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Subsequent petitions extended this permission to university graduates (1865), craftsmen (1865) and former soldiers (1867). As a result, in 1859 Joseph Evzel moved to to the Russian capital where, with the wealth accumulated from his success in the production and sale of alcohol, he opened the J. E. Gunzburg bank, one of Russia’s first private banks to be linked to European financial institutions. The Russian government was a major client. Gunzburg’s bank invested in railway-building and in the development of sugar production in Ukraine, where Jospeh Evzel had substantial landholdings. He diversified into insurance and local deposit banks and invested in the Lena goldfields in western Siberia, where he owned a shipping company on the Sheksna river. He also owned land and forests in Bessarabia.

Joseph Evzel’s move to Russia’s capital culminated in the official establishment of a Jewish community in St Petersburg, which he led and of which he was one of the main founders, negotiating with the authorities for, among other things, the construction of a synagogue (completed in 1893). His commitment to philanthropy led him to co-found the Society for the Promotion of Culture (OPE) in 1863 to promote the social and linguistic integration of Jews in Russian society. The “Gunzburg office” in St Petersburg provided financial help for Jewish students in the capital; among them was the sculptor Marc Antokolsky. Joseph Evzel’s struggle for civil equality also led him to press for Jews to be included when universal military service was introduced in 1874.

After a journey to Paris in 1857, the French capital, and France, became a lasting second home for the Gunzburg family, who, despite the reforms Joseph Evzel had helped bring about, still faced daily pressures, as all Jews did, in tsarist Russia. In 1862 Joseph Evzel had the satisfaction of marrying his only daughter Mathilde to Achille Fould, the nephew of Napoleon III’s famous finance minister. Five years later he opened a subsidiary of the J. E. Gunzburg bank in Paris, entrusting its management to his son Salomon. In 1869 he moved with his children and grandchildren to a lavish town house he had had built at 7 Rue de Tilsitt in the new district of Place de l’Etoile, and two years later he acquired a country residence at Saint-Germain en Laye by buying the former headquarters of the French imperial guard. When he died in 1878, at the age of sixty-five, France’s chief rabbi Lazare Isidor paid tribute to the charisma of a “tireless champion of the Jewish cause”, who chose to be laid to rest at Montparnasse cemetery (where the Gunzburg family has a funerary chapel), but who in his will urged his descendants to remain faithful to their homeland of Russia and to their Jewish religion. While he was alive he had included his son Horace in all his affairs: after his death Horace loyally continued his father’s work.

The second son of five children, Horace was his father Joseph Evzel’s named  heir: at the latter’s death, he became the new head of the family, continuing to pursue his professional as well as community and philanthropic activities with great success. He was a hard worker, balanced and reflective by character, and developed into a leading figure in St Petersburg life in the second half of the 19th century, as his official titles of state councillor, member of the council of commerce and manufacturing, member of the stock market council and the municipal council. As his father’s colleague at the J. E. Gunzburg bank, he was also his father’s executor at his death in 1878 and fourteen years later oversaw the bank’s closure in 1892. He lived and worked at his impressive residence at 17 Konnogvardeysky Boulevard, where he held business meetings, community meetings, and all kinds of musical and fund-raising evenings. The rules of the kashrut and shabbat were strictly observed there, bringing a dignified example of active Jewish practice into the heart of Russian high society. After his wife Anna’s death in 1876, he took personal charge of the upbringing of his eleven children.

            In the philanthropic arena Horace took a leading role, even as the Russian political, economic and social situation became increasingly tense. From 1881 he set up an office to offer aid to the victims of pogroms and was the unofficial but effective representative of the Alliance israélite universelle at a time when it was a proscribed organisation on Russian soil. To defend Jews who were the victims of numerous acts of violence and discrimination, the banker enlisted the help of the legal expert Emmanuel Levine and the lawyer Heinrich Sliozberg. In 1882 they succeeded in alleviating the “Temporary regulations”, also known as the “May laws”, which limited the economic rights and rights of residence of Russian Jews. When the government was persuaded to set up the Pahlen Commission on the Jewish Question in 1883 to investigate mass expulsions of Jews from their villages and review existing laws relating to Jews, Horace became a consultant member, and like his father he was involved in educational development as a founder of ORT (Society for Agricultural and Artisanal Labour). Horrified by the continuing rise of anti-Semitism, he wrote a long letter to Tsar Alexander III (16 May 1890) defending the rights of Jews. The “Gunzburg circle” worked ceaselessly, often behind the scenes, with the various Russian administrations to defend the rights of Russian Jews, but they were unable to prevent the erosion of Jewish living conditions and the rise of anti-Semitism at all levels of Russian society. By 1892 Horace had lost the right to his seat on the St Petersburg municipal council, and was unable to obtain any support from the Russian state to rescue the J. E. Gunzburg bank when it fell into difficulties as a result of the economic crisis.

            Horace de Gunzburg’s social involvement was not limited to the Jewish community. He was treasurer and principal benefactor of the Society of Russian Artists in Paris. With the backing of the writer Ivan Turgenev, the painters Alexei Kharlamov and Alexei Bogoliubov and the sculptor Marc Antokolsky, the society supported Russian artists by buying their work and organising exhibitions to make them better known by the Parisian public. In St Petersburg he helped both Jewish and non-Jewish artists, forging personal links with the art critic Vladimir Stasov, the composer Anton Rubinstein, the painter Ivan Kramskoi and the sculptor Ilia Gintzburg (no relation). Horace also supported research such as the work of Daniel Khvolson on the allegations of ritual murder in the Kutaisi affair of 1879 and the writings of Sergei Bershadskiy on the Jews of Lithuania. Horace endowed a renowned surgical unit at the Stock Market Hospital, donated to St Petersburg’s  Institute of Experimental Medicine (modelled on Paris’s Institut Pasteur), founded a society for low-cost housing for female students on the highly regarded Bestuzhev courses and women’s courses in medicine. Politically liberal, Horace was close to the circle of the Messenger of Europe founded by Mikhail Stasiulevich. Convinced of the importance of a free press, he backed the publications of Alexander Zederbaum both in Russian and Hebrew. He had deep friendships with writers of great talent such as Ivan Goncharov and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. For his 70th birthday in January 1903, which coincided with the 40th anniversary of his leadership of the Society for the Promotion of Culture (OPE), Horace’s family, friends and colleagues organised a series of public and private celebrations. The famous expedition to collect ethnographic evidence of the culture of the shtetl organised by S. Ansky and financed by Vladimir de Gunzburg was named in his honour the Baron Horace de Gunzburg Expedition.

A rabbi and Swabian merchant, Simon was the first to bear the name Günzburg, from the name of the town of his birth. He was also known as Simon ben Eliezer – his father Eliezer was a native of Ulmo, where the Jews had been excluded from in 1499, which explains the family’s subsequent move to Günzburg. Well versed in medical knowledge, Eliezer is recorded as physician to the daughter of Ferdinand I in Innsbruck in 1534, to Prince-Bishop Otto of Augsburg at Dillingen in 1543, and to the imperial court in Vienna in 1545. In recognition of his services he was granted laissez-passer for himself and his son by Ferdinand I (1503–1564), who was then Archduke of Austria, brother of the Emperor Charles V.

Simon was married to Hendele, the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Eitsik ben Eljakim Linz, a renowned teacher at the Frankfurt yeshiva, and of Schönle, the daughter of Asher of Ulm. Simon and Hendele had many children, of whom eight boys and seven girls have been identified. Their third son, Asher Aaron Ulmo-Gunzburg (1535–1603), is a distant relation of Joseph Evzel de Gunzburg.

Simon Gunzburg left his mark on the Ashkenazi world. His fame rests on both his commercial success and his public achievements. His presence in the banking world is attested in several places: we know he granted a loan to cardinal Otto of Augsburg (1514–1573) for the building of his episcopal seat at Dillingen because of his litigation against Otto’s successor for his refusal to honour the debt. Another recorded dispute pitted Simon against his former representative Nathan Châtin, who, in quitting his agency at Oberhausen for Frankfurt, had swindled Simon out of his share. Simon’s name likewise appears in the settling of the complicated marital situations of two of his children, a son and a daughter. In the litigation between his daughter and her in-laws, Simon called on the help of the renowned Rabbi Moshe Isserlès (1520–1572), known by the acronym ReMa, who proved the validity of the divorce that continued to be contested by the former husband even when the young woman had already remarried.

Simon was a leading light among the Jewish community of Bavaria, of which he was the elected representative (shtadlan or intercessor) to the Bavarian authorities for more than forty years, from 1543 till his death in 1585, on 8 Shevat 5345 according to the Memorbuch of the Jewish community of Pfersee. Simon had his main agency in Pfersee, a mile from Augsburg, the duchy’s capital and forbidden to Jews. “In his time there was no German Jew more influential than he was,” wrote his contemporary David Gans in his chronicle Zemach David, published in Prague in 1592. Among Simon’s achievements which have left their mark are his founding in the 1560s of the first Jewish cemetery in Swabia at Burgau on the River Mindel, not far from Günzburg, where he was later buried, along with his wife and some of his children, and where one of his sons was to finance the building of a synagogue. In 1578–81 he likewise contributed 8,000 florins to pay for the edition of the Talmud undertaken by the Basel printer Froben. The lives and achievements of his many Gunzburg family descendants have also secured him a lasting reputation.