The Gideon Family

The cradle of the lineage is Iberian. The Abudientes belonged to that Portuguese Sephardic elite which, following forced conversions and the establishment of the Inquisition, left the peninsula to reconstitute, at the tolerant margins of Protestant Europe, an open Jewish life. Family memory, corroborated by genealogical research, locates the paternal grandfather of the financier, Moses Abudiente, as a Sephardic man born in Lisbon, Portugal, who subsequently settled in Glückstadt, in Holstein, a region near Hamburg [Wikipedia, Sampson Gideon].

This displacement is not insignificant. Glückstadt and Hamburg counted among the rare centers where the "Portuguese merchants" — euphemism designating Sephardic Jews — could practice their commerce and, gradually, their worship. In leaving the lands of the Inquisition for these northern refuges, the Abudientes accomplished the founding gesture of so many Sephardic families of the early modern period: the public return to Judaism after generations of concealment. This reconquered freedom bore within it the virtue of the courage of faithfulness, this refusal of the effaced Law that traverses the collective memory of Israel since the times of persecutions.

It was in this milieu that Rowland Gideon was born, whose original name, according to genealogical records, was Rohiel Abudiente [Wikipedia, Sampson Gideon]. The transmission of Hebrew given names — Rohiel, Moses — in a Germanic context attests to the persistence of an identity that neither exile nor commerce succeeded in dissolving.

The following generation shifted the family's center of gravity toward two poles: the West Indies and London. Rowland Gideon, born in Glückstadt, belonged to this enterprising Sephardic diaspora that invested in Atlantic colonial commerce. The Abudiente, as research specifies, were part of the Sephardic ruling class of planters in the West Indies [Wikipedia, Sampson Gideon]. This insertion into the colonial economy, with the moral shadow it carries for today's historian, was the path by which many Jewish families, excluded from traditional European corporations, were able to accumulate capital and respectability.

The London settlement marks a decisive turning point. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that Samson Gideon was the son of Rowland Gideon (died in 1720), a West Indies merchant, who changed his name from the Portuguese "Abudiente" upon establishing himself in England, became a freeman of the City of London and member of the Paper-Stainers' Company on February 17, 1697 [Jewish Encyclopedia]. Sources further specify that Rowland was admitted to the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, one of those City guilds whose access remained exceptional for a Jew.

This change of name — from Abudiente to Gideon — is a highly significant act. It is not a renunciation but an onomastic naturalization: the Hebrew patronymic of Gideon, judge and liberator of Israel, replaces the Iberian name, as if the family, in gaining access to the London citadel, chose to re-anchor itself in biblical memory rather than in the memory of Marranism. Rowland married in his second marriage Esther de Porto, herself Jewish, daughter of Domingo (or Abraham) do Porto, a diamond buyer in Madras, India [Wikipedia, Sampson Gideon] — a union that inscribes the lineage in the vast Sephardic network of precious stone merchants linking India to Europe.

It was with Samson Gideon (February 1699 – 17 October 1762) that the lineage reached the pinnacle of public recognition. Born at London Wall, in the City of London, he was the second son of the five children of Rowland Gideon [Wikipedia, Sampson Gideon].

His rise was meteoric. The Jewish Encyclopedia relates that he began his business in 1720 with a capital of 1,500 pounds, which grew so rapidly that within a few years he became one of the most powerful brokers in London [Jewish Encyclopedia]. He was, according to the formula consecrated by historian James Picciotto in his Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History of 1875, "the Rothschild of his time" and "the pillar of public credit" [Wikipedia, Sampson Gideon; James Picciotto, Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History, 1875].

The pinnacle of his career was as much political as financial. Gideon is chiefly known for having financed the suppression, by the Hanoverian-Whig government, of the Jacobite uprising of 1745, becoming thereafter a trusted "adviser to the government" who supported the adoption of the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753 [Wikipedia, Sampson Gideon]. He worked in the period when England, freed from its internal political turmoil, experienced an expansion of its credit — a period that his active career covered almost exactly [Jewish Historical Society of England].

Under the administrations of Robert Walpole and then Henry Pelham, he became the architect of public debt financing and war loans, notably during the War of the Austrian Succession. In this, the Gideon lineage expressed one of the virtues by which the Jewish diaspora served the societies that welcomed it: economic action placed at the service of state stability, at a time when a nation's credit was worth as much as its armies. The Jewish financier, long a figure of suspicion, became here a guarantor of public order.

The destiny of Samson Gideon carries within itself a tension that belongs to the great Jewish meditation on assimilation. A man of high finance, aspiring to found a landed dynasty in an England where Jews could neither own property nor sit in parliament, he encountered the wall of legal exclusions. The Jewish Encyclopedia formulates the drama with precision: the great object of Gideon's life was to found a landed family, which was almost impossible to accomplish as a Jew. Consequently, in 1754, he resigned from his membership in the Sephardic congregation, and from that moment on raised his children in the Christian faith [Jewish Encyclopedia].

This act, which might pass for apostasy, calls for a nuanced reading where tradition and archive respond to one another. For Gideon did not convert himself: he withdrew from the congregation without ever publicly embracing another faith, and he continued, according to historians of Anglo-Judaism, to contribute secretly to the works of the Sephardic community of Bevis Marks. Community memory preserves the recollection of a man who, while preparing the Christian integration of his descendants, paid until his death an annual contribution to the synagogue and asked to be buried there according to Jewish rite.

Here is tied one of the most profound questions of the memory of Israel: what remains of the Law when social ambition demands that it be silenced? The case of Gideon suggests that piety can survive beneath the appearance of denial, that clandestine charity can be a form of fidelity. His generosity toward the community he officially left testifies to an attachment that refused to be extinguished — the virtue of tsedaka, of care for one's own, exercised all the more scrupulously because it had to remain discreet.

Samson Gideon's dynastic strategy bore fruit in the following generation, but at the cost of withdrawal from Judaism. Having raised his children in the Christian faith, he saw his son, also named Sampson, gain access to that landed aristocracy which he himself had not been able to reach: the latter was created a baronet during his father's lifetime, before later becoming Baron Eardley — the title by which posterity knew the Anglican branch of the family [Geni, Sampson Gideon (Abudiente)].

Thus was accomplished, in two generations, an emblematic trajectory of ambivalent emancipation: the Portuguese ancestor Moses Abudiente practiced Hebrew and Sephardic worship in Glückstadt; the great-grandson sat among the British peerage under a biblical name become a title of nobility. Between the two, the lineage had traversed everything — the Inquisition, exile, colonial commerce, high finance, synagogue and church.

It would be easy to see in this course of life only a loss. The honest historian must also recognize in it the power of a hope: that of finally belonging fully to a society which, for centuries, had rejected the Jews. Samson Gideon's support for the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753 — the famous "Jew Bill," quickly repealed under popular pressure — shows that, even withdrawn from the congregation, he worked for the legal emancipation of his former coreligionists. In this, the Gideon lineage participated in the great collective cause of Jewish dignity, that of involvement in the life of the city and the defense of the right of minorities to exist in the open.

The Gideon-Abudiente lineage occupies a singular place in the memory of Anglo-Judaism. It was neither the most numerous nor the longest faithful, but it was among those which, by their very trajectory, posed the decisive questions that Western Jewish communities would debate for two centuries: how far to integrate without dissolving? What to sacrifice to recognition and what to preserve?

The figure of Samson Gideon was rehabilitated by nineteenth-century Jewish historiography, which, far from condemning him, recognized in him a pioneer of public credit and a discreet benefactor. The Jewish Historical Society of England holds him to be the most remarkable financier, Jewish or Christian, of mid-eighteenth-century England [Jewish Historical Society of England]. This judgment, emanating from an institution devoted to British Jewish memory, indicates how much the community ultimately came to claim as its own a man who, officially, had withdrawn from it.

This is the whole subtlety of Israel's Memory: it does not abandon those who seemed to leave it, insofar as their deeds betrayed a deeper loyalty than their declarations. The Gideon lineage belongs to this category of hinge families whose ambivalence does not weaken the force of memory, but makes it instead exemplary of the modern Jewish condition.

At the end of this journey, it appears that the lineage Gideon-Abudiente will have, among all the virtues of the Jewish tradition, best expressed faithful charity — this tsedaka which, in Samson Gideon, became all the more tenacious as it had to remain secret. Here is the luminous paradox that crowns this story: at the very moment when the man officially withdrew from the Sephardic congregation, he continued to support it, preparing his Jewish burial and bequeathing to his abandoned community the fruits of his success. The Law that he had silenced in the drawing rooms of the City, he kept alive in the gesture of the outstretched hand.

To this primary virtue are added two others, inseparable from the destiny of the lineage: economic action in the service of the common good, embodied by a financier who made credit an instrument of stability for the nation that welcomed him; and commitment to collective emancipation, manifested by his support for the right of naturalization of Jews. Thus, from the Hebraist grammarian of Glückstadt to the peer of the kingdom of Great Britain, the Gideon lineage traces the entire arc of Western Jewish modernity — with its glories, its renunciations and its underground loyalties. In embodying this charity that survives exile and even retrenchment, the Gideon family participates in that immemorial virtue by which Israel, through the centuries and continents, has never ceased to recognize itself: care for one's neighbor, whatever the cost, and even in silence.