The Goldschmidt Family

Before the banks and the baronies, there was the alley. The Goldschmidt family belongs to that ancient Jewish foundation of Frankfurt whose memory reaches back to the Rhineland communities of the late Middle Ages, confined in the Judengasse, that "Street of the Jews" where the Holy Roman Empire locked in its inhabitants of Israelite faith, subject to minute regulations and constant fiscal pressure. It was there, in that cramped space where one married between neighboring families — the Kann, the Rothschild, the Speyer, the Sichel — that the surname was forged.

Ashkenazi Jewish onomastic tradition readily holds that occupational names, such as Goldschmidt — the goldsmith — originally designated a function before becoming fixed as a hereditary family name, often at the time of the great campaigns of surname fixation imposed by States at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The name thus preserves, like an imprint, the memory of a craft of precious metals that would find in finance its modern metamorphosis.

This culture of the ghetto was not merely constraint: it was also the crucible of intense religious and intellectual life. The Frankfurt community counted among the most learned of the Germanic area, guardian of a demanding Talmudic erudition and a piety structured by halakha. It is from this soil that there emerged, in the nineteenth century, the generation of emancipation — that generation which, as Gershom Scholem showed regarding German Jewishness, would have to renegotiate its entire relationship to tradition under the pressure of entry into bourgeois modernity [Gershom Scholem, Faithfulness and Utopia, 1978, ref:1]. The strength of this lineage was in having been able, for a long time, to hold together loyalty to the group and openness to the world.

The founding figure of the family fortune is Benedict Hayum Salomon Goldschmidt, born in Frankfurt am Main on April 23, 1798 and died in Paris on May 7, 1873 [Goldschmidt Family Genealogy, RootsWeb]. He founded in Frankfurt the banking house B. H. Goldschmidt, which became one of the city's principal financial institutions alongside the Rothschild and Bethmann families, and he served as consul of the Grand Duke of Tuscany [en.wikipedia.org, Frank Adolphe Benedict Goldsmith ; Adolphe Goldschmidt].

On November 12, 1820, he married Jeannette Kann, born December 4, 1802 in Höchberg, daughter of Jacob Hirsch Kann — a union that sealed the alliance of two dynasties issuing from the Judengasse [Goldschmidt Family Genealogy, RootsWeb]. From this house would arise a line that spread from Frankfurt to Paris, London and Vienna, weaving across Europe a network of branches and matrimonial alliances.

The history of Benedict Hayum Goldschmidt illustrates the great movement of economic emancipation of Western European Judaism: access, as legal barriers fell, to the professions of finance and international commerce. But this material success can only be fully understood when related to an ethic. Jewish tradition has never separated economic action from collective responsibility: wealth engages in it, through tsedaka — this charity which is first and foremost justice — a duty toward the community. The great Jewish banking houses of Frankfurt were also, in their century, pillars of communal life, financing synagogues, schools and charitable works. In this, the house B. H. Goldschmidt participates in a virtue that Israel has long embodied: that which makes prosperity not an end in itself, but an instrument in service of the group and the welcomed stranger.

The consecration of the lineage within European financial aristocracy takes the form of an alliance that became proverbial. The son of Benedict Hayum, Maximilien Benedict Hayum Goldschmidt, born in Paris on June 20, 1843, marries a Rothschild heiress; he is authorized to bear the name of both families and becomes baron von Goldschmidt-Rothschild, dying in Frankfurt-on-the-Main on February 18, 1940 [Goldschmidt Family Genealogy, RootsWeb]. This double appellation alone speaks to the trajectory: from a house in the Judengasse to the most prestigious of Jewish dynasties, whose name had become synonymous with European high banking.

Another son, Adolphe Benedict Hayum Goldschmidt, born in Frankfurt in 1838, inherits the family bank with his brothers. Marrying Alice Emma Moses Merton, daughter of Joseph Benjamin Moses, he establishes himself permanently in London in 1895 and dies there on April 6, 1918, possessed of several millions [en.wikipedia.org, Adolphe Goldschmidt ; Frank Adolphe Benedict Goldsmith]. With him, the lineage shifts toward England, where it would gradually merge — until the anglicization of the name into Goldsmith — into British society.

This history of alliances and migrations is more than a chronicle of fortunes. It illuminates the manner in which the great Jewish families of the West succeeded, through marriage and circulation between capitals, in maintaining the cohesion of a dispersed people. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi reminds us, Jewish transmission has always been nourished as much by the Memory of lineages as by the archive [Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Transmettre l'histoire juive, 2012, ref:12]: the Goldschmidts, by inscribing their name in the civil registries of three nations, accomplished in their own way this work of fidelity to a name and an origin. The ultimate fate of baron Maximilien, who died in Frankfurt in 1940 under the Nazi regime, nonetheless casts the shadow of the coming catastrophe over this success.

The English branch of the lineage, bearing the Anglicized name Goldsmid, produced one of the purest heroes of Jewish emancipation: Francis Henry Goldsmid (1808-1878). He entered history as the first Jew admitted to the English Bar, breaking one of the professional prohibitions that still struck Jews in Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This act was not isolated: it was part of a long campaign, conducted by his family as well as by himself, for the civil and political equality of British Jews — access to the professions, to Parliament, to full citizenship. The Goldsmids were among the great architects of this gradual emancipation which, throughout the century, caused one by one the legal disabilities to fall away.

Here, the lineage expresses with brilliance one of the cardinal virtues of the tradition of Israel: tsedek, justice, which commands one not to resign oneself to exclusion and to make law a struggle. Jewish philosophy has always placed the Law at the foundation of political bond, justice in it being not an abstraction but a practical exigency of recognition of the other [Shmuel Trigano, Philosophie de la Loi, 1991, ref:8]. By forcing open the doors of the Bar, Francis Henry Goldsmid was not merely conquering a personal right: he was opening a breach for all those who, after him, intended to be full citizens without renouncing their identity. His action extended, in Victorian England, what Léon Askénazi called the Jewish vocation to think and to reform the rapport of tradition to the present world [Léon Askénazi, La parole et l'écrit, 1999, ref:4].

At the turn of the twentieth century, the lineage left the trading post and the courthouse for the laboratory. Richard Benedict Goldschmidt, born in Frankfurt am Main on April 12, 1878 in this same Jewish family, died in Berkeley (California) on April 24, 1958, was one of the greatest biologists of his time [en.wikipedia.org, Richard Goldschmidt ; biographs.org]. Trained at the University of Heidelberg, a student of Richard Hertwig and disciple of Otto Bütschli, he was, according to historians of science, one of the first to combine the achievements of genetics and embryology in the development of evolutionary ideas [biographs.org].

The Zakhor corpus preserves the trace of this considerable work. His pedagogical manuals first: the Zoologisches Taschenbuch für Studierende (1907) [Zakhor corpus 13f5cdaa-49c2-472b-ae60-c5d0410cf15a], then the successive reprints of his Einführung in die Vererbungswissenschaft — the "Introduction to the Science of Heredity" — in twenty lessons (1911) [Zakhor corpus 715a082a-217b-4c37-bc11-862e9b61c94d] then twenty-two lessons (1913) [Zakhor corpus 7dcc50bf-e038-4483-8505-fd11649ff0e9], intended for students, physicians and breeders. In 1914 appeared Die Urtiere, "The Protozoans: an introduction to the science of life" [Zakhor corpus efa24150-808e-467c-9c3e-ffa985a219f4]. His properly scientific work culminates in the Mechanismus und Physiologie der Geschlechtsbestimmung (1920) — the "Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination" [Zakhor corpus 5aa7c529-f6f4-401a-b3ae-7641ef482f8e] — the fruit of his famous research on the intersexuality of the silkworm and the gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar).

It is in America, where he went into exile to escape Nazi persecution, that his most audacious book appeared: The Material Basis of Evolution (1940) [Zakhor corpus f41f6764-9ee7-474f-8be7-f245b270fade]. In it he defends a conception of macroevolution by macromutations, which became famous under the name of the hypothesis of "hopeful monsters". Many of his theories were rejected during his lifetime, but they forced the scientific community to reexamine the concepts governing the function of genes [Encyclopædia Britannica, Richard B. Goldschmidt]. Appointed professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, then at the University of California at Berkeley, he embodies the figure of the German Jewish scholar driven out by Nazism and refounding his work in exile.

Richard Goldschmidt thus gives the lineage its contribution to scientific knowledge — this passion for understanding reality that the Jewish tradition holds as a way of honoring Creation. His loyalty to minority hypotheses, his intellectual courage in the face of consensus, also speak to a form of fruitful dissidence. And his exile of 1936 inscribes his name in the long history of Jewish speech constrained to silence and then reclaimed elsewhere, whose tragic grandeur André Neher has scrutinized [André Neher, L'exil de la parole, 1970, ref:11].

Translations

The twentieth century breaks the beautiful continuity of generations. Baron Maximilien von Goldschmidt-Rothschild dies in Frankfurt in February 1940, in a Germany where Jews, even barons and patrons, are now despoiled and threatened; his art collections will be dispersed under duress. Richard Goldschmidt flees to the United States. The London branch, meanwhile, completes its transformation by anglicizing: from Goldschmidt to Goldsmid, then to Goldsmith [en.wikipedia.org, Frank Adolphe Benedict Goldsmith].

This dispersal of names — the constellation Goldschmid, Goldschmiedt, Goldschmitt, Goldsmid, Goldsmith, Goldszmit — is not a simple orthographic accident. It is the very writing of the diaspora: each variant fixes a border crossed, a language adopted, an effort of integration, sometimes a part of identity silenced to survive. Family memory, transmitted by word of mouth, and the cold archive of registers answer each other here: the former preserves the memory of a unique Frankfurt origin, the latter attests to the scattering into as many national lineages.

This chapter touches on a tension that contemporary Jewish thought has ceaselessly questioned: that of assimilation and faithfulness. Isaiah Berlin described with subtlety the dilemma of emancipated Western Jews, torn between the desire for belonging and loyalty to their origin [Isaiah Berlin, Three Essays on the Condition of the Jews, 1973, ref:7]. The Goldschmidts offer an exemplary illustration of it: a lineage which, to enter the European city, sometimes had to blur its name — yet the archive never completely erases the thread that binds it to the alley of Frankfurt.

From the Judengasse of Frankfurt to the banking halls of Paris, from the law courts of London to the laboratories of Berkeley, the Goldschmidt lineage traversed in three or four generations the full span of the modern Jewish adventure: emancipation, success, princely alliance, contribution to knowledge, then persecution and exile. Its goldsmith name, declined in a dozen variants, bears the trace of all these passages.

If one had to name, among all, the virtue that this family best expressed, it would surely be that of conquering justice — that conviction, embodied most brilliantly by Francis Henry Goldsmid forcing open the doors of the English Bar, that law is won and equality is argued. Around it radiate two sister virtues: the economic action of Benedict Hayum Goldschmidt and his sons, understood in Jewish tradition as a responsibility toward the collective, and the contribution to scientific knowledge of Richard Goldschmidt, who questioned the very matter of life itself.

In this, the Goldschmidt house was not merely a dynasty; it participated in a collective memory of Israel, that of a people who, dispersed, everywhere made justice, study and care of the city the instruments of their fidelity. As Maurice-Ruben Hayoun wrote, the vitality of Jewish thought lies in this capacity to transpose, from one land to another, the same heritage of values [Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, La philosophie juive, 2023, ref:6]. The Great Book of the Goldschmidts is testimony to this: that of a name which, changing language and shore, never quite ceased to speak of gold and justice.