Herminie and Fanny Pereire

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Herminie and Fanny Pereire were remarkable women of the French Jewish elite. Emerging from a Sephardic family that adapted early to acculturation with French society, they played essential but often unremarked roles in the lives and spectacular businesses of their husbands, Emile and Isaac Pereire, who were prominent bankers, financiers and industrialists in nineteenth-century France. Family provided the solid foundation on which the Pereire brothers depended, supporting and propelling a financial and industrial empire. Herminie and Fanny were entrusted with the construction of a close, intimate circle of family and friends. However, they not only built a domestic life that was calm, stable, and united, and contributed substantially to the public face their husbands enjoyed. They also enabled the Pereire businesses to flourish - as was expected of women of their class - and played an often-unacknowledged role in those businesses.In illuminating the lives of Herminie and Fanny Pereire, the book overcomes the invisibility of women of their class. It draws attention to their exceptional qualities, and brings to light their individuality, giving them definition, form and, most importantly, agency. Based on extensive analysis of family letters contained in the Pereire Family Archive in Paris and other archival sources in France, this volume is a fascinating study of a prominent Jewish family in nineteenth-century France.