The death in Paris early this month of Salomon Reinach, the famous savant, archaeologist, and member of the French Academy, concludes the story of the famous trio of three Reinach brothers.
The eldest of the brothers, Joseph Reinach, the politician and champion of Dreyfus, died in April 1921, and the youngest brother, Theodore Reinach, the famous historian, died in October 1928.
The three brothers were the sons of Hermann Joseph Reinach and the nephews of Baron Jacques Reinach, who helped to finance the Panama Canal Company and who was also the father-in-law of the eldest brother, Joseph.
All three brothers played a great part in Jewish affairs.
When Baron de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association in 1891, Salomon Reinach was one of the eight prominent Jews, including himself, whom he invited to subscribe for the foundation shares, the others being Lord Rothschild, Sir Julian Goldsmid, Sir Ernest Cassel, F. D. Mocatta, Benjamin S. Cohen, and S. H. Goldschmidt. He was from the beginning a member of the Council of the Ica, and at the time of his death he was its Vice-President. He was also a Vice-President of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, and a former President of the Societe des Etudes Juives.
All three brothers were opponents of Jewish nationalism and Zionism. Theodore Reinach once explained his position in the “Paix et Droit”, the organ of the Alliance Israelite, by pointing out that at different periods the infiltration of heterogeneous elements in the blood of Israel has been considerable, and that the mysterious influence of soil, climate, regime, and surroundings, have gently but surely modified racial characteristics. To-day Jewry, dispersed over the whole globe, he wrote, has nowhere either a territory or a government which is its own. The Zionists will establish a small group of Jews, at most a million, in Palestine. Will that be sufficient to form a nation of this population of varied origins? What shall we say of the other 14 millions of Jews spread over the rest of the world? Shall we consider them as Nationals dependent on the Jewish State in Jerusalem? What a formidable support that would give to anti-Semitism, to the Nationalist anti-Semitism which falsely persists in considering the Jew everywhere, where he is established, as a foreigner and to demand that he should be treated as such. Should we give our worst enemies the rod with
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
