Abraham Salomon Camondo

Origins and early life

Abraham Salomon Camondo was born in Constantinople around 1781 — some sources say 1785, and this fiche keeps the uncertainty — into a Sephardi family that had found refuge in the Ottoman Empire after the Iberian expulsions of 1492.

Work and career

Taking over the family bank in 1832 on the death of his brother Isaac, he built it into the leading financial house of the Ottoman Empire, banker to the government itself in the decades before 1863, and earned the name the press gave him: the Rothschild of the East. He was as devoted a philanthropist as he was a financier, founding in 1858 a modern school in the Jewish quarter of Constantinople that taught secular subjects alongside religious ones.

King Victor Emmanuel II ennobled him in 1867 as a hereditary count of Italy in gratitude for his support of Italian unification. When his grandsons carried the bank to Paris from 1869, the old patriarch followed; he died there in 1873, and his body was returned in state to Constantinople for burial. The dynasty he founded would end in French tragedy — its last descendants murdered at Auschwitz — leaving the Musée Nissim de Camondo as its monument.