David Gradis

Origins and early life

David Gradis was born in 1665 in Bordeaux, into a family of Portuguese Jews 'of Marrano extraction', as the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Encyclopaedia Judaica put it — descendants of the Jews forcibly converted in Portugal who had fled the Inquisition around the end of the fifteenth century and settled among the 'Portuguese merchants' of Bordeaux, where they lived as Jews under a thin Catholic veil until the crown let them drop it.

Work and career

In 1696 he founded the trading house that would bear the family's name for two and a half centuries, the house of Gradis, and made it one of the first French firms of the Atlantic. From the quays of Bordeaux his ships and correspondents traded with England and Holland, with Canada, and with the French West Indies — Cayenne, Martinique, Saint-Domingue — carrying wine, flour and cloth out and sugar and colonial goods home.

He built the capital, the fleet and the network that his nephew Abraham Gradis would raise to the summit of the kingdom's commerce as purveyor to the king and provisioner of French Canada. He died in Bordeaux in 1751, the founder of the most durable Jewish merchant dynasty of France.