Emmanuel Lipmann

Origins and early life

Emmanuel Isaac Lipmann was born at Neuf-Brisach, in the Haut-Rhin, in 1844, into an Alsatian Jewish family of watchmakers, and died at Besançon on 20 January 1913.

Work and career

In 1867 he founded at Besançon the watch manufacture that became Lip, and he directed it until his death; the firm gave France one of the few watchmaking names able to stand beside those of Switzerland, and it remained a byword for French industry long after him. He married Caroline Geismar in October 1868 and they had three children. In his later decades he turned to philanthropy, giving his time to charitable work in Besançon and to the Jewish community of France, and he served as vice-president of the Jewish consistory in the 1900s.

His funeral on 22 January 1913 gathered the Jewish community of the city. His son Ernest David Lipmann, born in 1869, inherited the company and received the Legion of Honour, and was deported to Auschwitz in 1943, so that the family that had built one of the emblems of French manufacture was struck by the destruction of the Jews of France.