Gustave d'Eichthal
Gustave d'Eichthal · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Saint-Simonian thinker and Hellenist, born into the Jewish Seligmann banking family and baptized at thirteen, who founded the Association for the Encouragement of Greek Studies
22 mars 1804, Nancy, France — 9 avril 1886, Paris, France
Paris, Athènes
Gustave d'Eichthal is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Saint-Simonian thinker and Hellenist, born into the Jewish Seligmann banking family and baptized at thirteen, who founded the Association for the Encouragement of Greek Studies
Origins and early life
Gustave d'Eichthal was born in Nancy on 22 March 1804 into a family of Jewish bankers from Munich named Seligmann, ennobled in Bavaria as d'Eichthal, and was baptized a Catholic at thirteen, in 1817, when his parents converted — a passage this fiche states plainly, and one he never treated as an erasure, for he wrote about Judaism, its history and its future all his life, and the historians of ideas describe his path as leading 'from Judaism to the Saint-Simonian religion'.
Work and career
A pupil of Auguste Comte in his youth, he joined in 1829 the Saint-Simonian movement of Prosper Enfantin, the first socialism of the industrial age, and was one of its apostles and its financiers, preaching the reconciliation of Orient and Occident, of Jews and Christians, of the races of mankind; his book of 1839 with Ismaÿl Urbain, Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche, argued for the equality and complementarity of Black and white, and he was a founder of the Société ethnologique de Paris in the same year.
His second passion was Greece: he travelled there in 1833 as a member of the new kingdom's economic council, learned modern Greek, and in 1867 founded the Association pour l'encouragement des études grecques en France, which still exists, to defend the study of Greek and the cause of the Greek people. Between the two he wrote on the origins of Christianity, on the Gospels and on the Bible, works of a free spirit that found no church to hold them. He died in Paris on 9 April 1886.
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Saint-Simonian thinker and Hellenist, born into the Jewish Seligmann banking family and baptized at thirteen, who founded the Association for the Encouragement of Greek Studies
Source: https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5478-eichthal-gustave-d
