Henri Hertz

Origins and early life

Salomon Léopold Henri Hertz was born at Nogent-sur-Seine on 17 June 1875, in a Jewish family originally from Lorraine; his father Émile Hertz was an army officer.

Work and career

He worked as a theatre director, journalist, writer and poet, ran the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin from 1909 to 1922, and moved among the writers of his time — Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Romain Rolland were his correspondents and friends; his volume Passavant won the Prix Mallarmé in 1939. The Dreyfus Affair marked him permanently, as it marked a whole generation of French Jews who had believed themselves simply French, and it turned him toward Jewish public work: he founded the Comité France-Palestine, which argued in France for the Jewish rebuilding of the Land of Israel, and after 1925 became secretary general of the French section of the World Jewish Congress.

He lived to ninety-one, dying in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris on 11 October 1966, having seen the Affair, two world wars, the deportation of the Jews of France and the founding of the State of Israel. His widow founded the Prix Henri-Hertz in 1986, awarded to works of ethical and civic concern.