Leopold Kronenberg

Origins and early life

Leopold Kronenberg was born in Warsaw on 24 March 1812 into a Jewish merchant family of the city, the son of Samuel Eleazar Kronenberg, and he was raised a Jew; this fiche states plainly that in 1846 he converted to Calvinist Protestantism, a step common among Jewish businessmen of Congress Poland who needed civic rights the law denied to Jews, and that he never ceased to be identified with his origin by others. He studied in Warsaw, Hamburg and Berlin, and made his first fortune from the state tobacco monopoly, which he leased from 1852.

Work and career

From there he built the industrial economy of Russian Poland: sugar refineries, the Warsaw-Vienna and Vistula railways, of which he was one of the seven great railway kings of the empire, coal and steel interests in the Dąbrowa basin, and in 1870 the Bank Handlowy w Warszawie, the first large Polish commercial bank and, as Citi Handlowy, still in business a century and a half later. He founded and financed the Warsaw commercial school that bears his name, the ancestor of the Warsaw School of Economics, and he bought and funded the Gazeta Polska to have a Polish voice in the press.

In the January insurrection of 1863 he belonged to the moderate party of the Whites, sat on its national government, and paid for it with heavy political risk; afterwards he worked for economic rather than armed resistance to Russification. He was a supporter of Jewish emancipation and of the integrationist current in Warsaw Jewry, and gave to Jewish charities all his life. He died at Nice on 5 April 1878, leaving one of the largest fortunes in Poland and a dynasty that entered the Polish aristocracy.