Marguerite Brandon-Salvador

Origins and early life

Marguerite Brandon-Salvador was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 25 May 1846, into two notable French Jewish lines: her father Daniel Lévy Salvador was one of the first French Jews to make a military career, rising to colonel of artillery, and her mother Séphora Adamine Crémieux came from the Jews of the Comtat Venaissin and was related to Adolphe Crémieux, senator and minister of justice.

Work and career

In 1907 she was among the founders of the Union libérale israélite de France, the liberal Jewish congregation of Paris, and in 1910 became its vice-president: with Clarisse Eugène Simon she was the first woman in France to hold such an office in a synagogue, at a period when the place of women in the consistorial synagogues was the gallery and nothing else. She argued for the equality of women in Jewish religious institutions, which took most of the following century to arrive.

She published several books, among them À travers les moissons in 1903. During the First World War she directed an annexe hospital for the wounded on her estate of La Commanderie at Ballan-Miré, where she died on 27 August 1925.