Moïse Cahen

Origins and early life

Moïse Cahen was born at Metz on 17 December 1785, six years before the Jews of France were made citizens, and died in the old third arrondissement of Paris on 24 May 1853.

Work and career

He was a French physician of the Jewish faith and one of the men who built the institutional life of French Jewry in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was president of the Israelite Consistory of Paris from 1832 to 1852, twenty years, succeeding Michel Goudchaux and followed by Gustave Halphen; the Consistory in those decades had to create from nothing the schools, the burial societies, the charities and the synagogues of a community that the Revolution had emancipated but not organised.

His medical thesis was on circumcision, a subject in which his two competences met: a Jewish doctor writing for a French faculty about a rite that French medicine of the time was inclined to discuss as an oddity. His son Mayer Cahen became a physician in turn, chief of the Rothschild hospital, and his daughter Rosine became a photographer under the professional name Mme Moriss.