Salomon Reinach

Origins and early life

Salomon Reinach was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 29 August 1858, the second of the three Reinach brothers, sons of a Jewish banker from Frankfurt, and remained all his life a Jew engaged in Jewish life — vice-president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a founder of the Société des études juives, a Dreyfusard from the first day — and a rationalist who held that all religions, his own included, were survivals of primitive taboos and totems.

Work and career

First in every examination, he entered the École normale supérieure at eighteen and the French School at Athens at twenty-one, excavated at Myrina and at Carthage, and in 1886 joined the Musée des Antiquités nationales at Saint-Germain, which he directed from 1902 until his death and made the museum of the prehistory and the Celtic and Roman past of France. He was a machine for knowledge: his Répertoires — of Greek and Roman statuary, of painted vases, of reliefs, of paintings — catalogued in tens of thousands of drawings the whole surviving art of antiquity, and are still on the shelves of every archaeological library; his Apollo of 1904, a history of art for the general reader, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in a dozen languages, and his Orpheus of 1909, a history of religions, was put on the Index by the Church.

A member of the Académie des inscriptions from 1896, he also had the failings of a man who knew everything: he defended to the end the authenticity of the Glozel finds, which were forgeries, and this fiche says so. He died at Boulogne-Billancourt on 4 November 1932.