Simon Lazard

Origins and early life

Simon Lazard was born on 8 April 1828 in Frauenberg, in Lorraine, into a Jewish family: his father, Elie Lazard, a farmer, died when he was three, and his mother, Esther Aron, then married Moïse Cahn.

Work and career

At sixteen, in 1844, he joined his elder brothers Lazare and Alexandre in New Orleans, where they sold dry goods, and on 12 July 1848 the three brothers signed the partnership that founded Lazard Frères. In January 1850, drawn by the gold rush, he sailed for California and opened the firm's store in San Francisco, where his brothers Elie and Maurice joined him and the firm began trading gold with France. In October 1850 he was one of the thirteen founders of the Eureka Benevolent Society of San Francisco, created, in the words of the city directory, to assist poor and needy Hebrews in want or in sickness.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives the Lazards their own entry as a Jewish family of international bankers, and their cousin Alexandre Weill, who joined them in California, was the forebear of later heads of the Paris house. He became an American citizen in 1851, calling it a mere formality that the law required, and in 1861 he left for Paris, where Alexandre had opened the firm's French office in 1854. In 1876 he returned to San Francisco to wind up the dry-goods trade and reopen Lazard Frères as a bank, and from Paris he served as the American representative of the Banque de France.

With houses in Paris, London from 1877, New York and San Francisco, the firm shipped gold across the Atlantic, and in the panic of 1893 its partners worked with the banker John Pierpont Morgan to replenish the gold reserves of the United States Treasury.

Later years

He married Rose Hélène Foy in 1867 and had six children, among them the economist Max Lazard, and he died in Paris in February 1898; the firm the brothers founded in New Orleans is today the advisory and asset management group Lazard.