Théodore Reinach

Origins and early life

Théodore Reinach was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 3 July 1860, the youngest of the three Reinach brothers, sons of a Jewish banker from Frankfurt settled in France, and like his brothers a Jew by birth who never left it: he presided over the Société des études juives, wrote a Histoire des Israélites in 1884, and in 1895 compiled the Textes d'auteurs grecs et romains relatifs au judaïsme, the collection of everything the ancient pagan world had written about the Jews, which scholars still use.

Work and career

He was the most universal of the three — a lawyer at the Paris bar, a doctor of law and of letters, a historian whose Mithridate Eupator of 1890 remains the standard life of Rome's great enemy, a numismatist, a papyrologist, an epigraphist, a mathematician, and a musicologist who deciphered the notation of the hymns to Apollo found at Delphi and gave them back their sound. Editor of the Revue des études grecques for forty years, member of the Académie des inscriptions from 1909, professor at the Collège de France, he was also a deputy for Savoy from 1906 to 1914.

His most visible monument stands on the point of Beaulieu-sur-Mer: the Villa Kérylos, which he built with the architect Emmanuel Pontremoli between 1902 and 1908 as a Greek house of the second century BCE, from the mosaics to the furniture, and where he lived as an Athenian of the Riviera; he left it to the Institut de France. He died in Paris on 28 October 1928.