The de Menasce Family (Egypt)
16
JULY
2012
In 1911, Oskar Kokoschka painted the picture of a boy, Jacques de Menasce. Belonging to the Jewish high society of Vienna, he became a composer and then had to exile to the United States and Switzerland. In 1921, Jean de Menasce, an Oxonian student, friend of Constantin Cavafy and T. S. Eliot, who later entered the Domenican order and was a discrete actor of the renewal of the the Catholic Church’s relationships with Judaism and Islam, went at the sculptor’s Naum Aronson to see his mother’s bust, Rosette de Menasce. In 1955, Lawrence Durrell resumed the writing of the Alexandria Quartet together with Claude Vincendon, an Alexandrian writer and his third wife to be. He created a political plot, involving the Copt banker Hosnani and the Bristish ambassador Mountolive, which is inspired by Claude’s uncle, Georges de Menasce, art collector and talented pianist. His concertos, in the Menasce Street villa during World War II, gathered the polite society and British officials, a way to hide the weapon transportations and support for illegal immigration to Palestine. All of them are descendants of Yacoub Levi Menasce. Born in Cairo Jewish quarter in 1809 and dead in Alexandria in 1882, where he settled ten years before, he was a leader of the Jewish Community, close to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, banker of the Khedive Ismail, created a baron by the emperor Franz Joseph, knight, great officer and commander of several orders both Austro-Hungarian and Egyptian. This is the prelude of the extremely diverse trajectories of the members of this family in the center of Egypt Jewish aristocracy, whose memory is kept by some works of art.
| Speaker | Location |
|---|---|
|
Anaël LEVY |
Seine B |