Maurice de Hirsch

Maurice de Hirsch, born Moritz Freiherr von Hirsch auf Gereuth in Munich on 9 December 1831, was a German Jewish financier and philanthropist who died on 21 April 1896 at Ogyalla in Hungary. He came from a family of Jewish court bankers; his father served as banker to the Bavarian king, and at thirteen he was sent to Brussels for schooling before going into business at seventeen. In 1855 he became associated with the Brussels, London and Paris banking house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, and married into that family the same year. He built a very large fortune by buying and working railway concessions in Austria, Turkey and the Balkans and by speculating in sugar and copper. His best known railway venture was the Chemins de fer Orientaux, a project meant to link Vienna to Istanbul, and in 1890 he sold the Ottoman railways to a consortium that included Deutsche Bank. He then turned his wealth to charity, founding the Jewish Colonization Association, which sponsored large scale Jewish emigration to agricultural colonies in Argentina and elsewhere, and the Baron de Hirsch Fund in New York.