Ignace von Ephrussi — banker with roots in the Russian Empire
Ignace von Ephrussi, known in Vienna as Ignaz, was born in 1829 in Berdichev, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Berdychiv in Ukraine. He was a son of Charles Joachim Ephrussi (1793–1864), who had built a small grain business in Odessa into one of the largest grain-exporting houses in the world, and of Belle, née Levensohn. By 1860 the family was the world's leading exporter of wheat, and its activities spread into banking and the financing of large projects such as railways and bridges.
In 1857 Charles Joachim sent his two elder sons from Odessa to Vienna to manage the family's affairs in the Habsburg monarchy. There Ignace and his brother Leon founded the bank Ephrussi & Co., which Ignace headed as it developed from a trading house into an international financial firm; Leon later returned to found a bank in Odessa, and other branches of the family settled in Paris. Ignace married Emilie Porges.
In 1871, or 1872 according to another account, Emperor Franz Joseph raised him to the hereditary rank of Ritter, and he was granted arms. On the new Ringstrasse, opposite the Votivkirche and the University, he commissioned the Danish architect Theophil Hansen to build a family palace, completed in the early 1870s, which became known as the Palais Ephrussi. He was said to be the second-richest banker in Vienna, and served as honorary consul of the King of Sweden and Norway. He was decorated with several Austrian and foreign orders.
Ignace von Ephrussi died in Vienna in 1899. His younger son Viktor, born in Odessa in 1860, succeeded him at the head of the bank and in the palace; that year Viktor married Emmy Schey von Koromla and received from his Paris cousin Charles Ephrussi a collection of Japanese netsuke as a wedding present. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, the family lost the bank and the palace. The Palais Ephrussi was sold in 2009 and now houses a law firm, and in 2018 the de Waal family gave the Ephrussi family archive to the Jewish Museum Vienna. Their story, including Ignace's, is told by his great-great-grandson Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010).
"Sent from Odessa to Vienna by his father in 1857 to run the family's business in the Habsburg Empire; he remained there for the rest of his life."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Berdichev, Kiev Governorate (now Berdychiv, Ukraine)
Born in Berdichev in 1829, the son of the Odessa grain merchant Charles Joachim Ephrussi, he worked in the family's Odessa house before his father sent him to Vienna in 1857 to found its bank there.
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Berdichev, Kiev Governorate (now Berdychiv, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.