The Rodrigues family were talented, cultivated, and acculturated Jews. The remarkable milieu they created was the world into which Herminie and her daughter Fanny were born. This chapter addresses the biographies of Herminie and Fanny up until the early years of the Second Empire: the circumstances of their lives, the influences upon them, and the relationship between them - mother and daughter. This provides the foundation for a broader analysis of their roles as Jewish grandes bourgeoises in nineteenth-century France. In 1805, the year Herminie Rodrigues was born, there were close to two thousand Jews in a total Parisian population of about six hundred thousand, a dramatic increase from a mere five hundred living there at the time of the French Revolution. The principal expectation for Jewish girls of Herminie’s age and social class, that is, marriage and family, was little different from that of young Gentile women.

This is the last chapter to examine local government policy in Wiltshire and it focuses on the post-1999 period. It traces the county’s immigrant, integration and diversity policies as Wiltshire’s local administration once again balanced a national-level directive and mandate with local circumstances and particularism. Local policies and measures during this period were influenced by the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, the Macpherson Report and the focus on community cohesion, as well as the importance awarded to anti-racism, equal opportunities and religious identity. Yet they were simultaneously underpinned by an inherent rurality, and an awareness that migrant communities in smaller and more isolated areas were potentially more difficult to reach. Policies discussed include Wiltshire County Council’s first race equality scheme, and a range of measures that addressed health and social services, valued culture and religion, and increasingly recognised, and responded to the needs of, Muslim communities across the county.

This chapter explores the development of differing strands of presbyterian ecclesiology at the Westminster assembly of divines in the mid-1640s. It explores the varying concerns of the clergy who would advance presbyterian positions at the Westminster assembly to demonstrate how the assembly’s presbyterianism emerged as a coherent programme for the further reformation of the British churches. While some theologians would seek to stress the rights of individual congregations, others wished to preserve the integrity of the Church Catholic and others still wished to build a broad alliance of Reformed ministers. Together these voices managed to marshal their differences in a single platform. The chapter then explores the thought of George Gillespie, one of the leading presbyterian theorists at the assembly, in light of these differing presbyterian ecclesiologies.

This chapter shows how the book’s findings and conclusions move beyond the novelty of the Wiltshire case study and have implications for various bodies of research addressing Britain and beyond. These consist of research on migration and integration at the rural level, that which examines the relationship between national- and local-level migration policies across the post-1960s period, and studies that support the shift in focus from the traditional national model to the local aspect of migrant integration. Furthermore, this chapter champions the importance of studying Muslim migrant communities at a grassroots level, as well as adopting a more interdisciplinary and cross-sector approach to migration history. Overall, it argues that there is a need to move beyond the image of the rural idyll, and that the study of Muslim settlement and integration in more peripheral and non-metropolitan areas builds upon and develops various different bodies of scholarship.

The Gazette de Lausanne reported in May 1856 that ’Mme Pereire has deigned to visit the curiosities with her sons’, going on to note that Herminie was staying at the Hôtel de Fribourg where everything about her was reported to an avid public: when she had breakfast, where she had lunch and dinner, the places she visited. It was as if she was the Empress Eugénie visiting the provinces, the report concluded. In their representation of the family name, women of the Pereire family expected to be treated, and were treated, as celebrities. Presenting themselves accordingly was a continuing and necessary task. Herminie and Fanny Pereire were also individual consumers, and their conspicuous consumption added to the mystique of these women and to their families. In summary, women of the grande bourgeoisie were expected to present themselves fashionably and were given credit for doing so.

This book explores the lives of two remarkable Jewish women in nineteenth-century France: Herminie Rodrigues, born in 1805, and Fanny Pereire, born in 1825. Herminie and Fanny Pereire, Jewish women of Sephardic origin in France, stand at the intersection of multiple strands of history. The historiography of Sephardic women is firmly bound to the early modern period, however, to women who were part of the Sephardic diaspora dispersed progressively around the Mediterranean and Atlantic seaboards, which culminated in their final expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal after 1497. On this reading, the influence of Islam and the imposition of strict rules governing the behaviour of women and men is uppermost: women identified with the home, men with the outside world. Sephardic women of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period have received less attention from historians than their grandmothers and earlier ancestors, however.

This chapter draws out the significance of charity and philanthropy in the lives of the very wealthy Herminie and Fanny Pereire. And it is noticeable that in their acts of generosity, the two women ied the gamut of possibilities as they unfolded over the nineteenth century: extending kindness towards their coreligionnaires as the obligation of sedaca commanded; giving to charitable causes of all kinds in the interests of the poor; and establishing infrastructure for the provision of particular welfare services - all in the family name. The chapter shows how charitable activities became the means through which they attracted honour to the family, enabling them to demonstrate at once allegiance to France and gratitude for the gift of citizenship to their men. In the case of Fanny Pereire, philanthropy was also a tool in combating an encroaching antisemitism as well as a means to exercise control, agency, over her legacy.

This chapter looks at the evolution of Herminie and Fanny Pereire’s relation to religious practice and the manner in which they defined their identity, a journey in which acculturation and embourgeoisement led them both, albeit differently, to an accommodation, of being both French and Jewish. That journey was infused with elements, historical, social, cultural, and economic, as well as religious. Burial in consecrated ground according to Judaic rites had been essential to the spiritual comfort of the Sephardic residents of Paris - indeed, of Jews of any town or village in France. Finally, it is arguable that the anti-Jewish invective heaped on Fanny’s husband by the Catholic Church in 1863 and again in 1869 induced a reaction and a closer reconciliation with Judaism; that is, in her later life she wore proudly and publicly being Jewish as a defence against the antisemitism that had been heaped on the Pereire family.

In Le Figaro of 23 July 1859, the journalist Gabrielle de Saint Mars, writing under the pen name ’Jacques Reynaud’, reported on the eighteenth-century mansion acquired and revamped at great expense, time, and effort by the Pereire family. ’L’hôtel Pereire, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, is one of the most beautiful, the most elegant of our great Paris. This chapter considers the manner in which Herminie and Fanny Pereire used these residences, the activities planned and organised, their meaning and significance, and the effects they were intended to have in the interests of family life, entertainment for themselves, and for le tout Paris. To Herminie and Fanny, the properties represented different opportunities for sociability, entertainment, and leisure, and at different times of the year. The chapter also considers the indispensable role servants played in them; and the role played by Herminie in particular in managing them.

This chapter seeks to analyse the debates between presbyterian political theology and the Long Parliament in the mid-1640s. It sets the background of this debate in continental Reformed theology and argues that the clash between parliamentary ‘Erastianism’ and the presbyterian perspective of two-kingdom theory reveals some of the underlying contradictions within the parliamentarian project of godly rule. The slightly different version of two-kingdom theory held by the congregationalists is also explored. The chapter shows how the Long Parliament grasped its way to an ‘Erastian’ solution by reference to differing ideas of the church–state relationship found within the Reformed tradition. In conclusion, the chapter looks at how the presbyterian clergy conceded to Parliament and how interregnum governments retreated from a fully Erastian position.

This chapter draws upon oral history interviews conducted with members of Wiltshire’s Muslim migrant communities. Through the interviews, migrants’ narratives and histories, and thus the ‘human’ side of the migration process, are detailed, and subjective perceptions and important events and themes in the interviewees’ migratory experiences emerge. A number of insights into Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain are offered, as are interviewees’ experiences, views and observations across a range of areas. These include migration histories and stories of settlement in Wiltshire, and post-settlement experiences in relation to identity formation, employment, housing, education, racism and discrimination, cross-community relations, and religious practices and recognition. Overall, the oral history interviews complement the archival material, reconstructing parts of the county’s post-war history of Muslim minorities’ settlement, experiences and integration that are simply not captured in written sources.