Abstract
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.
