A Family

The Sephardic Camondo family of bankers migrated from Iberia during the pogram of 1492 via Venice and Constantinople to Paris with a distinguished record in commerce and of liberal causes, some of which caused the elders to determine that Paris indeed was most fertile ground upon which to embrace and expand their faith, business and artistic enterprises.
In 1902, Irene Hillel-Manoach was married to the popular composer of light opera, Camille Erlanger at the height of his career establishing her as a socialite with a townhouse and salon in the fashionable 16th arrondissement.
As her later writing attests, she had a view of the times from both social privilege and the avant-garde milieu which she adopted whole-heartedly as a patron and participant .

The extended family branched into the liberal arts as patrons and collectors of such painters as Degas, Monet, Renoir and given Irene's interests, dadaists and surrealists Andre Breton and Louis Aragon and many more.

The family lineage over five centuries of remained faithful to its origins religious and cultural. Irene's son, Philippe describes in his autobiographical "France sans Etoiles" (Paris, Plon, 1974)  his own Camondo aunties in black riding white horses in the Bois de Bologne chatting in their fifteenth century dialect. The Camondo fortune was depleted by Irène Cahen d'Anvers a divorcée of Erlanger's cousin Moishe de Camondo after the Nazi pogrom in Paris put the entire Camondo family to death. She was the subject of Renoir's famous 1890 portrait "Mademoiselle Irène Cahen". Erlanger's son Philippe enjoyed a distinguished career as a "Plenipotentiare" in various ministerial capacities in government including the founding of the Cannes Film Festival.