We can be sure that, when his ancestors arrived, they were not called Salaman or Solomon. Most Central European Jews acquired family names only in the early nineteenth century. Before then, Jewish men were known by their Hebrew, or synagogal, names—so-and-so the son of so-and-so (e.g., Mosheh ben Yaakov, Yisrael ben Avraham). In the course of time, many Ashkenazi Jews in Britain acquired English family names by assuming their father’s name. Mosheh ben Yaakov became Moses Jacobs; Yisrael ben Avraham became Israel Abrahams. At some time in the second half of the eighteenth century, Redcliffe’s great-grandfather Aaron (1745–1819), whose father’s name was Shlomo (Solomon), became Mr. Solomon. Some branches of the family—most famously that of the Victorian painters Abraham, Rebecca, and Simeon Solomon—retained the spelling.²

The earliest documented Salaman in England was this great-grandfather, Aaron Solomon, a straw-hat maker and merchant, who lived in Sandys Street, Bishopsgate. He was often called Solomon of Leghorn (Livorno) because he imported the straw for his hats from Livorno. He had eight children, one of whom, Isaac (1790–1872), began spelling his name Salaman. Family legend has it that the change of spelling was the result of a sign painter’s error. Whatever the case, family names and their spelling were often unstable at the time. According to another family tradition, as a young man Isaac was pressed into service in the navy during the Napoleonic wars and was bought out by a distant relative in St. Helena, an important port of call for ships of the East India Company.³ Isaac, who was still on the island when Napoleon was imprisoned there, returned to London and in 1816 entered the ostrich-feather business, which in time became the foundation of the family fortune.⁴ Ostrich feathers are no longer a valuable commodity, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they most definitely were. In Britain and elsewhere, they adorned the military uniforms of men and the hats, gowns, wraps, and fans of stylish women.

When Isaac entered the business, in the early nineteenth century, it was not yet the booming trade it later became. It was, rather, one of many in London catering to the needs of an expanding, luxury-loving population. He imported feathers from Livorno and cleaned, dyed, and curled them in his home workshop, eventually with the help of his wife and daughters. The economics of his business were much like those of his father and the businesses of countless other small Jewish traders. Isaac lived first in Rathbone Place, near the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, and then migrated to Lamb’s Conduit Street, in Bloomsbury, which in the 1830s and 1840s was popular with middle-class Jews. The family lived above the shop, which did business as “Mademoiselle Salaman,” a nod to the status of French taste and style. It was visited by fashionable women, dressmakers, and milliners, who at times paid as much as £5 (equivalent to $187 or £135 in 2020) for a single plume.

Isaac’s entry into the feather trade was not serendipitous. Livorno, with which his father traded, was the major entrepôt for ostrich feathers in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Three-quarters of the ostrich feathers exported from North Africa (then the major source of the commodity) went there. Spanish and Portuguese Jewish firms had been active in the trade from the late seventeenth century, both in exporting plumes from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean and in distributing them from Livorno to elsewhere in Europe. I suspect that Aaron’s Livorno connections contributed to his son’s choice of business.

In 1820, Isaac married Jane Raphael (1793–1863), the daughter of Samuel Raphael, a sign painter. They had three daughters and four sons. The lives of the sons followed radically different paths and for that reason deserve mention. Isaac, whose business was only a modest success and whose resources and horizons were limited, did not give any of his children a secondary education. (His son Myer [1835–96], Redcliffe’s father, was a student at the Bayswater Jewish School.) Presumably they (at least the boys) received an elementary Hebrew education, as Isaac was a member of the Western (or Westminster) Synagogue.⁵ In 1841, at the time of the first British national census, the business was not prosperous enough that he foresaw his sons joining him in it. Aaron (1821–96) and Abraham (1827–98) were apprenticed to watchmakers, and Nathan (1824–1905) was training as a law stationer, a clerk who made handwritten copies of legal instruments. At that time, Myer was still a young child. About the three daughters’ education we know nothing: Betsy (b. 1829), Fanny (1833–96), and Rachel (1836–1908), all of whom in time helped with the business before marrying and leaving home. Isaac’s wife Jane also made dresses, work that would have complemented the family’s feather business.

At twenty-one, Myer’s older brother Abraham sailed to Australia to seek his fortune. He found work as a watchmaker in Sydney, but the long hours strained his eyes and the pay was unrewarding. The discovery of gold in California in 1849—and the quick riches it seemed to promise—stirred his imagination and he sailed for California. He sold liquor and supplies to miners in Monterey, on the coast, and then in Grass Valley, in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. His success led his brother Aaron and a cousin, Henry Sylvester, to join him around 1851. Desiring to marry, Abraham wrote to his parents in London to find him a wife, and in 1854 he sailed from San Francisco to New York, via the hazardous route around the tip of South America, and then on London. He married Bloom Phillips, the daughter of a tailor who lived next door to his parents in Lamb’s Conduit Street, and the married couple then sailed to Grass Valley, where they had seven children, six of whom survived, before returning to London in 1869. They bought a house in Maida Vale, a quarter of London popular with newly rich Jewish families, and had two more children. In 1870, Abraham left London once again, this time for New York, where he set up an agency to sell ostrich feathers, presumably with the help of his family in London. The business did not succeed, however, and Abraham, homesick for his wife and children, who had remained in London, returned to them in 1871. Meantime, his brother Aaron in California, who had remained single, took up farming and, at the time of the 1880 US census, was living in Anderson Valley in western Mendocino County, about one hundred miles north of San Francisco, an area well known today for its grapevines and marijuana plants.

Of Isaac’s four sons, the youngest, Myer (Redcliffe’s father), was the most entrepreneurial and the most successful. He transformed his father’s modest business into a thriving, international endeavor. Until 1863, the business was conducted informally as a partnership between Isaac and the four of his children who were living with him in Lamb’s Conduit Street—Nathan, Myer, Betsy, and Rachel. (Fanny had married Lewis Nathan in 1855.) That year the business, whose stock, lease on the premises, tools, and materials were valued at £2,000 (equivalent to £216,808, or $292,646, in 2020), was reorganized. The five partners invested £900—Isaac and his youngest son, Myer, invested £300 each and the other three £100 each, Isaac retaining a one-third share. That same year Myer married, and, soon after, his father decided to retire from the business. In early 1864, Isaac’s share was divided among the remaining four partners, who, in exchange, agreed to pay him an annuity of £150 a year for life. At the end of 1864, with Betsy and Rachel about to marry, the partnership was dissolved. Each of the sisters received £300 and neither they nor their husbands kept any stake in the business, which now belonged entirely to Myer and Nathan.⁶

Myer, however, was the driving force in the firm. Nathan, eleven years Myer’s senior, had become bogged down as a law writer and was supposed to have taken over the clerical side of the business. But, in that he was “entirely devoid of any initiative,” he became a silent partner in the business and all of Myer’s other enterprises, faithfully doing whatever his younger brother wanted and showing “unswerving devotion to him.”

Aaron had been no more successful in California than his brother Abraham had been. In 1882, Myer and his wife visited him in California (the transcontinental railroad had opened in 1869) and persuaded him to return to London, promising to support him. Aaron lived with their sister Rachel and her husband, Abraham Simmons, in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. He eventually settled in the Caledonian Road near the cattle market because he claimed he could be happy only if he lived near a place reminiscent of his thirty years farming in California. He never married but lived with a woman the last twelve years of his life.⁷

At the same time that the business was reorganized, Myer transferred it to Monkwell House in Falcon Square in the City and dropped the retail side. The reorganization and move predated the ostrich-feather boom that began in the 1880s, but they prepared the firm to profit from it. Ostrich feathers had adorned the dress of well-to-do women from the mid-eighteenth century, but it was the fashion for large, elaborately trimmed hats, from the 1880s until the end of World War I (as well as beplumed fans and boas), that caused the trade to flourish. In addition, the demand for plumes crossed class lines and was no longer confined to the wealthy. Journalists and retailers targeted middle- and lower-middle-class women, who increasingly possessed the means to adorn themselves with ostrich feathers. The demand for plumes was worldwide, but London became the center for their marketing and distribution in Europe and America, replacing Livorno and other southern European ports. Undergirding the shift to London were the burgeoning of South African ostrich-feather farms in the second half of the nineteenth century and the tightening of imperial and commercial links between the Cape of Good Hope and London. As a consequence, most South African plumes were exported to London, to which feather merchants from the rest of Europe and the United States traveled to obtain their stock.⁸ The trade thrived, and the number of Jewish feather merchants in London multiplied. The veteran Salaman firm, with decades of experience and expertise and a well-established network of suppliers and customers, was well positioned to take advantage of the ostrich feather boom. By the end of the century, they had offices in London, New York, Paris, and Cape Town.

One sign of Myer’s success even before the boom was his decision to marry and his choice of wife. In 1863, he wed Sarah Solomon (1844–1931), the daughter of Josiah Solomon, a partner in a firm of musical instrument makers that later expanded into gramophones. (The maternal Solomons were not related to the paternal Salamans.) His bride’s family, like his own, had been in England since the eighteenth century. But her father, unlike Myer’s, was a successful businessman and a pillar of the Anglo-Jewish community. An uncle was married to a daughter of Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler, for example. At the time of her marriage, Sarah was living in Finsbury Circus, then a select upper-middle-class quarter, in the City of London. She had been raised in comfort and educated at Leopold Neumegen’s school for Jewish girls in Kew, where she was taught “how to come in and go out of a drawing-room, and the correct manner of entering, sitting in, and leaving a carriage, for which purpose a wheel-less and retired vehicle was propped up on the logs in the school garden.”⁹ According to Redcliffe, she was one of the best...