This is Théodore Reinach (1860-1928), one of the main characters in my book, "The House of Fragile Things."

At the heart of public life in the Third Republic, he was an MP, a classicist, and scholar of Judaism, not to mention a founder of the liberal synagogue known as Copernic

The Reinachs were constant targets of virulent antisemitism. Théodore's uncle Jacques de Reinach was the center of the Panama Scandal; his brother Joseph was a lead Defender of Alfred Dreyfus's during the Affair. But Théodore always believed in the promise of Franco-Judaism.

Following in the tradition of Léon Halévy a generation before, as a young man Théodore outlined his vision of republican Jewishness: "strengthening our attachment to the great and painful past of Israel, and our no less filial attachment to the rediscovered homeland of 1789."

This was a vision of French republicanism in which the particular was prior to the universal, but in which the universal was still the attainable end."

He was also a great aesthete, and he left behind a house in Beaulieu-sur-Mer that is essentially a material self-portrait of the man he was: the Villa Kérylos, a painstaking recreation of a Greek villa at Delos, down to every last detail.

As did many other Jewish collectors of his time, Théodore left Kérylos to the state as a means of advancing France's national patrimony.

His son, Julien, was arrested there in 1943 before internment in Drancy and deportation to Bergen Belsen; Théodore's archive was destroyed.

The Holocaust destroyed the Reinach family: Théodore's other son, Léon Reinach, was murdered in Auschwitz with his ex-wife, Béatrice de Camondo, and their two children, Fanny and Bertrand Reinach. Julien Reinach survived but never quite recovered his health.

The house remains, but its Jewish past remains largely forgotten. These days, it's a museum and a place for French presidents to entertain foreign dignitaries. Here's Emmanuel Macron with Xi Jinping at Kérylos in 2019:

But a visit to Kérylos is ultimately a visit into the inner life of a family and a particular sensibility that did so much to build the modern France we know today. We owe it to them to remember the world as they knew it, and - for a time - the world as it actually was.