Horace de Gunzburg

Horace Günzburg (Goratsii Evzelevich Gintsburg, Гораций Евзелевич Гинцбург, (Naftali-Gerts Evzelevich Gintsburg) 8 February 1833 in Zvenigorodka, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire – 2 March 1909 in Saint Petersburg), 2nd Baron Günzburg, was a Russian philanthropist. He received his education at home in Zvenigorodka. After the Crimean war his father, Joseph Günzburg, then a wealthy merchant and army contractor, settled with his family in St. Petersburg. He is the father of David Günzburg.

Günzburg first came before the public in 1863 as one of the founders of the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, the only society of the kind in Russia. He was one of the charter members of the society, and after the death of his father in 1878 succeeded him in the presidency. He was the largest contributor to its support and one of its most energetic workers. The work which made him so widely popular among the Jews was his unremitting effort, in which frequent appeals to the Russian government were involved, toward the improvement of the legal status of his coreligionists, and for the securing by legislation, as well as by other means, of their economic and moral welfare.

In 1870 he was summoned as an expert before the commission on the "Jewish Question," which met under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior.

He was chairman of the Jewish congress which, by permission of the government, assembled in St. Petersburg in 1882. In 1887 he was invited to participate in the discussions of the high commission on the Jewish question, under the presidency of Count Pahlen. In 1880 he became a member of the board of governors of the temporary commission for the organization of a society for the purpose of encouraging Russian Jews to engage in agriculture and trades. He employed the lawyer, Emmanuel Levin, an auto-didact working within the system zakonmost of reformed juridical institutions. The rise of the "diploma intelligentsia" was critical to the challenges that Jews were able to make.

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