Simon doctor
Simon Arzt (* 1814 ; † 1910 ) was a Jewish cigarette manufacturer and merchant in Port Said / Egypt .
Simon Doktor used the tobacco cultivation in Egypt, which was favored by tax and customs regulations, for his cigarette production. The successful cigarette brands included "Simon Arzt", "Simon Arzt Filter" (produced from 1957–1985) and "Simon Arzt No. 70L “(Large Size), all of which were sold in 20 pieces in a tin box with colorful illustrations of oriental motifs. Simon Arzt is known to generations of smokers for his tobacco boxes, which are colorfully illustrated with oriental motifs and which bear his portrait and name.
However, it is controversial whether the picture really shows the man who came to Port Said as a Turkish tobacco grower in 1869, the year the Suez Canal was opened. His cigarette production was so successful that he opened another factory in Cairo in 1907 and in Alexandria in 1913 . The early Simon-Arzt tobacco tins indicate these early production locations. The “Simon Arzt Store” was originally located in the “Rue du Commerce” in Port Said. In addition to tobacco products, the shop front also advertises colonial goods on old postcards.
For example, lace from Malta and China , silver from Damascus , Egyptian embroidery as well as travel clothing and Indian tropical helmets were offered at fixed prices. The fixed prices were aimed at the well-heeled international public who came to marvel at the Suez Canal and were unfamiliar with the haggling common in the Orient . Over the years, the department store expanded and was designed larger and more elaborate until it finally encompassed the entire city block.
In 1923 the decision was made to build a new, modern department store directly at the port of Port Said (next to Thomas Cook & Son.). The waterfront store, one of the largest department stores of its time, became a world-famous attraction. It had a total area of about two thousand square meters, with a street facade of forty meters and consisted of a rectangular hall with galleries over two floors. The glass ceiling enabled natural light to illuminate.
The building was a typical example of modern European style along the Mediterranean coast, as can still be found today with the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan and Naples . Here the traveler could get everything he needed on the way to Africa , India and the Far East. As long as a passenger steamer was at anchor, the doors remained open. The vendors were dressed in white suits and red fez or tarbooshes and ready to sell the tourists everything they needed: pith helmets, cosmetics and tropical clothing. There was also a hairdresser, a photo studio, a pharmacy, a flower shop and even a post office. In the end, business was so successful that branches were opened in New Delhi and Paris .
Sylvia Modelski, who grew up in a Jewish family in Port Said in the 1930s and owned two department stores in the city, tells a different story in her memoir Port Said Revisited . After that, Simon Doktor was not a cigarette manufacturer from Turkey , but an American investor from New York who built a department store in Port Said in the late 19th century, even by today's standards . Thanks to his internationally oriented marketing and his modern advertising methods, he was soon able to win over the upscale market.
According to Hazelle Jackson, after he had died in 1896, his nephew Max Mouchly (1874–1950) and then Simon Benderli would have succeeded him. But it was Max Mouchly who moved the business in 1924 to the new, modernly equipped premises directly on the water (now Quai Palestine). The family, in line with the Neiman Marcuses from Dallas , has always lived on a large scale in Port Said. However, the problem with Sylvia Modelski's memories is that they cannot be historically proven.
There is no evidence of a Simon doctor's move from New York to Port Said. For Max Mouchly, referred to as the nephew of Simon Arzt, and for his later business partner in the 1920s, Simon Benderli (Benderli is said to have taken over Mouchly's business in the 1930s), it can only be stated that the father's surname was Mouchlam. At some point Max is said to have changed it to Mouchly or Mouchli. In 1938 he is listed in the von Fargeon Lexicon on the life of the Jews in Egypt until 1938 and in the index as President of the Community Committee of Port Said and as "business partner of Simon Benderli", which is referred to as a reference to the department store of Simon Arzt can understand.
Simon Benderli is also listed in the Fargeon in 1938 as a “prominent Jew in Port Said” and as “President of the B'nai B'rith Lodge”. A Simon doctor is not included in this index. The history of the Benderli family is meticulously documented and describes the long connection between the Benderlis and the city of Port Said, which dates back to the year the Suez Canal was opened. The family name is derived from the city of Bendery, about 100 km northwest of Odessa, where the family lived in the early 19th century.
After the severe persecution of Jews in the 1830s, the merchant David Benderli and thirty other families immigrated to Zafed (Safed) in Palestine. The restart there was difficult at first. To boost the local economy, the Ottoman Empire granted trade concessions to Jews in 1850. David Benderli took this opportunity and started an import and export business with which he moved large quantities of goods from the Middle East to Egypt. The family business was doing so well that a cousin, Shimon Benderly, was able to set up a huge warehouse and private jetty in Port Said in the 1870s. According to the family chronicle, it was Shimon who also opened a cigarette production there with the name Simon-Arch or doctor.
The family patriarch David Benderli himself continued to manage the business from Zafed, where he died in 1883. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century, family businesses also declined. Only the branch of the family in Port Said flourished and made it possible for Simon Benderli to build the new commercial building in 1923 in collaboration with Max Mouchli and, in 1938, an additional Benderli building (an apartment block not far from the French grammar school).
But there is also another version on the origin of Simon Arzt. After Albert Braunstein in Melbourne, Australia, a great-grandson of Sara Malia Arzt from Port Said, his great-grandmother and a few siblings came to Port Said at the time the Suez Canal opened in 1869. The great-grandmother was born in Jarosław , Galicia , which at that time was still part of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy . One of his father's cousins would have known Simon Doktor and his wife and daughter Rosine. Maurice Fargeon also listed a Simon doctor in his lexicon as having died in 1910 at the age of 96 in the cemetery in Port Said ( Les Juifs en Egypte , 1938).
This information contradicts Sylvia Modelski's advice that Simon Arzt, who also came from Galicia, died in 1896. This could possibly be a mix-up, since according to the stories of the cousin, who still knew his wife and daughter, Simon Arzt's son Mayer is said to have been poisoned by his lover at the age of twenty-four. Mayer Arzt (* 1873) died in 1897. This could be the doctor whose death is dated by Sylvia Modelski to the year 1896. What is certain is that Simon Benderly, who lived in Port Said in the early 20th century, married Table Brisk and had two children, Alma and Henri, with her. Other descendants include Arie Benderly and Shlomom Benderly. The spelling of the name seems to have changed from Benderli to Benderly. How they relate to Simon Doktor remains unclear.
The successful cigarette brands were taken over by the industry giant British American Tobacco (BAT) in the 1950s, with the exception of the “Equator Golden Virginia” brand, which went to Sonntag Cigarettenfabrik GmbH in Bonn .
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Sylvia Modelski: Port Said Revisited , ISBN 0967623006
- ↑ a b cf. Hazelle Jackson: At the Cross Roads of the World, A History of Port Said 1859-1939 , http://www.myportsaid.info/index.html
- ↑ cf. Gudrun Krämer : The Jews in modern Egypt, 1914–1952 , p. 112
- ↑ cf. Fargeon, Maurice: Les Juifs d'Egypte des origines a nos jours . Cairo 1938. 321 pages
- ↑ cf. The Benderly family branch: The Zafed Era . In: Historical background of the Bashan family ; http://www.bashanfoundation.org/finalhistory.html
- ↑ The big four. In: Der Spiegel 19/1960 from May 4, 1960
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Doctor, Simon |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Jewish cigarette maker |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1814 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1910 |