Eitingon Schild Co. Inc. (Furs)

Product Details

Nicely engraved antique stock certificate from the Eitingon Schild Co. Inc. dating back to the 1930's. This document, which carries the printed signatures of the company President and Assistant Secretary, was printed by the American Bank Note Company, and measures approximately 12" (w) by 8" (h).

The certificate's beautiful vignette features a beaver flanked by a pair of allegorical female figures.

Images

You will receive the exact certificate pictured.

Historical Context

During the 19th century, in what is now Belarus, a Jewish family named Eitingon became extremely rich “buying pelts or skins from Jewish pedlars and exporting them to larger Jewish enterprises further west”.

Max Eitingon, born 1881, was the son of Chaim, founder of the Eitingon fortune. Max studied medicine and in 1907 went to Vienna to study with Freud. “‘He was the first to come to see me,” Freud said later, meaning the first to come from abroad.

In the Great War, Max, a captain in the Austrian army medical corps, treated victims of “war neuroses”. He thrived. Post war, “Freud invited Max to join the inner sanctum of psychoanalysis, the secret Psychoanalytic Committee”, while in Berlin (where his private practice was). Max established the Berlin Poliklinik to train analysts and psychoanalyse the poor for free. It was a triumph.

Max’s German life ended on April 8th, 1933, with the decree requiring all medical organizations to aryanise. He went to Palestine (today he’s known as the father of Israeli psychoanalysis) and died in 1943.

Max’s cousin Motty was born in 1885 and aged 17 went to work in his Uncle Chaim’s office; in 1907 he married Chaim’s daughter, Fanny. In 1918, Motty, now a successful fur dealer “with gold in his pockets”, was arrested in Moscow (where he was buying pelts) by opportunistic Bolsheviks. He paid a ransom to get out of jail, went to New York and took over the American arm of the Eitingon fur empire, Eitingon Schild - which had been incorporated in 1914.

In 1926, Max signed a contract with the Soviet government to buy pelts valued at $8 million. In 1928, the New York Times described Eitingon Schild as, “the dominant skin trader of the industry”. This was Motty’s high point.

By 1940, the company was out of business, and on August 5, 1940, its stock was stricken from the New York Stock Exchange. A report on the firm published in The New York Times for April 25, 1940, indicates that the worst blow to the company was the onset of the Second World War, shutting off its relations with the Eitingon textile subsidiary in Poland, to which it was a major creditor. This followed the seizure of its holdings in Germany, under the Nazi “Aryanization” laws, in 1938, and the sale of its properties in China.

Curiously, in 1937 the New York firm had been fined by the Joint Boycott Committee of the American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee for shipping furs through Nazi Germany, although in this as in other instances “the luck of the Eitingons” held—the report of the board partially exonerated the firm on the grounds that its involvement in the transaction in question was a matter of simple negligence