Iosel (Joseph) Treves

Michael Handler Ruby: "Treves is the original surname of the Rabinovitz, Ruby and Travis families of pioneer Jewish oilmen in Ohio and Oklahoma, according to multiple sources in the families. Everyone named Ruby or Travis in these families should really be named Treves.

According to Sarah Ruby Brachman (1903-1994), who learned it from her father, Susman Ruby (1850-1940), their Treves ancestors lived for many centuries in Metz, a town at the confluence of the Moselle River and the Sielle River in Lorraine. The family originated in the Roman city of Treves, the oldest city in Germany, long the seat of the western provinces of the empire, now the German city of Trier. With a Jewish population dating from the first century A.D., Treves is the birthplace of Karl Marx. According to Susman Ruby's nephew, D.R. Travis (1870-1958), the family came from Treves, was driven to Spain and Portugal during the Crusades, and then fled to Metz during the Inquisition. The family prided itself on Talmudic scholarship, sometimes with a streak of cabalism, and claims direct descent from the greatest Talmudic commentator, the 11th century Frenchman, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, better known as Rashi, who came from Troyes, 120 miles southwest of Metz in the Seine Valley, and studied in Worms and Mainz across the German border. Supposedly, there was a book that traced the many generations back to Rashi, but it was stolen from the household of Moshe Yehuda Rabinovich (1827-1911) by a wanderer who had been offered a bed for the night.

According to the tradition handed down by Susman Ruby, Isaac’s family was granted land by Napoleon after the breakup of the aristocratic estates. In 1808, when France effectively renamed its Jews, the Treves name was forcibly modernized to Dreyfus and several variants such as Trefousse. The century from 1750 to 1850 was a period of great instability for Jewish names. Our direct ancestors became something like Trefousse, though pronounced TREY-fus, according to Susman’s daughter Sarah. Despite their generally improved position in the world as landowners, Isaac Trefousse and his two brothers emigrated with their families from their ancestral home around 1820, when Isaac was 40 years old, not young. They were supposedly part of the French branch of the Hasidic movement and feared a new climate less hospitable to religious worship after the defeat of Napoleon. According to a 1949 letter from D.R. Travis, himself quoting a cousin in Israel, “We were driven from Alsace-Lorraine.” We read of these horrible times for Jews in eastern France in Michael Burns’ Dreyfus: A Family Affair 1789-1945, when foreign armies, including Cossaks, swept through Alsace Lorraine, and Capt. Dreyfus’s ancestors were forced to move from Rixheim to the sleepier Mulhouse amid the troubles.

Improbable as it may seem, the families of Isaac, one of his brothers and some other relatives emigrated from Metz to the Lithuanian hinterlands near the border with German-speaking Courland, which became part of Czarist Russia during the Polish partitions of the late 18th century. Why did this group of French Jews pick up and move to this Lithuanian border region of all places? On a trip to Lithuania and Latvia in 2007, their descendant Merom Brachman noticed that Napoleon’s forces fought extensively in this area during the invasion of Russia. He speculated plausibly that some of the Treves were soldiers or suppliers accompanying the army, and that this lush region of lakes and religious Jewish communities might have appealed to them as an amenable place to live. One wonders what route the families traveled from Metz to the Lithuanian countryside, especially with so many restrictions on the movement and settlement of Jews in Russia. In those days before railroads, one would imagine they traveled by ship from northern France to a Baltic port, then overland. In some ways, this journey feels more epic to me than the family’s emigration to America nearly a century later. The other Trefousse brother emigrated to Italy, where he may have been part of the Treves family that figured prominently in the synagogue in Florence, according to the tradition handed down by Susman Ruby. It’s possible none of the brothers considered the move permanent, because they continued to pay taxes on their land in France for a number of years before they finally allowed their ownership rights to lapse."