Jenny Adler

Jenny Adler

• 1870 Denmark Census
• Birth: Circa 1831
• Residence: Feb 1 1870 - Amaliegade, København, Denmark
• Husband: David Baruch Adler
• Children: Bertel Adler, Emil Adler, Martin Adler, Emma Adler, Hanna Adler, Ellen Adler

Niels Bohr was born in the mansion of his maternal grandparents, banker/politician David Baruch Adler and Jenny Raphael, situated across the street from Christianborg Palace, seat of the Danish Parliament and official site of royal receptions. Grandfather David died before Niels' birth and passed his business, D.B.Adler & Co., to his eldest son Bertel. According to an oral history given by Niels' wife Margrethe, life for the Bohr children was centered in the activities of the Adlers under the guidance of grandmother Raphael-Adler, who hosted the brood of cousins together in her summer home "Naerum Gaard". (2). Niels' mother Ellen was the youngest of six, and it was her next older sister Hannah Adler who took extreme interest in the activities of Niels and his younger brother Harald, arranging travel with them and an endless stream of cultural activities. The oldest Bohr child, Kristen (Jenny), and her mother shared a more retiring personality and seldom participated with Hannah and the boys. At home, Professor Christian Bohr included the children in adult meetings for intellectual discussion befitting the progressive education in which he was engaged. Margrethe Norlund Bohr reports hardly knowing of the Bohr side of the family although Niels' uncle, grandfather Bohr, and great-grandfather were well-known Danish education reformers.

The Adlers were English, according to Margrethe. The English Raphaels came to Britain by way of Amsterdam in the 1780s along with the Rothschilds and Schroders as merchant-cum-bankers who established businesses in Manchester and later moved to London. In time, the Raphaels also set up banking houses in the major European capitols. David Baruch Adler joined the London firm of Martin, Levin & Adler and married his Adler/Meyer heritage (3) to that of R. Raphael & Sons, early investor in railroads like the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O), America's first railroad that also played a key role in the Civil War. With the backing of Raphael & Sons, D.B. Adler contracted for the Danish and Swedish public loan in his time as manager of Privatbanken and Handelsbanken in Copenhagen. D.B. Adler and other Adler relatives like his son-in-law Hermann Trier, were liberal politicians and free-traders, as D.B.Adler was the outspoken founder of the Free Trade Society.

Niels, born in 1885, attended an elite school for the length of his boyhood, graduating in 1903 and going on to Copenhagen University where his father taught physiology. Raised "on campus", both Niels and Harald were privileged to participate in the family visits from Denmark's social and intellectual luminaries. At the Gammelholm school, Niels joined in a special group of twelve boys called the Ekliptika Circle under the direction of his professor Harald Hoffding. The boys were tightly knit and remained lifelong friends, among them his second cousin Edgar Rubin (the mothers were first cousins) who went on to become a gestalt psychologist of renown and was Niels' closest friend and counsel next to his brother. The Rubin family patriarch, Marcus Rubin, was Director General of the Danish Treasury and the Danish National Bank, attaining his treasury position in 1902, the same year the Zionist movement officially came to Denmark and established the Zionistforening. The Jewish community of Copenhagen at the time was small, perhaps 1,500 people in the years prior to WWI.