Emil Jellinek

Jellinek was born in Leipzig, Germany, the son of Adolf Jellinek (sometimes known as Aaron Jellinek). His father was a well-known Czech-Hungarian rabbi and intellectual in the Jewish communities of Leipzig and Vienna. Jellinek's mother, Rosalie Bettelheim (born 1832 in Budapest, died 1892 in Baden bei Wien), was an active rebbetzin. He had two brothers, both of whom achieved fame: Max Hermann Jellinek, as a linguist, and Georg Jellinek, as an international law teacher. His sisters were Charlotte and Pauline.

The family moved, shortly after Jellinek's birth, to Vienna. He found paying attention to school work difficult and dropped out of several schools, including Sonderhausen. His parents were displeased with his performance, while Jellinek began to indulge in practical jokes. In 1870, when he was 17, his parents found him a job as a clerk in a Moravian railway company, Rot-Koestelec North-Western. Jellinek worked two years before being fired by management, upon discovery that he had been organising train races late at night.

In 1872, when 19 years old, he moved to France. There, through his father's connections, Schmidl, the Austro-Hungarian Consul in Morocco, requested his services, getting Jellinek diplomatic posts at Tangier and Tetouan, successively. In Tetouan, he met Rachel Goggmann, an Algerian-born illegitimate daughter of a Sephardi mother, Meriem Azoulay, adopted by the husband of the mother, Moise Goggmann (Gogman), a Jew from Lorraine.

In 1874, Jellinek was conscripted for military service in Vienna, but was declared unfit. He resumed his diplomatic career as Austrian vice-consul at Oran, Algeria, and also began trading Algerian tobacco to Europeans, in partnership with Rachel's father.

He also worked as an inspector for the French Aigle insurance company and traveled to Vienna briefly in 1881 at the age of 28 to open one of its branch offices. Returning to Oran, he married Rachel, and their first two sons Adolph and Fernand were born there.

Two years later, in 1884, Jellinek joined the insurance company full-time and moved with the family to Baden bei Wien, Austria, where they lived in the house of a wine dealer named Hanni. His first daughter, Mercédès Jellinek, was born in Baden on 16 September 1889; the name Mercédès means "favor", "kindness", "mercy", or "pardon" in Spanish. Rachel died four years later, and was buried in Nice. Even so, Jellinek came to believe the name Mercedes brought good fortune and called all his properties after it. One of his sons wrote: He was as superstitious as the ancient Romans.

Jellinek's insurance business and stock-market trading became very successful, and they started to spend the winters in Nice on the fashionable French Riviera, eventually moving there and establishing links with both international business people and the local aristocracy.

Helped by his diplomatic career, he became the Austrian Consul General in Nice, and began selling automobiles, mainly French makes, to European aristocrats spending winter vacations in the region. Associated with the automobile business were Leon Desjoyeaux, from Nice, and Alsatian cyclist Karl Lehmann, who acquired the sole French agency and adopted the alias of "C. L. Charley". Jellinek acquired a large mansion which he named Villa Mercedes to run the business from and by 1897 he was selling about 140 cars a year and started calling them "Mercedes". The car business was by now more profitable than his insurance work.

It was in Nice that Jellinek became enthralled by the automobile, studying any information that he could gather about it and purchasing successively: a De Dion-Bouton, a Léon-Bollée Voiturette, both three-wheelers, and a four-seat Benz motorized-coach. Jellinek greatly admired automobile designer Wilhelm Maybach's work. He promised to buy a shipment of 36 automobiles for 550,000 goldmarks if Maybach could design a great race car for him following his specifications. The prototype was finished in December 1900 and, in 1901 went on to have a string of racing successes. Its engine was baptized Daimler-Mercedes.

In 1899, he married Madelaine Henriette Engler (Anaise Jellinek), and had four more children: Alain Didier, Guy, Rene and Andree (Maya).