David Rudolf Mahomet Hahn was born to Mortiz Hahn and Rachel Valentine Hecht on August 8, 1888 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. At the age of eighteen, Hahn joined the family diamond and gemstone business, M. Hahn et Compagnie. Although he completed his bachelors exams, his father suffered a heart attack that forced Hahn to abandon plans for university and have a more prominent role in the family business. Hahn first visited the United States in October 1910, after he arrived in New York from Cherbourg, France, on the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse to establish business contacts. Hahn married Charlotte Walk on July 9, 1914 in Brussels, Belgium. Charlotte’s father, Joseph, was a prominent diamond merchant who introduced the couple. They had four children: Marie Louise (1915-1977), Maurice (1918-2009), Denise Rachel (1922-2010), and Francoise Micheline (1927-1999).

Hahn suffered a heart attack in 1937 that forced him to limit his participation in the gemstone business. He sold his company shares to his brother Jean and retired a year later. Upon the Nazi invasion of France, Hahn and his family sought refuge in Roche-Posay in the unoccupied free zone of France. The Hahns traveled through Bordeaux to Spain with a transit visa issued by the Portuguese Consulate in June 1940. The family was issued an American immigration visa at the American Consulate in Oporto, Portugal, and later arrived in New York in August 1940 aboard the SS Quanza.

It is unclear how or when Hahn became involved with the École Libre des Hautes Études at the New School. However, Hahn was mentioned as a founding member and business manager of the École Libre in a release issued by the New School for Social Research on November 24, 1941. Hahn is listed as an “Administrateur” or “Administrateur Honoraire” and as the “Tresorier” in the course catalogs and promotional materials of the École Libre.

Hahn died of a heart attack at the family’s summer home in Lake Placid on August 22, 1954.

Following the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, intellectuals fled Europe out of fear for persecution of their free ideas. In 1941, President Alvin Johnson facilitated the establishment of the École Libre des Hautes Études at the New School, also called The Free French School. The new institute was founded to continue French culture and scholarship by bringing together a disparate group of French and Belgian scholars fleeing the war in Europe. Legally a part of the New School, the École Libre retained an autonomous administration and educational structure, with largely independent finances.

Between 1942 and 1946, the École Libre offered a wide range of courses, primarily in French, in the social sciences and humanities. The university had three divisions, or faculties: law and political science, letters, and natural science. The faculty included more than sixty renowned scholars, among them Jean-Baptiste Perrin, Jacques Maritain, Gustave Cohen, Henri Focillon, Henri Grégoire, and the former prime minister of Belgium Paul van Zeeland. Instruction was primarily in French, with some courses taught in English or other romance languages. The Ecole Libre was recognized by the De Gaulle and Belgian governments as equivalent to an education completed at a French university.

While certain École Libre faculty worked adamantly to maintain a non-political and purely scholarly stance for the school, others, passionate supporters of the Free France movement led by Charles de Gaulle, held that the school bore an intrinsic relationship to the movement. This widening rift eventually contributed to the severance of the institute from the New School in June 1947. Between 1943 and 1945 the École Libre produced a journal in French, Renaissance, available online through the Hathi Trust.

Sources:

"A formal agreement between the French Government and the New School for Social Research (not signed)," 1940s, The New School Publicity Office records, NS.03.01.05, box 16, folder 17, The New School Archives and Special Collections, The New School, New York, New York. https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS030105_000057

"Description of the Ecole Libre," 1940s, The New School Publicity Office records, NS.03.01.05, box 17, folder 8, The New School Archives and Special Collections, The New School, New York, New York. https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS030105_000151

Friedlander, Judith. A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and its University in Exile. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Zolberg, Aristide R., and Agnes Callamard. “The École Libre at the New School, 1941-1946.” Social Research 65, no. 4 (1998): 921–51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971292.