Summary
Norbert Guttenberg (1911–1975), born in Vienna, one of Palestine’s main diamond merchants from the early 1940s, among the founders of the Diamond Club and of the 1946 Tel Aviv diamond exchange (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.320).
Details
- He studied jewelry in Germany, diamond cutting in Antwerp, and commerce in London, and immigrated to Palestine in 1938 (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.320).
- He was among the founders of the Diamond Club (founded November 1937) (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.288, p.320).
- In autumn 1945 he argued that in peacetime diamonds are “a 100 percent non-essential commodity” and that control benefited only the existing factory owners at the expense of traders and workers (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.210).
- His 7 November 1945 letter to the Diamond Control Committee is quoted in Chapter 6’s notes (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.320).
- He was one of the founders of the diamond exchange in 1946 in Tel Aviv and is listed among the bourse’s founders in Chapter 6 note 61 (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.320, p.322).