Maurice Tempelsman — The Diamond Merchant Who Worked Both Sides of the Atlantic
Maurice Tempelsman — The Diamond Merchant Who Worked Both Sides of the Atlantic
Lazare Kaplan's long-serving chairman, De Beers insider, and a fixture of mid-century African diamond commerce
Maurice Tempelsman is a Belgian-American diamond merchant whose career, spanning more than seven decades, made him one of the most prominent figures in the post-war international diamond trade. He served for many years as chairman of Lazare Kaplan International, one of the world's leading diamond-cutting and trading firms, and built a reputation as a deeply networked operator with close ties to both the De Beers Central Selling Organisation in London and the African producing governments whose rough fed the cutting industry. His personal life — his long relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from the late 1970s until her death in 1994 — drew the press attention his trade career did not.
Early career and Lazare Kaplan
Tempelsman was born in Antwerp in 1929 to a family already established in the diamond trade, and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1940. He joined the family business after the war and became chairman of Lazare Kaplan International, a New York firm founded by his future father-in-law Lazare Kaplan, an Antwerp-trained diamond cutter remembered for his work on the cleaving of the Jonker Diamond in 1936. Under Tempelsman, the firm continued to occupy a distinctive position in the trade as an integrated rough-to-polished operation with cutting facilities in the United States and later in Botswana and Russia.
The De Beers and African connection
Tempelsman was for decades a sightholder in the De Beers Central Selling Organisation system — the closed allocation channel through which De Beers distributed rough diamonds to a small list of approved buyers. The sightholder relationship gave him a steady supply of rough and a place at the centre of the De Beers system. In parallel, he developed working relationships with the governments of major African producing countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire), Sierra Leone, and Botswana, where his role at times spanned commercial diamond purchasing and informal diplomatic exchange. The combination — De Beers credentials in London, Pennsylvania Avenue contacts in Washington, and ground-level government access in producing countries — made him a singular figure in the trade.
Cutting innovation
Lazare Kaplan was associated with the development and promotion of the Lazare Diamond, a branded ideal-cut round brilliant introduced in the 1980s and aggressively marketed as the world's first ideal-cut branded diamond. The brand drew on the firm's cutting heritage and on the broader trade-marketing wave of the late twentieth century that established branded cuts as a significant retail category. Tempelsman's chairmanship oversaw the brand's introduction and growth.
Personal life and public profile
Tempelsman's relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from the late 1970s until her death in 1994 brought sustained media attention. He was her companion in her final years and one of the executors of her estate. The press coverage of the relationship made his name familiar far outside the trade, but the substance of his career remained the diamond business — sourcing, cutting, and the long machinery of the De Beers system.
In the trade
Tempelsman is remembered in the trade as one of the last figures whose career bridged the closed De Beers world of the mid-twentieth century and the more dispersed, multi-source diamond market of the twenty-first. His combination of Antwerp training, American base, and African operational reach is unusual and difficult to replicate in the post-Kimberley Process market. Lazare Kaplan as a firm has continued to operate, with corporate restructuring and changes in the diamond market reshaping its position over the years.