Although Amschel and Carl continued to lobby the representatives of the various German states and to receive encouragement from Hardenberg and Humboldt, as well as from the Russian envoy in Frankfurt, they were increasingly pessimistic. Indeed, Amschel began to talk of leaving Frankfurt altogether—though this may have been intended partly as a threat to embarrass the Frankfurt authorities. It was at this time that he and Carl made their first concerted efforts to overcome their social isolation in Frankfurt: the first dinners they gave were in fact primarily designed to lobby influential figures in diplomatic and financial circles “in the interests of the Jewish people.” They attached particular significance to winning over the banker Bethmann, whose utterances on the subject appear to have varied considerably according to the company he was in. At the same time (November 1816), Amschel, Baruch and Jonas Rothschild sent a memorandum to the Federal Diet challenging the legality of the Frankfurt Senate’s action.
Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that the legislative settlements reached in the various states would fall far short of what had been achieved in 1811. In Kassel, although the Jews were given citizenship (in return for the inevitable payment), it was hedged around with economic restrictions preventing Jews from unrestricted ownership of real estate and prohibiting street-hawking. To Buderus’s wife, Carl was fulsome in his flattery of the Elector: “I said, the Prince knows that he alone began the reform, it was his own initiative, and that the world now saw how liberally-minded he had been all along.” Indeed, he pressed William to give the same rights to the Jews in his other territory of Hanau. But he and his brothers knew full well that, while the conditions attached to Jewish citizenship seemed “trivial things in principle,” they were “big things for those affected.” Moreover, as Carl privately remarked, the Elector was “an expert when it comes to going back on his word”—a verdict which seemed to be vindicated in 1820, when it was rumoured that new residence restrictions were going to be imposed on Jews in Kassel. The new law was in fact typical of the kind of qualified “emancipation contract” which German states wanted to make with Jews—offering rights only in return for social “regeneration” and assimilation; it was better than nothing, but it did not satisfy the Rothschilds.
In Frankfurt, despite the example of Electoral Hesse, the debate appeared to end in an even more complete defeat in October 1816, when a revised constitution confirmed the equality of Christian citizens only, leaving Jews as second-class Schutzgenossen (literally “protected comrades”). It was especially galling that, even as they revoked the decree of 1811, the authorities specifically cited Amschel’s garden as evidence of their enlightened attitude towards the Jewish community. If this was intended to buy off the Rothschilds, however, it failed; it merely made Amschel the target for antagonism on the part of those in the town who wished even stricter measures against the Jews—namely a wholesale return to the ghetto. As we have seen, anti-Jewish feeling in Frankfurt grew more and more overt in this period, with the performance of plays like Unser Verkehr and the publication of numerous anti-Jewish pamphlets. During the debates on the Jewish question, some members of the Senate had even been heard to propose as a “solution” that the Jews should be expelled from Frankfurt altogether “as the endeavour of these money-grabbing nomads is solely directed at the ruin of [us] Christians, so that within a few years a large part of the Christian burghers and residents will have been deprived of all happiness and prosperity.” In September 1816 a group of anxious representatives of the Jewish community wrote to the Rothschild brothers, noting “how tirelessly and eagerly you are working for us, how strong your solidarity with us is,” but admitting: “[T]he good results which we were justified in hoping for have not been achieved . . . We fear that the fortress will not capitulate before very decisive measures are taken.”
What form could such measures take? In the wake of the Frankfurt defeat, Amschel angrily talked of “hurting” the Gentile bankers in Frankfurt “by doing business, even if it entails losses.” More plausibly, the Rothschilds might make use of their rapidly increasing wealth in a more positive way. Some German Jews looked to Nathan—the richest and most influential of the brothers at this time—to provide some kind of English deus ex machina. “I hope in days to come the British who conquered Napoleon,” wrote one of the Frankfurt community’s leaders, “are going to call the Frankfurt Senate to set free Jewish slaves here as they have freed Christian slaves elsewhere.” Amschel himself urged Nathan to “have the British Minister [in Bavaria, Frederick] Lamb egged on again” to support the Jewish case. According to the brothers’ correspondence, Nathan did what he could. A number of letters credit him with securing support on the issue from the Dutch King, as well as acting to protect the interests of other Jewish communities in British jurisdiction, notably in Corfu and Hanover. “I think it might be easy to improve our lot should you approach the Prince Regent,” a Hamburg Jew named Meyerstein wrote to Nathan in 1819. “Why should the Hanoverian Jews, living in an English province, not be given the same laws conceded to their brethren in England? The barbarity of the past century has got to be stopped and it is from your direction that we expect the sun to rise also for us.” In the case of Frankfurt, of course, British influence was minimal: the best tactic still seemed to be to apply pressure in Berlin and Vienna, in the hope that the larger German states would finally force Frankfurt to soften its attitude. But here too Nathan could make a contribution. In what was to become the pattern for much of their later activities of this sort, the brothers sought to win stronger Prussian support for the Jewish case in the course of the negotiations for the 1818 sterling loan. The brothers also endeavoured to raise the issue at the Congress of Aix; indeed, Amschel argued that Salomon should go there “not for business reasons but in the interest of the whole Jewry.” It was in fact this issue which brought them into contact with Friedrich Gentz for the first time, as he and Metternich passed through Frankfurt on their way to the Congress.
Such pulling on the purse strings in Berlin and Vienna could not prevent popular antagonism in Frankfurt finally boiling over into the violence of the “Hep” riots of August 1819. On the other hand, the unrest served to strengthen the case against the town authorities, and the Rothschilds sought to press home the point by reiterating Amschel’s threat to leave Frankfurt for good. A letter by James to the Vienna banker David Parish, which was evidently intended for Metternich’s eyes, illustrates the way the brothers were now explicitly using their financial leverage on behalf of their “nation” (a phrase they often used):
What can be the result of such disturbances? Surely they can only have the effect of causing all the rich people of our nation to leave Germany and transfer their property to France and England; I myself have advised my brother to shut up house and come here. If we make a start, I am convinced all well-to-do people will follow our example and I question whether the sovereigns of Germany will be pleased with a development which will make it necessary for them to apply to France or England when they are in need of funds. Who buys state bonds in Germany and who has endeavoured to raise the rate of exchange if it be not our nation? Has not our example engendered a certain confidence in the state loans so that Christian firms have also taken heart and invested part of their money in all kinds of securities? . . . The object of the agitators at Frankfurt seems to have been . . . to collect all the Israelites into a single street; if they had been successful in doing this, might it not have led to a general massacre? I need not point out how undesirable such an occurrence would be, especially at a time when our house might be holding large sums for the account of the Austrian or Prussian Court. It seems to me to be really necessary that Austria and Prussia should devise measures to be applied by the Senate at Frankfurt for energetically dealing with occurrences such as those of the 10th of this month, and thus making each man secure in his possessions.
In the view of their avowed adversary, the Bremen delegate to the Frankfurt Diet, the Rothschilds were making full use of t
heir financial leverage. Besides Austria and Prussia, “several minor states have also had recourse to this financial Power in their difficulties, which puts it in a strong position to ask for favours, especially for a favour of such an apparently trivial nature as the protection of a few dozen Jews in a small state.”
The brothers kept up the pressure in 1820, pressing Metternich to lean on Buol, who continued to support the Frankfurt authorities. They also lobbied the Bade nese government on behalf of the Jews there. When Metternich visited Frankfurt in October 1821, he signalled his own sympathies by lunching with Amschel; Salomon meanwhile came to an “important financial arrangement” with Gentz, after he had once again “bent his ear about the fatal Frankfurt ‘Jews’ affair.” In 1822 Amschel even wrote to Metternich’s lover Princess Lieven “asking for the withdrawal of certain instructions towards [the Frankfurt Jews] that Count Münster must have sent to the Minister of Hanover.”
This campaign was not a total failure. A year after his letter to Princess Lieven, for example, Amschel was able to celebrate Buol’s recall and the arrival of the more sympathetic Münch-Bellinghausen. And, writing from Berlin in March 1822, Heine detected “better prospects” that the Jews would win back their citizenship. Yet Princess Lieven’s private reaction to Amschel’s letter was revealing: it was, she told Metternich, “the funniest letter imaginable . . . Four pages of sentiment, begging my help for the Jews of his town, and I, the patroness of the Jews! There is a kind of naive confidence in it all, which is at once laughable and touching.” If this was how Metternich felt too, the brothers’ efforts in Vienna may have been less productive than they imagined. In the end, the Frankfurt authorities made only the most minimal concessions. Although there was to be no return to the ghetto—in itself a cause for relief rather than rejoicing—a plethora of restrictions on Jews remained, and their citizenship was clearly of the second-class variety. The new law confirming the “private citizen’s rights” of the “Israelite citizens” (1824) excluded the Jews from political life as before; imposed restrictions on their economic activities; subordinated the community to a Senate commissioner; permitted, as before, only fifteen Jewish marriages a year (only two of which could be with outsiders); and restored the Jewish oath in the law courts.7 It is important to bear in mind that these regulations applied to more than a tenth of the town’s population (some 4,530 people). Most of the rules—including the restriction on marriages to Jews from outside Frankfurt—remained in place until 1848. Indeed, the Frankfurt Jews did not secure full legal equality until 1864.
Heine used the Rothschilds’ role in the emancipation debate to make a sarcastic joke about businessmen in general:
Frankfurt citizenship papers . . . are said to have dropped 99 per cent below par—to adopt the language they speak in Frankfurt . . . But—to speak like a Frankfurter again—have not the Rothschilds and the Bethmanns stood at par for a long time? A businessman’s religion is the same all the world over. The businessman’s . . . office is his church; his desk is his pew, his copybook is his bible, his warehouse his holiest of holies, the bourse bell his church bell, his gold his God, his credit his faith.
But this was to miss the point. It was not the position of the Rothschilds which was at issue, but the position of Jews in general. What Heine had to say about the religion or lack of religion of businessmen would be echoed by that other apostate Marx (who argued conversely that capitalism was the universalisation of Jewish “huckstering”); it was not, however, true in the case of the Rothschilds. In any case, the idea that Bethmann and Rothschild stood at par was not one which many Gentiles in Frankfurt accepted.
There is an obvious continuity running from the battle for Jewish rights in Frankfurt to the involvement of Nathan and his sons in the campaign to secure emancipation in Britain after 1828. For here the remaining legal discrimination to which Jews were subject did not in any way personally inconvenience the Rothschilds. Nothing prevented Nathan doing the business he did at the Royal Exchange; nothing prevented him buying the houses where he wished to live. The fact that British Jews were excluded from political life and the English universities could have been a matter of complete indifference to him, as he had no desire or need to enter any of these institutions. Yet it was not. Even Nathan, of all the brothers the most single-minded in his pursuit of profit, felt an obligation to act on behalf of the Jewish community as a whole, even for the sake of rights he himself had no intention of exercising.
In 1828 and 1829 Protestant Dissenters and then Catholics secured the repeal of the laws excluding them from political life, but Jews did not—thanks to the parliamentary Oath of Abjuration (originally intended to exclude “popish recusant convicts”), which contained the phrase “upon the true faith of a Christian.” This inconsistency appears to have galvanised Nathan—or, rather, to have galvanised his wife. For, like his brother Salomon, Nathan was evidently susceptible to feminine pressure on the issue. On February 22, 1829, his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore recorded in his diary how he and his wife Judith
took a ride to see Hannah Rothschild and her husband. We had a long conversation on the subject of liberty for the Jews. He said he would shortly go to the Lord Chancellor and consult him on the matter. Hannah said if he did not, she would. The spirit manifested here by Mrs. Rothschild, and the brief but impressive language she used, reminded me most strikingly of her sister, Mrs. Montefiore.8
In the subsequent manoeuvrings, Nathan and Montefiore worked closely together. Broadly speaking, they tended to urge a more cautious strategy than the leading figure on the London Committee of Deputies of the British Jews (later generally known as the Board of Deputies), Isaac Lyon Goldsmid.
For Nathan, the issue revealed with sudden clarity the limits of his relationship with the Tory government, and particularly with the Prime Minister Wellington. Perhaps somewhat naively, he offered to sound out his Tory contacts about the possibility of emancipation in early April, at the height of the political crisis over Catholic emancipation which was close to toppling the government. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, was evasive:
He advised them to remain quiet until . . . the Catholic business . . . was settled, but if they thought it more to their own interest to bring the matter forward immediately, to set Lord Holland to do so, and he would support him, as he considered it right that the Jews should be relieved from their present disabilities; at the same time they must be guided by public opinion.
On the basis of this ambiguous message, Nathan recommended to the Board of Deputies “that a petition praying for relief should be prepared, in readiness to be presented to the House of Lords whenever it may be thought right.” At Nathan’s suggestion the petition dealt solely with British-born Jews, and he advised that only British-born Jews sign it (hence his son Lionel’s name appeared, rather than his own). He and Montefiore then took it to their old friend, the former Chancellor Vansittart (now Lord Bexley), who agreed to present it in the Lords after some minor alterations. The Deputies were impressed, and wrote thanking Nathan “for the zeal and attention he has manifested on behalf of his Hebrew Brethren, and more especially for his personal Attendance this day and evincing so ardent a desire in promoting through his powerful influence a relief to the Jews of this Kingdom from those disabilities under which they are labouring.” Work was begun on drafting a bill.
Yet in the course of the following month it became evident that Wellington was opposed to the introduction of any such bill that year; nor would he commit himself as to the next parliamentary session. When Nathan went to see him in February 1830 to “entreat” him “to do something for the Jews,” the Duke replied that “he would not commit the Government on the question of the Jews, and advised them to defer their application to Parliament, or, if they did not . . . it must be at their own risk, and he would make no promise.” In the face of this, Nathan became pessimistic. The Liberal Tory Robert Grant proceeded to introduce a petition in favour of the Jews a week later, followed on April 5 by the first
of many bills—an event Nathan himself may have witnessed. Two days later, however, he informed his brother James “that the Jewish matter is not going through.” He lobbied another old Tory friend on the subject—Herries, now President of the Board of Trade—but the government position remained unchanged and the bill was duly defeated by 228 to 165 on its second reading. It was now obvious that support for Jewish emancipation was much more likely to come from the Whigs. After years of proximity to the Tories, Nathan suddenly found himself siding with the Opposition.
The emancipation issue cut across party lines: supporters included the socialist Robert Owen, the Irish Catholic Daniel O’Connell and the Liberal Tory William Huskisson, while its most vehement early opponents included William Cobbett. A flavour of the more radical opposition can be gleaned from the numerous cartoons devoted to the subject. A caricature produced shortly after the introduction of Grant’s bill (though dated March 1, 1830) depicts a bearded Jew in the House of Commons listening to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s maiden speech in support of the bill and declaring: “It’s Liberty of Conscience my peoples vants—that’s all” (illustration 6.ii). The figure bears no physical resemblance to Nathan, but the fact that he has a bill in his coat pocket bearing the legend “Cent per cent interest” makes the connection between the Jews and finance clear enough.
The House of Rothschild, Volume 1 Page 31