The significance of this should not be exaggerated, however. In fact, Natty retained the title of honorary president and even performed the opening ceremony for the Federation’s first synagogue in New Road in 1892. Indeed, his desire to unite the various Jewish communities was more welcome to Montagu than to many members of the United Synagogue. It was to this end, following the death of the long-serving Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler in 1890—and despite opposition from Adler’s son and successor Hermann—that Natty called a conference of the various synagogues, arguing “that the time had come when even the humblest portion of the Communiry ... and certainly the most orthodox, should invite the other branches of the Community to join with us in attempting to unite us all. I will not say under one head, but under one spiritual Chief.” However, it proved impossible to reconcile the competing claims for influence of the different communities; and a similar effort failed in 1910 for the same reason. Still, Natty was powerful enough to secure the appointment of Joseph Herman Hertz as Chief Rabbi in succession to Adler in 1912, largely (according to one account) on the strength of Lord Milner’s recommendation, though more probably because he saw Hertz as likely to appeal to both the Federation and the United Synagogue—to the Orthodox East End and the more assimilated West End.
If his influence extended this far on an essentially religious question, it is hardly surprising that on more political questions relating to the Jewish community Natty was accorded quasi-regal status. As the scion of the richest of all Jewish families, a key figure in the City, an MP and then a peer, and as an unofficial diplomat with direct access to most senior politicians of the day, he had no equal. It might not be possible to get the various Jewish communities to agree on a single spiritual “Chief”; but there could be little doubt that Natty was their de facto temporal chief.
To appreciate the significance of this, it is necessary to appreciate the profound—and alarming—questions which were being raised about the position of Jews in Europe at this time. When Natty became a peer, Alphonse’s reaction was revealing: “This news will have great repercussions in Austria and Germany,” he wrote, “where anti-Semitism is still so virulent.” The late nineteenth century saw the transformation of what had previously been an incoherent and politically heterogeneous prejudice against Jews—sometimes harking back to the restrictions imposed on them under the ancien regime, sometimes looking forward to a utopia in which they and all other exploitative capitalists would be expropriated—into something more like organised political movements. It is no coincidence that the term “anti-Semitism” itself dates from this period: racial theories were developing which purported to explain the supposedly anti-social behaviour of Jews in terms of their genes rather than their religion. As political life became more democratised by the development of mass literacy and the widening of the franchise, the years after c. 1877 saw a great upsurge of anti-Jewish journalism, speech-making and, in some countries such as Russia, actual policy. The Rothschilds had little other than their religion in common with the Jews who came westwards from Eastern and Central Europe. As we have seen, they were part of a wealthy elite which had overcome virtually all of the social barriers which remained against Jews in Western Europe. Yet, having since the 1820s been the targets of political malcontents on both the left and right, it was probably inevitable that the Rothschilds would once again be identified as the personification of the “Jewish problem.” This was the disadvantage of being “Kings of the Jews.”
Anti-Semitism
Events in the mid-twentieth century tempt us to exaggerate the importance of anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century. As an organised political movement it was minor compared with socialism; and it is a mistake to see every expression of hostility towards Jews as a manifestation of it, for these were as ubiquitous as votes for anti-Semitic candidates were sparse. The memory of National Socialism also inclines us to look first to the German lands for signs of anti-Semitism. Of course, there were some there (more in Austria than in Germany, where the Rothschilds’ financial importance was declining); but traces can also be found in Britain, while Russia was the only major state which systematically discriminated against the Jews. Yet France, where Jews had enjoyed equal rights for longer than anywhere else, was also the country where the volume of anti-Semitic publication was greatest.
It is not without importance that Wilhelm Marr, the man who introduced the specifically racialist term Antisemitismus to German politics, had worked as a young man for the Wertheimsteins, a family closely linked to the Vienna Rothschilds. In an unpublished memoir, Marr recalled how he had been dismissed in 1841 despite working harder than many of the Jewish clerks in the firm. “It was,” he recalled bitterly, “the ‘goi’ who had to bear the consequences of the economic crisis.” Such experiences seemed to find an echo in the economic difficulties of many Germans after the 1873 crash. A good example of the kind of anti-Rothschild polemic inspired by writers like Marr was The Frankfurt Jews and the Mulcting of the People’s Wellbeing published by “Germanicus” in 1880. The title speaks for itself: beginning with the now familiar garbled version of the Elector’s treasure story, the author is primarily concerned to relate Germany’s economic difficulties during and after the Gründerzeit to capital export (especially to Russia) encouraged by the Rothschilds and their lackeys in the financial press. There is not a great deal to choose between this and the claim made by the Hessian Reichstag Deputy Otto Böckel in 1890 that the Rothschilds had cornered the world market in oil—a charge which was being repeated in Social Democrat pubs in Berlin five years later (illustrating how readily this rhetoric could still be used by the left). Friedrich von Scherb’s 1893 History of the House of the Rothschild developed this point in some detail, arguing that the Rothschilds’ relentless profiteering had found a new target: having dominated state loans and then railway construction, they were now seeking to establish global monopolies of raw materials.
By 1911, when Werner Sombart published his tendentious but influential book The Jews and Economic Life, such claims enjoyed a degree of intellectual respectability. For Sombart, “the name Rothschild” meant “more than the firm which bears it”; it meant “all the Jews who are active at the bourse”:For only with their help were the Rothschilds able to achieve that position of supreme power—indeed one can justly say the sole mastery of the bond market—which we see them possessing for half a century. It is certainly no exaggeration that one used to be able to say that ... a Finance Minister who alienated this world house and refused to co-operate with it more or less had to shut his office up... [N]ot only in quantitative terms, but also in qualitative terms, the modern bourse is Rothschildian (and thus Jewish).
But it was not necessary to root anti-Semitism in this kind of bogus sociology: the racial differences between Jews and Germans could simply be asserted. Max Bauer’s pamphlet Bismarck and Rothschild (1891), contrasted Bismarck, the embodiment of Teutonic, peasant virtue, with Rothschild, his cosmopolitan antithesis:The principle of his existence is not the calm growth of a constructive strength, but the hasty and nervous gathering of a dismembered mass of money ... But [thinks Bismarck] just leave the Jew to his insatiable pleasure; once the five billion marks have been paid in full, it will be the German’s turn to amuse himself in his own fashion! ... Bismarck’s physical and spiritual form stands clearly and tangibly for all to see ... But what physical notion does the world have of Rothschild? He is never seen, just as the tapeworm remains invisible in the human body. The “house” of Rothschild is a structureless, parasitical something-or-other, that proliferates across the earth from Frankfurt and Paris to London, like a twisted telephone wire. There is neither structure nor life in him, nothing that grows in the earth, nothing that strives towards God. Bismarck’s spirit is like a gothic building ... These are the powers which stand antagonistically opposite one another in the political culture of our times: insatiable Jewry, that destroys life; and hearty Germandom, which generates life.
There were similar
publications in Austria; but there, where the Rothschilds remained a major economic force, anti-Semitism was more politically effective than in Germany. It was in the years after the 1873 Vienna stock market crash that Karl Lueger conceived his “Christian Social” campaign against Jewish financial power. A turning point in this campaign was Lueger’s call in 1884 for the nationalisation of the Rothschild-owned Kaiser-Ferdinand-Nordbahn when the government proposed renewing the original charter granted to Salomon in 1836. Lueger’s demand that the government pay “attention for once to the voice of the people instead of the voices of the Rothschilds” was echoed by Georg Schönerer’s German National Association, and their ire was only increased when Albert was awarded the Iron Cross in 1893 for his role in Austro-Hungarian monetary reform. However, when Lueger himself came to power as Mayor of Vienna in 1897, he quickly discovered how difficult it was to dispense with the Rothschilds. By the late 1890s, critics like the conservative Karl Kraus (himself a Jew by birth) and the Social Democrat newspaper the Arbeiterzeitung were accusing Lueger of being “on good terms with the Rothschilds” and even working “hand in hand with the Jew Rothschild.” At the same time, in classic Habsburg fashion, the Jüdische Zeitschrift accused the Rothschilds of employing anti-Semites in preference to Jews! Rothschild power remained a byword even among those without a political axe to grind. To give just one example, the Tyrolean poet and professor of geology Adolf Pichler remarked in 1882 how “Rothschild” could “make the Mount Olympus of Austrian government bonds totter.” It was, he added sarcastically, “a sublime spectacle.”
But it was in France that anti-Semitism was most articulate and all-pervasive. The outpouring of publications hostile to the Rothschilds which characterised the 1880s had no real parallel in nineteenth-century history; not even the great pamphlet war after the Nord railway accident in 1846 produced so many libels. This time the catalysing “accident” was the collapse of the clerically backed Union Générale bank in 1882. No sooner had the Union Générale folded than its founder Paul Eugène Bontoux began laying the blame on “Jewish finance” and its ally “governmental freemasonry.” This refrain was taken up by sections of the press: the Moniteur de Lyon spoke of a “conspiracy orchestrated by a society of Jewish bankers from Germany” and a “German-Jewish conspiracy.”
Perhaps paradoxically, in view of his later role as a Dreyfusard, few writers did more to give this idea currency than the novelist Emile Zola. Although set in the Second Empire, his novel L‘Argent—part of his vast Rougon Macquart cycle—was obviously inspired by the Union Générale débâcle (with occasional allusions to the Credit Mobilier). And although the character of Gundermann was plainly not based on Alphonse, there is no doubt whatever that it was based, with one or two modifications, on his late father James. There is an eerie quality to this unflattering resurrection, for Gundermann lacks the redeeming humanity of Balzac’s Nucingen, the other great literary creation James inspired. The best explanation for this is that Zola had not known James as Balzac had; over a decade after his death, he had to turn for inspiration to the memoirs of others—indeed, passages of L’Argent are lifted more or less verbatim from Feydeau. Gundermann is introduced early on as:the banker king, the master of the bourse and of the world ... the man who knew [all] secrets, who made at his beck and call the markets rise and fall as God makes the thunder ... the king of gold ... Gundermann was the true master, the all-powerful king, feared and obeyed by Paris and the world ... One could already see that in Paris a Gundermann reigned on a more solid and more respected throne than the emperor.
He is cool, calculating, dyspeptic (a fictional touch), ascetic, workaholic. Saccard, by contrast, is an impetuous young would-be financier with clerical sympathies who dreams of financing projects in the Balkans and Middle East which might eventually lead to the purchase of Jerusalem and the re-establishment of the Papacy there. In the hope of winning his support, he goes to see Gundermann in his “immense hôtel” where he lives and works with his “innumerable family”: five daughters, four sons and fourteen grandchildren. Once again we enter the thronged offices of the rue Laffitte, where queues of brokers file past the impassive banker, who treats them with indifference or—if they dare to address him—outright contempt; where art-dealers vie with foreign ambassadors for his attention; and where (the debt to Feydeau is unmistakable) a small boy of five or six bursts in, riding a broomstick and playing a trumpet. This bizarre court confirms in Saccard’s eyes “the universal royalty” of Gundermann.
Saccard wants Gundermann’s backing—yearns, in fact, to make money on the bourse just as he has. Yet as he contemplates “the Jew” he instinctively imagines himself “an honest man, living by the sweat of his brow” and is overwhelmed with an “inextinguishable hatred” forthat accursed race which no longer has its own country, no longer has its own prince, which lives parasitically in the home of nations, feigning to obey the law, but in reality only obeying its own God of theft, of blood, of anger ... fulfilling everywhere its mission of ferocious conquest, to lie in wait for its prey, suck the blood out of everyone, [and] grow fat on the life of others.
As Saccard sees it, the Jew has a hereditary advantage over the Christian in finance, and he foresees—even as he enters Gundermann’s office—“the final conquest of all the peoples by the Jews.”
When, inevitably, Gundermann dismisses his proposal, Saccard’s antipathy becomes positively violent: “Ah the dirty Jew! There’s one it would be a decided pleasure to chew between one’s teeth, the way a dog chews a bone! Though certainly it would be too terrible and too large a morsel to swallow.” “The empire has been sold to the Jews, to the dirty Jews,” he cries:All our money is doomed to fall between their crooked claws. The Universal Bank can do nothing more than crumble before their omnipotence ... And he gave vent to his hereditary hatred, he repeated his accusations against that race of traffickers and usurers, on the march throughout the centuries against the peoples [of the world], whose blood they suck ... [bent on] the certain conquest of the world, which they will possess one day by the invincible power of money ... Ah! that Gundermann! A Prussian at heart ... Had he not dared to say one evening in a salon that if ever a war broke out between Prussia and France, the latter would be defeated!
In the end, of course, Gundermann triumphs: the Banque Universelle collapses and Saccard ends up in jail, leaving in his wake a trail of broken hearts and empty purses.
No one could accuse Zola of having failed to do his homework: not only was the portrayal of James’s office carefully based on an eyewitness account, but the rise and fall of the Union Générale was described with some precision—the mopping up of clerical and aristocratic savings, the bidding up of its own shares and the eventual débâcle. But what Zola had also done was to give literary credibility to the idea that the Union Générale really had been destroyed by the Rothschilds, as well as to the canard that the French Rothschilds had pro-German sympathies. That such notions struck a chord in the France of the Third Republic is all too apparent. Guy de Charnacé’s Baron Vampire is as wretched a book as L‘Argent is powerful; but its message is not too different. The character of Rebb Schmoul, like Gundermann, is a German Jew with a distinctively racial gift for financial manipulation. A “bird of prey,” he profits from the horrors of war, then metamorphoses into Baron Rakonitz, advising impecunious baronesses in return for their social patronage. Such stereotypes were given added currency by the publication of Bontoux’s own memoirs in 1888. Although Bontoux did not mention the Rothschilds by name, there was little doubt about whom he meant when he denounced “la Banque Juive,” which, “not content with the billions which had come into into its coffers for fifty years ... not content with the monopoly which it exercises on nine-tenths at least of all Europe’s financial affairs,” had set out to destroy the Union Générale.
It was, however, another disappointed man—Edouard Drumont—who made perhaps the biggest of all individual contributions to French anti-Semitic mythology. Edouard Drumont had wo
rked as a young man at the Credit Mobilier and had devoted years to researching and writing a huge and rambling tome which purported to describe the full extent of Jewish domination of French economic and political life. First published in 1886 and so successful that it subsequently appeared in 200 editions, Jewish France took the notion of a racially determined and anti-French Jewish character and developed it into a pseudo-system. Thus “the Rothschilds, despite their billions, have the air of second-hand clothes dealers. Their wives, despite all the diamonds of Golconda, will always look like merchants at their toilet.” Even the sophisticated Baroness Betty cannot conceal her origins as a “Frankfurt Jewess” when the conversation turns to precious stones. In part, Drumont was merely updating the pamphlets of the 1840s (Dairnvaell was his main inspiration), so that much of his attention in the first volume is devoted to the idea of the Rothschilds’ excessive political power. It is all here: their speculation on the outcome of Waterloo, their immense profits from the Nord concession, their antagonism to the more public-spirited Pereires. Goudchaux—a Jew—saves them from bankruptcy in 1848 and Jews in the Commune protect Rothschild properties from arson in 1871. The politics of the Republic are merely a continuation of this story: Gambetta is in league with the Jews and Masons, Léon Say—“l‘homme du roi des juifs”—plays a similar role, and Cousin, President of the Supreme Council, is merely a cog in the great Jewish—Masonic machine which is the Compagnie du Nord. Even the fall of Jules Ferry can be attributed to the Rothschilds’ malign influence. Best of all, Drumont suggests that the Union Générale was in fact an elaborate Jewish trap, designed to mulct the clericals of their savings.
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