The House of Rothschild

by Ferguson, Niall

  Responses

  The most elementary response to attack is to fight back. That was the response favoured by Alphonse’s son Edouard and Gustave’s son Robert, both whom responded to racial insults by demanding satisfaction on the field of honour.5 But one could not duel with every anti-Semite. The question of how to respond to religious and racial intolerance had long preoccupied the Rothschilds; but the new forms of prejudice which characterised the fin de siècle called for new responses. These were not easy to formulate.

  Because of their unique social position—simultaneously at the apex of the respective Jewish communities and in increasingly close contact with the European aristocracies—the Rothschilds were sometimes inclined to blame anti-Semitism not just on anti-Semites but on other Jews. In 1875 Mayer Carl told Bismarck: “As for anti-semitic feeling the Jews themselves are to blame, and the present agitation must be ascribed to their arrogance, vanity and unspeakable insolence.” To modern eyes, this seems a shocking statement, suggesting a kind of disloyalty to the wider Jewish community which is not at first sight easily reconciled with the Rothschilds’ claim to be that community’s lay leaders. Yet the fact that the man who tried to assassinate Leo was (as Natty put it) “of our own persuasion” is significant: there were profound tensions between Jews too in this period.

  The two groups which gave the Rothschilds most concern were nouveaux riches—Jewish bankers and businessmen who had made their fortunes more recently than the Rothschilds—and, perhaps more important, Ostjuden: the much more numerous Jews of Eastern Europe (principally though not exclusively from the Russian Empire), 2.5 million of whom migrated westwards after the pogroms sparked off by the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and the new discriminatory laws introduced the following year.6 In the former category, Gerson Bleichröder was viewed with especial distaste, though it is reasonable to assume that part of Mayer Carl’s grievance against Bleichröder had its origins in their business disagreements. Forwarding a letter from Bleichröder on the subject of German anti-Semitism in November 1880, Natty told Disraeli:There is no doubt that Bleichröder himself is one of the causes of the Jewish persecution, he has been employed so often by the German Government that he has become arrogant and forgets that he is very often merely “a Ballon d‘essai.”

  There are also a great many other reasons ... among them the constant influx of Polish Russian and Roumanian Jews who arrive in a state of starvation and are socialists until they become rich.

  The Jews also are proprietors of half the newspapers particularly of those papers which are anti Russian ... I hear also that Madame von Bleichröder is most disagreeable & haughty.

  As these comments suggest, the new poor were at least as great a source of embarrassment as the nouveaux riches.

  The Rothschild response to anti-Semitism was not just (as Drumont alleged) to demand high levels of police protection and to fortify their houses; though they can be forgiven for doing so in the light of the assassination attempts described above. There was a long-standing family view about how best to deflect or mitigate anti-Jewish feelings. Ever since the time of Mayer Amschel, the Rothschilds had taken care to make charitable contributions not only to the Jewish communities where they lived, but also to non-Jewish “good causes” as part of a conscious strategy to win social acceptance. There is some evidence to suggest that members of the third generation had tended to neglect this tradition during the last decades of their lives. The younger Rothschilds, however, consciously revived it in the 1880s and 1890s, though in England the emphasis was now laid as much on public service as on finan cial donations; and in every case there was a new interest in the provision of housing for the poor, in addition to the traditional preoccupations with health care and education.

  We have already seen how Ferdinand set up a hospital dedicated to his wife Evelina after her death. His brother-in-law Natty was also president of no fewer than three hospitals, treasurer of the King Edward VII Hospital Fund and chairman of the Council of the British Red Cross, as well as running what has been called “a two-tier health service” on his Tring estate. In Frankfurt Mayer Carl and Louise established the Clementine Interdenominational Girls’ Hospital following the death of their eldest daughter Clementine and also contributed towards the town’s public baths. Finally, their unmarried daughter Hannah Louise was responsible for a large number of public foundations including the Baron Mayer Carl von Rothschild Carolinum Foundation, a medical foundation which came to specialise in dental care. The Viennese Rothschilds also made major charitable contributions in this field: founding a general hospital, an orphanage, an institute for the blind and one for the deaf and mute. Nathaniel left considerable sums to establish a sanatorium for nervous illnesses at Döbling and Rosenhügel and his house at Reichenau became a hospital. And in France Adolph established an ophthalmological hospital in Paris after a surgeon in Geneva successfully removed a piece of metal which had lodged in his eye, while Henri set up a clinic at 199 rue Marcadet. Education remained important too (as it had been since the days of the Philanthropin in Frankfurt). In addition to the Carolinum Foundation, Hannah Louise established the Carl von Rothschild Public Library (which later occupied the Rothschild house on Untermainkai) and the Anselm Salomon von Rothschild Foundation for the Promotion of the Arts. Her sister Hannah Mathilde was also a major benefactor of the new Frankfurt University set up in 1910.7

  It was a sign of the times, however, that the provision of cheap housing now became an object of Rothschild philanthropy. For the late nineteenth century saw an acceleration in the pace of urbanisation as millions of people throughout Europe left the countryside to find employment in cities. London, Paris, Vienna and Frankfurt were all affected in this way, albeit to varying degrees. Although there was heavy private investment in housing, contemporaries could hardly fail to notice the appalling conditions which prevailed in the “slums” of Europe’s many East Ends: landlords had an obvious incentive to overcrowd their properties, and almost none to provide good sanitation (which at the very least required a measure of collective action by builders and property-owners). One Rothschild response to this was to set an example by acting as model landlords themselves. Natty, Leo and Ferdinand also made a point of running their Buckinghamshire estates as models of modern paternalism, providing tenants with improved housing, running water, club houses and other facilities. But these experiments in private welfare (not dissimilar to those adopted by some big German industrial concerns in the period) had no real applicability in the slum areas where the Rothschilds owned no land.

  A first step to address the urban problem was taken by the Paris Rothschilds in 1874, when a fund was established known as l‘Oeuvre des loyers (later Secours Rothschild) to pay 100,000 francs a year to the mayors of the Paris arrondissements to assist poor families unable to pay their rents. Thirty years later, another bigger Rothschild Foundation “for the Improvement of the Material Existence of Workers” was set up with 10 million francs’ capital to construct affordable working class housing blocks in the 11th, 12th and 19th arrondissements. The model for this was in fact the English Rothschilds’ Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company, which had been set up in the 1880s (see below).

  All this needs to be set in the context of the family’s primary charitable function as benefactors within the Jewish communities, though the distinction, as we shall see, is not always easy to make. The continental Rothschilds continued to found specifically Jewish institutions. In 1870, for example, James Edouard established the hospital of Berck-sur-Mer, which specialised in bone disorders, while Edmond modernised the old Jewish hospital in the rue Picpus; in addition, he and Gustave each founded a new Jewish school. In Austria Anselm established a Jewish hospital at Wahring in 1870; while in Frankfurt the indefatigably philanthropic Hannah Mathilde founded a Jewish Children’s Home, the Georgine Sara von Rothschild Foundation for Sick Foreign Jews, an Old People’s Home for Jewish Women (in the old Rothschild house on the Zeil), a Jewish Home for Women in Bad Nau
heim, as well as a Sanatorium for Poor Jews in Bad Soden, a spa town near her summer residence at Königstein. In London the Jews’ Free School remained a favoured institution, as did (albeit to lesser degree) the Jews’ College.

  However, the influx of East European Jews created new problems which the established institutions could not address. Unlike many Non-conformists, British Jews felt no anxiety about the expansion of state support for secular education, providing they could maintain their own communal control over religious education. At the same time, Natty and his relatives grasped the need for extra-curricular organisation. For example, Natty’s wife Emma provided around 60 per cent of the annual costs of the Brady Street Lads’ Club founded in Whitechapel in 1896 to keep young Jewish men out of mischief. Her son Walter contributed £5,000 to the costs of the Hayes Industrial School set up in 1901 for Jewish young offenders, nearly a third of the total. Two years later, the Rothschilds and Montefiores combined to create a similar school for girls with the explicit object of improving the religious education working class girls received. The spirit in which all these efforts were conceived can be gauged from Lionel’s declaration at the opening of the Hutchison House Club for Working Lads on June 28, 1905:We hope to catch the youth of the immediate neighbourhood, and to help them to rise in the world, to help them out of the temptations which they find in the street, the music-halls and the public houses. We want to instil into the boys ambition, the pride of being Jews and the pride in being Englishmen. [Cheers] We want to teach them the qualities of endurance and sportsmanship.

  It is hard to imagine a more clearcut call for cultural integration. As Natty declared in a speech to the United Synagogue council in 1891, the “paramount duty devolving upon the Jewish community” was “the task of Anglicising the numbers of their foreign brethren at present living in the East End of London.” Max Beerbohm’s cartoon A Quiet Morning in the Tate Gallery hints at the difficulty the Rothschilds had in understanding “their foreign brethren.” The curator is pictured “trying to expound to one of the Trustees the spiritual fineness” of a picture of a group of Orthodox rabbis in a synagogue. With his neat moustache, top hat and cane, the Trustee in question—Alfred—looks unconvinced (illustration 8.iv).

  The housing question also called for new forms of benefaction. In May 1884 Natty was invited to join a Board of Guardians Sanitary Committee set up specifically to consider ways of providing better housing for the growing number of poor Jewish tenants living in East End districts like Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Good mans Fields—areas which had been notorious for crime and prostitution even before the case of Jack the Ripper in 1888. A first step towards tackling the housing problem for immigrants was taken that year with the creation of the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter, which offered accommodation for up to fourteen days for single men and helped families to find lodgings. But a new East End Enquiry Commission under Natty’s chairmanship also proposed creating more permanent housing—“healthy homes ... at rentals such as the poor can pay”—through the creation of a Dwellings Company of the sort which had proliferated since the 1860s and had been encouraged by Richard Cross’s Artisans’ and Labourers“ Dwellings Improve-ment Act of 1875. Apparently encouraged to pursue the matter by his dying mother, Natty sought to mobilise other wealthy Jews—including Lionel Cohen, the bullion-broker F. D. Mocatta, Claude Montefiore and Samuel Montagu—but in the end the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company set up in March 1885 had to rely on the Rothschilds for a quarter of its £40,000 share capital (another major donor was the Rothschild-supported Jews’ Free School which lent the company £8,000 two years later).

  8.iv: Max Beerbohm, A quiet morning in the Tate Gallery (1907).

  The Industrial Dwellings Company was not strictly speaking a charitable foundation: its declared aim was to “provide the maximum of accommodation for the minimum rent compatible with the yielding of a nett 4 per cent per annum dividend upon the paid-up Capital,” and the “ruthless utilitarianism” of the resulting flats has been condemned by a modern social historian. However, the differential between this fixed return and the much higher returns being reaped by purely commercial landlords was substantial and can be regarded as a kind of subsidy: the flats were unquestionably an improvement on the slums they replaced. Two months after the initial subscription was announced, Natty purchased a site at Flower and Dean Street (off Commercial Street in the heart of Spitalfields) from the Metropolitan Board of Works for £7,000. Designed by the Jewish architect N. S. Joseph, the austere seven-storey buildings were officially opened in April 1887 and were named after Charlotte. Inside, there was spartan accommodation for up to 228 families (in 477 rooms). The Company went on to build a similar estate in Brady Street and acquired a second site in Flower and Dean Street, where “Nathaniel Dwellings” were built in 1891-2.

  Of course, it would be quite wrong to regard all this purely as a response to the increase of anti-Semitism: as Jews, the Rothschilds regarded charitable work as a religious obligation and this impulse was reinforced by the voluntarist ethos of Victorian liberalism. To take the case of Anthony’s daughter Constance, who was president of the National Union of Women Workers, an executive of Lady Somerset’s National British Women’s Temperance Association, an active member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as well as a Home Office-appointed prison visitor; such activities were the sort of thing the wife of any ambitious Liberal MP was expected to go in for. In any case, like her aunt Charlotte, she evidently derived pleasure from such work. She was just as active, if not more so, with Jewish organisations: the Union of Jewish Women, the Ladies Conjoint Visiting Committee of the Board of Guardians and the Jewish Ladies Society for Preventative and Rescue Work (later renamed the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women), a society for rescuing “fallen women” (as unmarried mothers and prostitutes were euphemistically known) and preventing other working-class Jewish girls from falling in the same way. This was a pattern of activity Charlotte had established in the 1850s and 1860s, and it evidently gave both her and Constance the kind of fulfilment which their male relatives could derive from the “counting house” or politics. Emma too was a compulsive philanthropist: in 1879 she recorded no fewer than 400 individual charitable donations and subscribed to 177 “good causes” in the Tring area, including the Church Girls Union, the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Tring United Band of Hope!

  Nevertheless, there undoubtedly was a “defensive” rationale at work. In part, it was important to demonstrate that rich bankers could be relied upon to make a voluntary contribution towards the amelioration of social problems. As we shall see, this was vital as an increasing number of politicians on the political left argued for direct state intervention to redistribute income and wealth; modest though the proposals of New Liberals were at the turn of the century, the Rothschilds shared that violent aversion, so widespread among the rich of the period, to any increases in direct taxation—especially those motivated by a desire to improve working class living standards. The Rothschild argument was that “capital” must be left free from taxation in order to accumulate; only then could economic growth, increased employment and higher wages be expected. In return, the rich could be relied upon to make their contribution towards the needs of the deserving poor on a voluntary basis. It is worth pausing to assess approximately how big a contribution was in fact being made here. Alphonse’s will provides a good test case, as he made quite a large number of charitable bequests, with a total value of around 635,000 francs. Yet this was equivalent to less than 0.5 per cent of the value of his share of the Rothschild partnership (135 million francs) which was passed on tax-free to his son Edouard.8 Of course, this takes no account of the substantial sums Alphonse contributed to charitable causes in his lifetime; and further research would be needed to establish the proportion of his income spent in this way. Nevertheless, it was always a weakness of the conservative argument against higher taxation that in general private charitability at th
e turn of the century tended to fall short of the traditional 10 per cent.

  In the case of specifically Jewish philanthropy, of course, there was a further motive: the perceived need to accelerate the “Anglicisation” of the newly arrived East European Jews. Of course, there was never much chance of achieving the kind of rapid assimilation which the Rothschilds and their cousins had achieved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They, after all, had arrived in England already relatively well off and well educated; the majority arriving from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century were poor artisans. An especially alarming moment in this context was the great East End tailors’ strike of 1888. To an ardent anti-socialist like Natty, the spectacle of a major industrial dispute within the Jewish community was hardly an agreeable one. Both he and Samuel Montagu hastened to offer their services as mediators, in the hope of splitting the difference between the two sides; though it is hard to believe that Natty had much insight into the labour relations of the East End. Their intervention reflected the Jewish elite’s anxiety to appease any nascent radicals within the East End: they had before them the example of Russia, where the Jews’ persecution was often spuriously justified by numerical over-representation within the revolutionary movement.

  One criticism sometimes advanced by critics of Rothschild philanthropy was that, far from promoting assimilation, the Industrial Dwellings Company merely encouraged the creation of new ghettos. Thus it has been pointed out that 95 per cent of the tenants in the Charlotte de Rothschild Buildings were Jews. But this is misleading. At the Directors’ meeting of February 18, 1890, it was agreed that “as far as possible, the proportion of Christian tenants to Jewish tenants should be from 33 to 40 per cent” in the company’s Brady Street flats. In 1899 space was reserved in the company’s East Ham property for the construction of non-Jewish places of worship “in order that the estate should in no way form a ‘Ghetto.’ ” Though the Charlotte de Rothschild Buildings were mainly occupied by Jewish families, a third of the tenants in the Navarino Manions in Stoke Newington Buildings were not, according to figures for 1904. The company’s Camberwell estate (Evelina Mansions) had no Jewish tenants at all in 1911.