The House of Rothschild

by Ferguson, Niall

  The other branch of the family which had settled in France—the descendants of the English-born Nat—ceased altogether to play a part in the bank. Although still formally a partner, Nat’s grandson Henri was another of the fifth generation’s scientists. A qualified if misanthropic doctor, he had his own private laboratory, published extensively on the subject of infant nutrition and took an interest in the Curies“ work on the medical use of radium. He also dabbled in the theatre, as a sponsor of the famous 1909 tour by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, and as an amateur playwright using the nom de plume ”André Pascal.“ With his Parisian château de la Muette, his mock-Tudor villa at Deauville and a yacht suggestively called Eros, Henri lived not to make money, but to spend it. His various attempts at entrepre neurship (he tried at various times to manufacture cars, mustard, soap and canned pheasant) were commercial failures.

  This meant that most of the responsibility for the running of de Rothschild Frères after 1905 devolved on Alphonse’s only son, Edouard. He, however, was scarcely swashbuckling in his approach to business. Fastidious and ostentatiously old-fashioned—he still wore a frock coat at the Nord line’s annual general meeting—he argued against offering investment advice to clients: “If they make a profit, they’ll consider it their due; if they lose money, they’ll say that they were ruined by the Rothschilds.” Edouard also had his share of extra-mural distractions, though they were rather more conventional than Henri’s: bridge when in town, shooting at Ferrières and horse-racing at Longchamp.

  In Vienna too, the Rothschilds of the fifth generation tended to neglect the “counting house” for high culture or high life. After the death of Albert in 1911, control of the bank passed almost entirely to his second son Louis, despite the fact that he was not yet thirty; rather as Anselm before had handed power to Albert, effectively sidelining his other two sons. It has been said that Louis brought a modernising spirit to the Vienna house, involving it in such unfamiliar fields of activity as the New York Interborough Rapid Transit Company. But he was no slave to work: the archetypal playboy bachelor (he married in his sixties), he was an accomplished rider and mountaineer who also found time to dabble in anatomy, botany and art. Freed almost entirely from business responsibility, his brothers were in a position to indulge their enthusiasms still more. The elder, Alphonse, trained as a lawyer but after the war settled down to the life of a gentleman scholar, specialising in classical literature; the younger brother Eugène’s most notable achievement was to write a monograph on Titian.

  The Impact of War

  Was any European family unaffected by the First World War? It seems doubtful. Not even the continent’s richest could avoid sacrificing blood, time and money in the great slaughter of those years.

  On the face of it, the Rothschilds were swept along by the patriotic fervour which historians usually see as the typical “mood” of 1914. Although they were all in their thirties when the war broke out, all three of Leo’s sons (as officers in the Bucks Yeomanry) itched to fight for their country. The second son, Evelyn, saw action early on the Western Front and was invalided home in November 1915. Within a matter of months, he was back in the trenches and in March 1916 was mentioned in despatches. He was then sent to Palestine, where he met his younger brother Anthony, who had earlier been wounded at Gallipoli and ended the war as a major with the General Staff. To his frustration, Lionel was obliged to remain at New Court, where he sought an outlet for his bellicose urges in organising Jewish recruitment in the City. At least four of the French Rothschilds ended up in uniform. Jimmy was seconded to the British 3rd Army as an interpreter and, like his English relations, served in Palestine towards the end of the war. Henri concealed his chronic albuminuria and became an officer in the medical corps, but was invalided out by the effects of a typhus vaccination. His elder brother James served as a pilot in the Balkan theatre and Gustave’s son Robert acted as interpreter on the Western Front. Of the Austrians, Alphonse and Eugène served as officers in the 6th Dragoons on the Italian front. In practice, therefore, Rothschild did not fight against Rothschild: the English and French Rothschilds who fought were active only on the Western Front and in the Middle East, though James might conceivably have found himself flying over his Austrian cousins had he been deployed further west. Only one Rothschild was killed—Leo’s son Evelyn in November 1917, from wounds sustained in a cavalry charge against Turkish positions at El Mughar—though the war claimed two other close relatives: Hannah Rosebery’s son Neil Primrose, who was also killed in Palestine,5 and the son of Charles’s Hungarian sister-in-law.

  Even for members of the family who were far from the Front, the war was a traumatic experience. Alfred and his cousins Constance and Annie—the last of Nathan’s grandchildren—lived in terror of German air raids. At his insistence, the Dividend Office gallery at New Court was packed with sandbags to protect the Bullion Room below and a personal shelter was built for his use in the corner of the Drawn Bond Department. A special system was also designed to relay official air-raid warnings from the Royal Mint refinery (temporarily converted to munitions production) to New Court, and Alfred even had a wire net erected above the roof of his own house in the hope of intercepting falling bombs. Constance’s war-time letters to her sister are full of anxious references to the same danger. “I hope if there are Zeppelins about,” she wrote in January 1915, “that the airmen may be blinded and frozen [by the snow] ... The Subway is ready for us ... I always wear my pearls (as I do not want to lose them in a débâcle) and at night have a fur cloak at the foot of the bed, a shawl and warm slippers, and next to me, candles and matches.” Even when she was out of London she was “full of nervous forebodings ... one thinks that one hears Zepps. at all hours of the evening and night, and there are constant explosions and gun-firing out at sea.”6 These fears were, of course, somewhat exaggerated as aerial bombardment was as yet in its infancy. Alfred died naturally—a month after the war had ended. Constance lived until 1931.

  Nevertheless, those who remained at home endeavoured to do their “bit” for the war effort. As early as September 1914, Constance made her house at Aston Clinton available to Belgian refugees (whom she lectured on the wickedness of German war aims and the virtue of Temperance), and helped to run a small hospital for the Red Cross. “The servants have all conformed to some necessities of this economising time,” she boasted, apparently oblivious to the irony of delegating sacrifice to the domestics. “Lester has no men-servants under him. A bright, neat pretty little parlour-maid has taken their place ... My Iron-room a canteen! ... Cricket pavilion much used and liked as billiard-and reading-room—Tennis pavilion used as library for the village.” With slightly more self-awareness, she even welcomed the introduction of food rationing in 1917. “I fancy there will be some difficulty in large establishments and in public places like restaurants, etc.,” she reflected, “but in small (!!) households like mine, the experiment will be quite interesting. Oh! dear, what strange experiences we are having!”

  While Charles continued to work at the bank, he served on the committee of the Volunteer Munitions Brigade and offered his services as a financial expert to Lloyd George’s new Ministry of Munitions. In the same spirit, Alfred forwarded a petition to Lloyd George urging that cotton be declared contraband to prevent its reaching Germany. His estate at Halton became a military camp and in 1917, at his suggestion, its beech woods were felled to provide pit props. In all this, a general enthusiasm for Lloyd George’s dynamic approach to the war effort is detectable. In October 1915—more than a year before he became Prime Minister—Constance was already dismissing his predecessor Asquith as “simply played out, not a bit up to the situation! ... I think there is a rising tide of anger against the Government. If Mr. A. were to resign there is only one man to take his place, Lloyd George.” “Oh dear,” she exclaimed two months later, “we want a very different PM.” Alfred too seems to have become a devotee. By contrast, Jimmy remained a loyal Asquithian and was one of the circle of his friends who ralli
ed round immediately after his fall a year later.

  Yet the fact that members of the family were now fighting on opposite sides inevitably brought back to the surface the old questions about loyalty and identity which had first been raised by the wars of German unification. Five of Mayer Carl’s seven daughters—all of whom had been raised in Frankfurt—had married French or English nationals: Adèle to James’s son Salomon, Emma to Natty, Laura Thérèse to Nat’s son James Edouard, Margaretha to the duc de Gramont and Bertha to the prince de Wagram. Wilhelm Carl’s daughter Adelheid had married her French second cousin Edmond; and the Viennese Albert had married Alphonse’s daughter Bettina. In each case the national loyalties of bride and groom were—at least in terms of their place of birth—to opposite sides in the war. The problem was compounded in the cases of three of the children produced by these marriages. In 1907 Natty’s son Charles had married a Hungarian, Rozsika von Wertheimstein; three years later, Edmond’s daughter Miriam had married a German relation, Albert von Goldschmidt-Rothschild; and in 1912 Albert’s son Alphonse had married an Eng- lishwoman (also a distant relation), Clarice Sebag-Montefiore. At the time, all of these marriages had made sense in the terms of the European Jewish “cousinhood” —indeed, Miriam and Albert were cousins (his mother was Minna von Rothschild). Yet in 1914 the claims of the fatherland trumped those of the cousinhood. When the war broke out, Albert left his wife in Paris and returned to Germany.

  Moreover, there was a mood of public hostility towards “the enemy” which made even German names and accents suspect in London and Paris (and English and French names suspect in Berlin and Vienna). Although the Rothschilds did not follow the British royal family in Anglicising their no less German surname, one of their clerks—a man named Schönfelder—elected to become “Fairfield,” a reaction perhaps to pressure from “patriotic” employees. It became impossible to converse in German during the lunch-break at New Court following the appearance there of a poster (published by the Daily Mail) bearing the legend “Intern Them All.” Walter resigned from Tring council when, in his absence, a resolution was passed in the same spirit. It was a similar story in France, where the Rothschilds were accused in the Chamber of Deputies of profiting from French military reverses and helping to supply the Germans with contraband nickel from New Caledonia.

  Matters were further complicated by the question of religion. Committed assimilationists as they had been for three generations, the London Rothschilds hastened to reinforce the patriotism of the British Jewish community, in which they continued to play a leading role.7 The text of a poster produced by the British Board of Deputies’ Jewish Recruiting Committee gives a flavour of the mood of the time:THE COUNTRY’S CALL FOR MEN HAS BEEN NOBLY RESPONDED TO BY JEWS OF ALL CLASSES. ARE YOU HOLDING BACK? On the VICTORY OF THE ALLIES depends THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM AND TOLERATION which is the cause of England. Apply at the Recruiting Office at MESSRS. ROTHSCHILD’ S, NEW COURT ST SWITHIN’S LANE, E.C. and Major Lionel de Rothschild M.P. will enlist you. THERE MUST BE NO JEWISH SLACKERS. JEWISH YOUNG MEN! Do your duty to your faith and your Country. All British Born Jews ENLIST NOW DON’T FORGET—Ask advice of Major LIONEL DE ROTHSCHILD M.P. at the Jewish Recruiting Committee.

  As might be inferred from the tone of this, however, there were those who were inclined to question the commitment of Jews to the war effort. Thus one of the war’s many bitter ironies: German-born Jews who had settled in Britain or America were viewed with suspicion because of their birthplace; those who had remained in Germany were viewed with suspicion because of their faith.

  An obvious source of embarrassment for assimilationists like Lionel and his father was the fact that Liberal England was fighting on the same side as Tsarist Russia, the object of so much Rothschild-led criticism for its treatment of Jews. When the Jewish author Israel Zangwill denounced the entente with Russia in a letter to The Times, Natty publicly distanced himself and the Board of Deputies. He even disowned the proposal of the American Jewish leader Oscar S. Straus that Britain should press her ally to grant the Jews civil and political rights, arguing that their lot would inevitably improve after the war as (in the words of the Jewish Chronicle) “the militarism of Russia’s next door neighbour ... has in the main been responsible for the reactionary spirit in Russia.” But this was not a line which went down well among the more recent Jewish immigrants from the Russian Pale, and not all the members of the family adhered to it. In early 1915 Leo was one of those who lobbied Kitchener and other ministers on the subject of Russian Jewry in advance of the visit of the Russian Finance Minister, P. L. Bark. The message was duly relayed to Petrograd: in his report to the Council of Ministers, Bark attributed to “the all powerful Leopold de Rothschild” the fact that Kitchener “repeated constantly that one of the most important conditions for the success of the war is the amelioration of the lot of the Jews in Russia.” In Paris, Edmond appears to have made similar representations to Protopopov, the last Tsarist Minister of the Interior.

  This and other injunctions to the Romanov regime to reform itself were, of course, in vain; but the advent of a new parliamentary republic in Russia proved to be anything but a solution to the problem. At first, there was optimism at New Court that the provisional government’s Finance Minister, an obscure Ukrainian businessman named Mikhail Tereshchenko (who at once wrote “asking us to continue ... and extend ... our business relations”), would prove “a friend of the Jews.” Later, the Rothschilds subscribed a million roubles to the “freedom loan” issued by Kerensky to keep Russia in the war. The Bolshevik Revolution of October dashed these hopes. French bondholders were effectively expropriated as Lenin repudiated the imperial debt, while Russian Jews found their plight positively worsened as the country descended into a barbaric civil war. As late as 1924, in the period of the New Economic Policy, Rothschild views of Soviet Russia remained so hostile as to preclude even the acceptance of a deposit from one of the new Soviet state banks.

  The paradox was that, to many commentators, the revolutions which swept westwards from Petrograd in 1917-19 appeared in large part to be the work of Jews, though the number of Bolshevik leaders who were of Jewish origin tended to be exaggerated. A few members of the family did in fact welcome the fall of the great Central and European monarchies. Writing to her sister on November 7, 1918, as the German and Austrian revolutions gathered momentum, that inveterate Liberal optimist Constance confessed to feeling:quite giddy when I read the morning papers with all the wonderful news. Everything topsy-turvy; a gigantic cataclysm, rather a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” or “Through the Looking Glass” effect. I seem to be always seeing Emperors and Kings and their Consorts running, and their thrones toppling over. Is it not wonderful!

  But for those Rothschilds who were still closely involved with the family firm, such optimism was impossible in the face of such an explicitly anti-capitalist revolution. Even Constance had to acknowledge that the revolution might be “somewhat disastrous from a financial point of view” for the Vienna house. And there was also the faint but conceivable possibility that the “revolutionary element in this country” might draw inspiration from the continent. Walter ghoulishly warned his eight-year-old nephew (and future heir) Victor that when the war was over he would be “put up against a wall and shot.” The few remaining Frankfurt Rothschilds identified much more closely with the deposed Hohenzollerns than with the new Weimar Republic, judging by the friendship which persisted between Hannah Mathilde and members of the deposed German royal family.

  “Dear Lord Rothschild”: The Balfour Declaration

  Perhaps the most profound conflict of identity which the war exacerbated, however, related to the future of Palestine and, specifically, to the Zionist aspiration to establish a Jewish nation state there. As we have seen, none of the Rothschilds had wholly embraced the projects of Herzl and Weizmann, although Edmond’s colonisation schemes were in some ways compatible with Zionism. By pitting England, France and Russia against the Ottoman empire—an unprecedented comb
ination in modern times—the war seemed to weaken his reservations about the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine. As he said in 1917, he had always expected:that a time might come when the fate of Palestine could be in the balance, and I desired that the world should have to reckon with the Jews there at such a time. We did a good deal in the last ten to fifteen years; we meant to do still more in the years to come; the present crisis has caught us in the middle of our activities, still one has to reckon with the facts and now we have to use the opportunity which will probably never return again.

  In the same way, the war did much to move the British Rothschilds closer to Zionism, though the extent of their conversion has often been overstated because of Walter’s role as the addressee of the 1917 Balfour declaration. The enthusiasts in London were Jimmy and Charles’s wife Rozsika, whom Jimmy introduced to Weizmann in July 1915. Through her, Weizmann met a wide range of influential figures, including Lady Crewe, Lord Robert Cecil (the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and General Allenby, later the “liberator” of Jerusalem. Charles himself became directly involved following the Foreign Secretary Grey’s March 1916 proposal for a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine. Plainly, however, the best way of associating (in Weizmann’s words) “the name of the greatest house in Jewry ... with the granting of the Magna Carta of Jewish liberation” was to secure the backing of Walter; for as “Lord Rothschild” he was the heir of Natty’s quasimonarchical status within British Jewry. It was with this aim in mind that a declaration of Jewish objectives in Palestine was laboriously drafted and redrafted between November 15 and January 26.