The House of Rothschild (102 page)

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 rallied 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:

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:

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.

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 combination 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:

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.

Walter’s reasons for becoming involved were complex. Shortly before his death, his father had further revised his views on the issue in the light of Herbert Samuel’s Cabinet memorandum on “The Future of Palestine” (January 1915), which argued that Palestine should become a British protectorate, “into which the scattered Jews would in time swarm back from all quarters of the globe, and in due course obtain Home Rule.” This had as much to do with British imperialism as with Zionism; and Walter generally followed his father in regarding the two as now being complementary. Shortly before an important meeting with Sir Mark Sykes at the Foreign Office, Walter wrote to Weizmann, opposing the idea that power in Palestine might be shared between England and France. “England must have sole control,” he argued, and the Development Company which he envisaged running the Palestinian economy was to be firmly “under the tutelage and control of the British administration.” This was the way the editor of the
Manchester Guardian
C. P. Scott was thinking too: talk of a system of Anglo-French dual control over post-war Palestine had to be resisted, he argued, if there was not to be a repeat of the unhappy experiment with dual control in Egypt. It was presumably this line of argument which attracted Walter’s cousin Lionel. According to Constance that March, even he was “convinced that we shall march upon Jerusalem, and found our protectorate there. When I suggested that Zionism was at an end, on account of Russia’s new and wonderful move [revolution], he said certainly not ...” If nothing else, Lionel realised that the Revolution was unlikely to benefit Russian Jews in practice, despite the Bolsheviks’ anticlerical rhetoric.

Other members of the London and Paris Jewish “establishments” were more cautious, however; and Lionel himself soon changed his tune. In London the opposition to Zionism was led by Lucien Wolf, secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association (after 1918, the Joint Foreign Committee) and head of the Board of Deputies’ “Special Branch,” who argued that Zionism would tend to fuel anti-Semitism and endanger the position of assimilated Jews in Western Europe. Wolf had influential supporters, including the Liberal Minister Edwin Montagu (who returned to the Cabinet in July 1917) and the Conjoint Committee presidents Claude Montefiore and David Alexander, who wrote a strongly anti-Zionist letter to
The Times
on May 24, 1917, supposedly expressing the “Views of Anglo-Jewry.” Shortly before his death, Leo intimated that he agreed with Montefiore and Alexander’s view “that it was advisable to adopt a conciliatory tone towards Zionism, whilst maintaining the cardinal points of our own position, viz., that we would not concur in any proposals which implied the idea of nationality for the Jews in Palestine, or the granting of privileges detrimental to the other inhabitants.” After Leo’s death, his widow Marie continued to take this line, as increasingly did Lionel. In Paris a similar line was taken by the secretary of the Alliance Israelite, Jacques Bigart.