The House of Rothschild (65 page)

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.

An alternative solution to the problems caused by immigration was, of course, to stop it. However, when the idea of restrictions on immigration surfaced for the first time in the 1880s, the Rothschilds and their circle were disconcerted. As N. S. Joseph, the architect of Rothschild Buildings put it, “The letters which spell exclusion are not very different from those which compose expulsion.” When the anti-immigration campaigner Arnold White wrote to Natty in 1891, his arguments for legislation were rejected (though not without a qualification): “I share with you the opinion that an influx of persons of foreign birth, likely to become a public charge by reason of physical incapacity or mental disease, is most undesirable and should be discharged. I have no reason to believe that such persons come here in number sufficient to justify legislation.” Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, a growing number of Conservative MPs were becoming convinced of the need for immigration controls and this put Natty—by now a staunch party man—in a difficult position. In the 1900 election, Natty was embarrassed when his agent in the East End endorsed two candidates (Sir William Eden Evans-Gordon in Stepney and David Hope Kyd in Whitechapel) who proved to be proponents of immigration control; and he felt obliged to disown the Unionist candidate in St George’s in the East, Thomas Dewar, after an intemperate election address was reported in the
Jewish Chronicle.

When, at Evans-Gordon’s instigation, the immigration question was referred to a Royal Commission, however, Natty made no secret of his opposition to “exclusion.” As a member of the Commission, of course, he was primarily concerned to question witnesses. But when a number of these (including Arnold White) specifically claimed that it was Rothschild charity which acted as a “magnet” for poor immigrants, he felt obliged to respond. Natty dissented from the majority on the Commission, whose report called for “undesirable” immigrants—including criminals, the mentally handicapped, people with contagious diseases and anyone “of notoriously bad character”—to be barred from entry or expelled. In his minority report, Natty argued forcibly that such legislation “would certainly affect deserving and hard-working men, whose impecunious position on their arrival would be no criterion of their incapacity to attain independence.” For him, the case of the “little Jew who was first educated at the Jews’ Free School” and who became Senior Wrangler in Cambridge in 1908 was the ideal: the young mathematician’s father had “fled from Odessa some years ago. I believe he used to preach in a small synagogue. He is now foreman in a small tailoring business where he receives high wages and teaches in one of the small Cheders. Such a boy,” he observed, “might have done benefit to Russia. I hope he will do well here.”

His son Walter echoed this view. “Great Britain,” he argued, “should be the refuge for the oppressed and unjustly ill-treated people of other nations so long as they were decent and hard-working.” But Natty’s opposition to the bill introduced in 1904 and his support for a Liberal critic of the bill in the 1905 Mile End by-election could not prevent an act being passed later that year. This act established, he declared, “a loathsome system of police interference and espionage, of passports and arbitrary power.” Nevertheless, he opposed petitioning for its repeal—as other members of the Board of Deputies wished to do—on the ground that a renewed debate might lead to a tightening of the rules; instead he pinned his hopes on persuading governments to apply it leniently. If nothing else, the passage of the Aliens Act in 1905 gave the lie to Arnold White’s claim that “the Prime Minister and the Cabinet of England alter their policy ... at the frown of the Rothschilds.”

There were two other ways of taking the sting out of the immigration isssue. One was to persuade the Russian government to end its discrimination against the Jews in its territory. This was what many Russian Jews pinned their hopes on, in the belief that the Rothschilds’ financial leverage could force the Tsarist regime to mend its ways. Indeed, stories from the Pale of Jewish settlement like “The Czar in Rothschild’s Castle,” credited “Rothschild” with positively supernatural powers, and dreamt of him literally teaching the Tsar a lesson. Thanks to his possession of “King Solomon’s signet ring,” Rothschild had become “the man who ... controls the destiny of nations,” living in a vast palace “where enormous hoards of gold were stored and guarded by gigantic warriors.” If the Tsar accepted an invitation to spend the night in Rothschild’s castle, he would be enlightened by pyrotechnical visions of the history of the Jews. In such stories the myth of the Hebrew talisman lived on. As we shall see, however, exerting leverage in St Petersburg on this issue was more a question of money than magic; and diplomatic factors made it difficult for the Rothschilds to do much more than protest at anti-Jewish policies.

The other possible strategy was to get as many as possible of the new arrivals to move on. This had in fact been the Jewish community’s practice for some years. In 1867, the Board of Guardians wrote to New Court on behalf of “Haim Kohen Hahamake,” a “very deserving” Greek merchant who had lost £8,000 and who wished to return to Greece; the Rothschilds sent £100. At around the same time, Alfred sat on the committee of an East End Emigration and Relief Fund. In 1881—5 alone, some 2,301 families were sent back to Eastern Europe under such schemes. Natty himself paid the costs of 200 families who wished to leave England for Canada in this period. In 1891 he was one of the eight founding shareholders of Maurice de Hirsch’s French-based Jewish Colonisation Association, an organisation for Jewish emigration from Russia to Argentina; and personally offered “to spend £40,000 in transporting to S. Africa and establishing on good Agricultural Land with an easy access to the sea a carefully selected No. [between 400 and 500 familes] of Russian Jews ... [to] be taken exclusively from a class who have proved themselves to be successful and persevering Agriculturalists.” This question of “re-exporting” immigrants resurfaced in 1905, when levels of emigration from Russia soared. Natty’s comments on the Royal Commission the previous year indicate that he still favoured “re-exporting” immigrants under certain circumstances.

But could not the Jews return to their biblical place of origin? The notion that the Rothschilds would use their wealth to restore the Jewish kingdom of Jerusalem in the Holy Land dated back as far as the 1830s; and it too lived on in the Pale: “Was not Rothschild a fit prince to ... restore scattered Israel to the Land of Promise [and] ascend the throne of David?” However, although the family had taken an interest in the Jews of the Middle East since the time of the Damascus affair and continued to donate money to educational and other institutions for Jews in Jerusalem, it was only much later that a Rothschild first seriously began to consider the possibility of founding Jewish colonies in Palestine. Edmond, James’s youngest son, became interested in this idea in 1882 under the influence of Zadok Kahn and Michael Erlanger of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. It was they who introduced him to Samuel Mohilever, Rabbi of the city of Radom (then in Russia) who wanted to resettle a group of Jewish farmers from Belorussia in Palestine; and Josef Feinberg, who wanted money for an already existing colony at Rishon le Zion (“First in Zion”), south of Jaffa (now Tel Aviv). When Edmond gave Feinberg 25,000 francs to drill for water at Rishon le Zion, other settlers in the area were encouraged to apply to him, including a group of Rumanian Jews at Samarin near Mount Carmel (later Zikhron Ya‘aqov) who intimated that they expected not just money but leadership from the famous Rothschild.

Edmond responded enthusiastically. As he told Samuel Hirsch, head of the “Mikveh Israel” Agricultural College, his aim was “to create models of future settlements, something like settlement nuclei, around which further groups of immigrants could subsequently settle.” Every new settler at Rishon le Zion had to sign an agreement “to submit myself totally to the orders which the administration shall think necessary in the name of M. le Baron in anything concerning the cultivation of the land and its service and if any action should be taken against me I have no right to oppose it.” On this decidedly authoritarian basis, Edmond instructed Mohilever’s settlers to attempt viniculture at Eqron (later renamed Mazkeret Batya after his mother Betty). There were also experiments with silk manufacture at Rosh Pinna, as well as perfume and glass production, not to mention synagogues, schools and hospitals—every detail supervised by the Baron’s “officials.” Although he insisted all along that he was engaged not in philanthropy but in creating economically self-sustaining settlements, Edmond’s highly paternalistic approach inevitably generated what would now be called a “dependency culture.” By 1889, despite investments totalling £1.6 million, there were numerous symptoms of economic failure. Although he transferred the administration of the settlements to the Jewish Colonisation Association in 1900, tacitly accepting the need for greater local autonomy, he continued to act as their banker in his capacity as chairman of the JCA’s Palestine Committee. By 1903 nineteen of the twenty-eight Jewish settlements in Palestine were subsidised partially or wholly by him. Altogether he spent around £5.6 million on his settlements.

Edmond’s colonising ventures should not be equated with Zionism in the sense of a Jewish nationalism aiming at the creation of a Jewish state, nor should the English Rothschilds’ interest in Jewish colonisation. In 1890, Natty attended (along with other luminaries of the London community such as Samuel and Cohen) the opening meeting of the Chovevei Zion Association of England, which united the various local Hovevei Zion (“lovers of Zion”) groups which had been formed after 1883 in reaction to the Russian pogroms. Leo also lent support to Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organisation, which sought to establish Jewish colonies in Mesopotamia (Iraq and Kurdistan). But none of the Rothschilds of this generation favoured the notion of a Jewish state in the Middle East; indeed, Edmond explicitly advised the settlers to seek Ottoman citizenship. Even less interested was Albert, who in 1895 received what doubtless seemed to be yet another half-mad demand for money—a billion francs, no less—from a more than usually verbose
Schnorrer.

By 1895 the Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl had become convinced that the only “solution to the Jewish question” was for the Jews to leave Europe and found their own
Judenstaat
modelled on the independent nation states already founded by Greeks, Italians, Germans and other peoples in the course of the nineteenth century. Having found a sympathetic listener in Hirsch, he made a succession of attempts to win the support of the Rothschilds, in the belief that they were about to “liquidate” their unknowably vast capital as a response to anti-Semitic attacks and that he could provide them with a “historic mission” in which to invest it. But despite the mediation of the Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Güdemann, Herzel’s sixty-six page Address “to the Rothschild Family Council” was never sent.
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He did not even get an answer from Albert to his initial approach, and concluded bitterly that his Address “should not be laid before the Rothschilds, who are vulgar, contemptuous, egoistical people.” Instead, he must wage “a battle.against the powerful Jews” by mobilising the Jewish masses.

This switch from ingratiation to aggression was characteristic of a particular type of Rothschild correspondent. King Ludwig II of Bavaria responded in a rather similar way when the Rothschilds rejected his requests for loans to finance his mania for fairy tale castles: he instructed his servants to rob the Rothschild bank in Frankfurt. Herzl, however, never gave up hope of securing Rothschild support. As early as May the following year, he was seeking to gain a hearing from Edmond through the Chief Rabbi in Paris, Zadok Kahn, even offering to resign from his.own embryonic movement if Edmond would take over as leader. But when Edmond said that he regarded Herzl’s talk of founding a state in Ottoman territory as a threat to his own colonisation programme, Herzl reverted to hostility. A year later, he was denouncing them as “a national misfortune for the Jews.” Even when he managed to secure an interview with Edmond in August 1896, it was only to be disillusioned further. By 1898, he had concluded that Edmond was slow-witted and that he would have to try appealing to the more financially powerful Alphonse—a view confirmed by his visit to Rishon le Zion that October.