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What If There Had Been No Rothschilds?
Karen Yourish
 (From 'The House of Rothschild') |
(June 19, 2000)A masterful historian examines the achievements and failings of modern Jewry's greatest dynasty, once branded by Herzl as 'a national misfortune for the Jews'
"We Rothschilds are inveterate scribblers," Charlotte de Rothschild, of the London branch of the aristocratic Jewish clan, wrote to her children in 1874, "and cannot live without letter writing or receiving."
Thanks to this tendency, and to an extraordinary research effort by biographer Niall Ferguson, we now have a more intimate glimpse into the incredible two-century-long saga of the Rothschild dynasty than has previously been available.
Based on over 20,000 letters and other documents drawn from more than 20 archives around the world, Ferguson�s two-volume tour de force takes us on a fascinating journey. It begins in the Frankfurt ghetto where patriarch Mayer Amschel established the first "house" of Rothschild, and moves on to London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, where his sons created the world of banking as we know it today. It ends with the family�s far less significant influence on the present-day international banking scene - a decline that stems, according to Ferguson, from the family�s failure to create a sixth house in the United States during the mid-19th century, when world financial power shifted from London to New York.
In between is a mostly gripping, readable and lively account, examining the family�s rise to power, the extent that their interests reached beyond the realm of finance into railways and mining of gems and oil, and the clan�s far-reaching impact on the politics of war and peace.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the head of the London house, who emerged as the leader of Mayer Amschel�s five sons, was the richest man in Britain by the 1830s and probably the wealthiest man in the world. His brother James, of the Paris house, who took over as head of the family after Nathan�s death, was possibly the richest man in France. In fact, the combined wealth of the five sons made the family the richest in the world. While the original five forged their way into the social aristocracy of Europe theretofore off-limits to Jews, it was the third generation that built the lavish gilded palaces that are the family�s most impressive monuments, and which spent its money on hunting, horse racing and art.
The myth that the Rothschilds are at the center of a vast Zionist conspiracy aimed at world domination can be traced back to the early 1800s, but it remains a mainstay of anti-Semitic rhetoric - the family has been blamed for everything from Lincoln�s assassination to the financing of Hitler. Though he does not deal with these specific canards seriously, Ferguson, in his attempt "to supplant Rothschild mythology with historical reality," does address various misconceptions such as the commonly held myth of the immense profits Nathan Mayer made by speculating on the outcome of the battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Ferguson delves into the phenomenon of the Rothschilds� preference for marriage within the family, which, until the late 1800s, was the main way they kept their fortune "safe" from outsiders. He also explores the family�s commitment to Judaism and unwillingness to convert to Christianity in the face of anti-Semitic pressures, unlike other wealthy Jews during the 19th century, and reveals some surprising information about their attitudes toward other Jews and the idea of a Jewish state.
Overall, Ferguson succeeds in his stated goal - "to help reintegrate economic, social, cultural, political and diplomatic history, and in the process to make both the nineteenth century world and the �exceptional family� more intelligible..." As a result, the book is as much a historiography as it is a biography of the Rothschilds.
A fellow in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, the prolific Ferguson is the author of "The Pity of War," about the causes and consequences of World War I, and editor of the best-selling "Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals," a compilation of contributions from noted historians speculating on a number of "what if" scenarios such as "What if there had been no American Revolution" and "What if Communism had not collapsed?"
He is the first historian to have gained unrestricted access to all of the Rothschilds� surviving historical archives and the first person to use a translator to decipher intra-family correspondence that, until the late 1860s, was written in Judendeutsch - German in Hebrew letters. He also interviewed a number of family members, who read and commented as well on portions of the text, but did not act as censors, the author emphasizes.
One of the more emotional - and interesting - exchanges occurs in a series of letters about the marriage in 1839 of Nathan�s second oldest daughter, Hannah, to the Hon. Henry Fitzroy, the younger son of Lord Southampton - and a Christian. Hannah�s brother Nat was the only relative who attended the wedding. "Nothing could be more disastrous for our family," wrote Hannah�s Uncle James. "To renounce our religion, the religion of our [father] Rabbi Mayer [Amschel] Rothschild of blessed memory, the religion which, thank God, made us so great."
Nonetheless, Ferguson suggests, her kin were even more concerned that Hannah was marrying outside of the family. After Nat contends that his sister had done "no more than marry a Christian in a Christian country," James retorts: "I and the rest of our family have ... always brought our offspring up from their early childhood with the sense that their love is to be confined to members of the family... so that the fortune would stay inside the family."
Unlike Hannah, Nathan�s son Anthony was able to be dissuaded by financial inducements from marrying a non-Jew and, instead, abide by the "nicely conceived project" that he marry one of his Montefiore cousins, Louisa. "I told him [Uncle Amschel] that if Aunt Henrietta [Montefiore] would cash up, I was ready," Anthony wrote unabashedly to his brothers.
The 1860s and 1870s saw the last wave of Rothschild inbreeding. Concerns over the genetic risks of the practice do not appear to have factored into the decision to abandon the practice of endogamy - research into heredity was largely unknown until the early 1900s - and the author comes up with no firm explanation for the change beyond a vague reference to the family�s increasingly open attitude toward the rest of society, particularly society�s elite.
The Rothschilds' over-whelmingly positive impact on the Jewish people, through their philanthropy and activism, is well documented here. Mayer Amschel and his five sons saw themselves as role models for other Jews and believed that the more they could achieve socially without converting to Christianity, the more they would weaken arguments for conversion. James wrote in 1816: "I am quite ready to believe that we have enough money to last us all our life. But we are still young and we want to work. And [as] much for the sake of the Jews as for any other reason."
As an atheist from a Calvinist background, Ferguson notes in the foreword of the first volume that he hopes he has not misunderstood the complicated relationship between the "exceptional family" and the Jewish people. "I do not think I am guilty of overestimating the very important role the Rothschilds have played in modern Jewish history."
He is not. But Ferguson could be charged with giving somewhat short shrift to some of the more surprising tidbits he reveals about attitudes of later-generation Rothschilds to issues of anti-Semitism and immigration.
Ferguson writes that the Rothschilds of the third generation were "most" concerned by two groups of Jews - the nouveaux riches and the 2.5 million Jewish refugees from the Russian empire who, fleeing pogroms, migrated westward. Nathan�s grandson Natty wrote to Disraeli in November 1880 that "There is no doubt that [Bismarck�s personal banker Gerson] Bleichroder himself is one of the causes of Jewish persecution .... 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 be come rich."
Natty later, nevertheless, as a member of British Parliament, fought vociferously against legislation proposed to restrict immigration. The fact that the Aliens Act was eventually passed, in 1905, if nothing else, Ferguson notes, gave the lie to anti-immigration campaigner Arnold White�s claim that "the Prime Minister and the Cabinet of England alter their policy ... at the frown of the Rothschilds."
Immigration came up again 60 years later, when German and Austrian Jews fled to Britain and France in the face of Nazi persecution. In December 1938, a shockingly ambivalent Victor - Nathan�s great-great-grandson - declared to an audience: "The slow murder of 600,000 people is an act which has rarely happened in history. In spite of humanitarian feelings, we probably all agree that there is something unsatisfactory in refugees encroaching on the privacy of our country, even for relatively short periods of time."
The Rothschilds themselves emerged from World War II relatively unscathed - most of their stolen artwork was recovered by the Allies and only two members of the family died, one of them ironically Nathan�s great-great-grandson�s estranged wife Lili, who�d already reverted to her original title, comtesse de Chambure, and who asked her husband in 1940: "Why should the Germans harm me? I am from an old French Catholic family." She was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944 and brutally murdered at the Ravensbruck camp.
Believers in the Jewish conspiracy will be disappointed to learn that the Rothschilds initially were not in favor of establishing a Jewish state. Much to the chagrin of Theodor Herzl, who offered to make a Rothschild the first "prince" of the new state but eventually denounced the family as "a national misfortune for the Jews," the Rothschilds refused to lend their support to the idea - although individual Rothschilds, especially James�s eldest son Edmond, had been lending their support to establish Jewish settlements in Palestine since the 1880s. But even Edmond�s efforts, stresses the author, did not constitute political Zionism. "Indeed, Edmond explicitly advised the settlers to seek Ottoman citizenship."
The family�s opposition was primarily based on the feeling that a Jewish state would encourage anti-Semites to question the existing national identities of assimilated Jews around the rest of the world.
World War I brought some of the Rothschilds closer to the concept of Zionism, but Ferguson points out that the extent of their "conversion" is often overstated because of Walter�s role as the addressee of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Other members of the family remained less than enthusiastic. Within a week of the declaration, Nathan�s great-grandson Lionel established a League of British Jews "to uphold the status of persons professing the Jewish religion; to resist the allegation that Jews constitute a separate political nationality" and to oppose "the tendency ... to fix upon the Jews the acceptance of a nationality other than, and in addition to, that of the country of our birth or where we have lived and worked." Even as late as 1946, Victor defended the policy of restricting immigration to Palestine while speaking in the House of Lords.
The fact that the Rothschilds were against the creation of a Jewish state may be surprising, but it is not necessarily horrifying. That members of the family actually lobbied from their gilded perches against accepting Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, however, is a deeply disturbing deviation from a long and generous tradition, and deserved more profound treatment than is provided here by Ferguson.
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