History of the Jews (56 page)

Jews were abundantly justified in viewing radical attitudes to them with grave suspicion. There was a worm in the apple which the revolutionary goddess proffered them. The events of 1789 were a product of the French enlightenment, which was strongly anti-clerical and, at bottom, hostile to religion as such. This posed a problem. Much was permitted to clever writers in eighteenth-century France, but direct attacks on the Catholic Church were dangerous. It was at this point that they found Spinoza’s work particularly useful. Concerned to develop a rationalist approach to Biblical truth, he had inevitably exposed the superstitions and obscurantism of rabbinical religion. He had pointed the way to a radical critique of Christianity too, but in doing so he had assembled the materials for an indictment of Judaism. The French
philosophes
were willing to follow him in the first, but they found it safer to do so by concentrating on the second. Thus they turned on its head the old Augustinian argument that Judaism was a witness to the truth of Christianity. It was, rather, a witness to its inventions, superstitions and sheer lies. They saw Judaism as Christianity taken to the point of caricature, and it was on this ugly travesty that they concentrated. Here, they insisted, was an example of the distorted effects that the enslavement of religion can produce on a people.

In the
Dictionnaire philosophique
(1756), Voltaire argued that it was absurd for modern European society to take its fundamental laws and beliefs from the Jews: ‘Their residence in Babylon and Alexandria, which allowed individuals to acquire wisdom and knowledge, only
trained the people as a whole in the art of usury…they are a totally ignorant nation who for many years have combined contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition with a violent hatred of all those nations which have tolerated them.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ he added in a condescending afterthought, ‘they should not be burned at the stake.’
¹¹⁶
Diderot, editor of the
Encyclopédie
, was less abusive but in his article
Juifs (philosophie des)
he concluded that the Jews bore ‘all the defects peculiar to an ignorant and superstitious nation’. The Baron d’Holbach went much further. In a variety of books, especially his
L’Esprit du Judaisme
(1770), he portrayed Moses as the author of a cruel and bloodthirsty system which had corrupted Christian society too but had turned the Jews into ‘the enemies of the human race…. The Jews have always displayed contempt for the clearest dictates of morality and the law of nations…. They were ordered to be cruel, inhuman, intolerant, thieves, traitors and betrayers of trust. All these are regarded as deeds pleasing to God.’
¹¹⁷
On the basis of this anti-religious analysis, D’Holbach heaped all the common social and business complaints against the Jews.

Hence the French enlightenment, while helping Jewish aspirations in the short term, left them with a sombre legacy. For these French writers, above all Voltaire, were widely read throughout Europe—and imitated. It was not long before the first German idealists, like Fichte, were taking up the same theme. The works of Voltaire and his colleagues were the title-deeds, the foundation documents, of the modern European intelligentsia, and it was a tragedy for the Jews that they contained a virulently anti-Semitic clause. Thus yet another layer was added to the historical accumulation of anti-Jewish polemic. On top of the pagan plinth and the Christian main storey there was now placed a secular superstructure. In a sense this was the most serious of all, for it ensured that hatred of the Jews, so long kept alive by Christian fanaticism, would now survive the decline of the religious spirit.

Moreover, the new secular anti-Semitism almost immediately developed two distinct themes, mutually exclusive in theory but in practice forming a diabolical counterpoint. On the one hand, following Voltaire, the rising European left began to see the Jews as obscurantist opponents to all human progress. On the other, the forces of conservatism and tradition, resenting the benefits the Jews derived from the collapse of the ancient order, began to portray the Jews as the allies and instigators of anarchy. Both could not be true. Neither was true. But both were believed. The second myth was unwittingly aided by Napoleon’s well-intentioned attempts to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ himself. In May 1806 he issued a decree convening an Assembly of
Jewish Notables from all over the French empire (which included the Rhineland) and the Kingdom of Italy. The idea was to create a permanent relationship between the new state and the Jews on the lines of those Napoleon had already concluded with the Catholics and the Protestants. The 111-strong body, elected by Jewish community leaders, met from July 1806 to April 1807, and provided answers to twelve questions the authorities put to it, concerning marriage-laws, Jewish attitudes to the state, internal organization, and usury. On the basis of these answers, Napoleon replaced the old communal organization with what were termed consistories, as part of a general Jewish statute which regulated the conduct of those now seen, not as Jews, but as ‘French citizens of the Mosaic faith’.
¹¹⁸

By the standards of the day, this was progress, of a sort. Unfortunately, Napoleon supplemented this secular body by convening a parallel meeting of rabbis and learned laymen, to advise the Assembly on technical points of Torah and halakhah. The response of the more traditional elements of Judaism was poor. They did not recognize Napoleon’s right to invent such a tribunal, let alone summon it. None the less, the rabbis and scholars met, February-March 1807, in considerable splendour and with suitable ceremony. The body was dubbed the Sanhedrin.
¹¹⁹
It attracted infinitely more attention than the serious, secular gathering, and lingered in the European memory long after Napoleon’s Jewish policy had been forgotten. On the right of the political spectrum, already violently suspicious of Jewish activities because of their real or supposed radical purpose, the meeting of the fake Sanhedrin—a body which had not existed for a millennium and a half—set up powerful conspiratorial chemistry. Was this not merely an open and sanctified gathering of a conclave which convened secretly all the time? Memories stirred of the secret international Jewish assemblies which had supposedly met to pick the town selected each year for the ritual murder. Thus a new conspiracy theory appeared, launched the same year by the Abbé Barruel in his book
Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme
. It adumbrated most of the fantasies later set forth in myths about the ‘Elders of Zion’ and their secret plots. The Sanhedrin also attracted the attention of the new secret police organizations which the autocracies of central and eastern Europe were creating to counter the radical threat, now seen as a permanent challenge to traditional order. And it was from the
milieu
of the secret police that the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was eventually to emerge.

Hence when the ghetto walls fell, and the Jews walked out into freedom, they found they were entering a new, less tangible but equally hostile ghetto of suspicion. They had exchanged ancient disabilities for modern anti-Semitism.

On 31 July 1817 a precocious twelve-year-old boy, Benjamin Disraeli, was baptized into the Anglican Church, at St Andrew’s, Holborn, by the Rev. Mr Thimbleby. This was the culmination of a quarrel between the boy’s father, Issac D’Israeli and the Bevis Marks Synagogue, on an important point of Jewish principle. In Judaism, as we have noted, service to the community was not an option or a privilege, but an obligation. In 1813 the well-to-do Mr D’Israeli had been elected a warden or parnas, in strict accord with the laws of the Bevis Marks congregation. He was indignant. He had always paid his dues and considered himself a Jew. Indeed, as an antiquarian author he had actually written an essay called
The Genius of Judaism
. But his major work, by contrast, was a five-volume life of King Charles the Martyr. He had a low opinion both of Judaism and of Jews. In his book
Curiosities of Literature
(1791) he had described the Talmud as ‘a complete system of the barbarous learning of the Jews’. He thought the Jews had ‘no men of genius or talents to lose. I can count all their men of genius on my fingers. Ten centuries have not produced ten great men.’
¹
So he wrote to the Chamber of Elders that he was a man ‘of retired habits of life’, who had ‘always lived out of the sphere of your observation’; and that such a person as himself could on no account perform ‘permanent duties always repulsive to his feelings’.
²
He was fined £40, but the matter was allowed to lapse. Three years later it was resumed, and this time D’Israeli withdrew from Judaism completely and had his children baptized. The breach was significant for the son, for Britain, and much else. For Jews were not legally admitted to parliament until 1858, and without his baptism Disraeli could never have become Prime Minister.

Seven years after Disraeli’s baptism, on 26 August 1824, a similar event took place in the German town of Trier, this time involving the six-year-old Karl Heinrich Marx, as he was now renamed. This
family apostasy was more serious. Marx’s grandfather was rabbi in Trier until his death in 1789; his uncle was still the rabbi. His mother came from a long line of famous rabbis and scholars, going back to Meier Katzellenbogen, a sixteenth-century rector of the talmudic college in Padua.
³
But Marx’s father, Heinrich, was a child of the enlightenment, a student of Voltaire and Rousseau. He was also an ambitious lawyer. Trier was now in Prussia, where Jews had been emancipated since the edict of 11 March 1812. In theory it was still in force, despite Napoleon’s defeat. In reality it was evaded. Thus, Jews could train in law, but not practise it. So Heinrich Marx became a Christian and, in due course, rose to be dean of the Trier bar. Karl Marx, instead of going to the
yeshiva
, attended Trier High School, then in charge of a headmaster later sacked for his liberalism. His baptism proved to be even more significant to the world than Disraeli’s.

Conversion to Christianity was one way in which Jews reacted to the age of emancipation. Traditionally baptism had been an escape from persecution, and emancipation should have made it unnecessary. In fact, from the end of the eighteenth century it became more common. It was no longer a dramatic act of treason, a change from one world to another. With the decline of the part all religion played in society, conversion might be less of a religious act than a secular one; it might be quite cynical. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who had himself baptized the year after Karl Marx, referred to the act contemptuously as ‘an entrance-ticket to European society’. During the nineteenth century, in east-central Europe, at least 250,000 Jews bought their tickets.
⁴
The German historian Theodor Mommsen, who was a great friend of the Jews, pointed out that Christianity was not so much a name for a religion as ‘the only word expressing the character of today’s international civilization in which numerous millions all over the many-nationed globe feel themselves united’.
⁵
A man felt he had to become a Christian in the nineteenth century in the same way he felt he had to learn English in the twentieth. It applied to countless non-white natives as well as Jews.

For a Jew, everywhere except in the United States, remaining a Jew was a material sacrifice. The Austrian novelist and newspaper editor Karl Emil Franzos (1848-1904) said that it took Jews different ways: ‘One Jew can’t bring himself to make the sacrifice and gets baptized. A second makes it, but in his heart regards his Judaism as a misfortune and comes to hate it. A third, just because the sacrifice has been so heavy, starts to grow closer to his Judaism.’
⁶
The rewards of baptism could be considerable. In England, from the mid-eighteenth century
onward, it removed the last obstacles preventing a Jew from getting to the top. The millionaire Samson Gideon was prepared to make the sacrifice himself but not to impose it on his son. Accordingly he was able to get Samson Gideon Junior made a baronet while he was still at Eton, and in due course the boy became an
MP
and an Irish peer. Sir Manasseh Lopez accepted baptism and became an
MP
; so did David Ricardo; a third ex-Jewish
MP
, Ralph Bernal, rose to be Chairman of Committees (Deputy Speaker).

On the Continent, Judaism remained an obstacle not just to a political career but to many forms of economic activity. Even Napoleon had imposed (1806) some legal restrictions on Jews. They lapsed in 1815 and the restored Bourbons, to their credit, did not renew them; but not until 1831, when Jews were granted equal rights with Christians, did they feel legally secure, and the old Jewish oath lasted another fifteen years. The articles of the German Confederation (1815) deprived Jews of many of the rights they had been granted in Napoleon’s time, especially in Bremen and Lübeck, where they were banned altogether for a time, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Mecklenburg. In Prussia Jews remained subject to poll-tax, the Jewish annual tax, a registration levy and a ‘lodging increment’. They could not own land or exercise a trade or profession. They were confined to ‘authorized emergency business’ which the guilds would not touch, or money-lending. There was a further Prussian reform in 1847, and the following year the revolution produced a list of ‘Fundamental Rights of the German People’, establishing civil rights on a non-religious basis, which were included in the constitutions of the majority of German states. Yet residence restrictions on Jews remained in most of them until the 1860s. In Austria, overall legal emancipation did not come until 1867. In Italy, the fall of Napoleon put the clock back for Jews nearly everywhere, and it took another generation to restore the rights first gained in the 1790s. Not until 1848 did permanent emancipation come in Tuscany and Sardinia, followed by Modena, Lombardy and Romagna (1859), Umbria (1860), Sicily and Naples (1861), Venice (1866) and Rome (1870). This is a bald summary of a long and complicated process, involving many setbacks, retractions and exceptions. Hence even in western Europe, the process begun in 1789-91 in France took eighty years to complete purely in a nominal legal sense. Further east, especially in Russia and Rumania, Jewish disabilities remained severe.

These delays and uncertainties explain why so many Jews took their ticket to society through baptism. But there were other solutions to the ‘problem’ of being a Jew in the nineteenth century. To many Jews, the
ideal one had been found by the Rothschilds. They became the most illustrious exponents of the new phenomenon of eighteenth-century finance, the private bank. Such private finance houses were founded by many Jews, chiefly descendants of court Jews. But the Rothschilds alone escaped both baptism and failure. They were a remarkable family because they contrived to do four difficult and often incompatible things simultaneously: to acquire immense wealth quickly and honestly; to distribute it widely while retaining the confidence of many governments; to continue to earn huge profits, and to spend them, without arousing popular antagonism; and to remain Jewish in law and, for the most part, in spirit too. No Jews ever made more money, spent it more self-indulgently, or remained more popular.

Yet the Rothschilds are elusive. There is no book about them which is both revealing and accurate.
⁷
Libraries of nonsense have been written about them. For this the family is largely to blame. A woman who planned to write a book entitled
Lies About the Rothschilds
abandoned it, saying: ‘It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but it proved impossible to find out the truth.’
⁸
The family was highly secretive. That was understandable. They were private bankers. They had confidential relations with several governments as well as innumerable powerful individuals. They were Jews, and therefore particularly vulnerable to destructive litigation. They kept no more documentation than was necessary. They systematically destroyed their papers, for all kinds of personal as well as business reasons. They were particularly concerned that no details of their lives should be used to promote anti-Semitism. So their deaths were followed by holocausts of private papers even larger and more drastic than those of Queen Victoria’s family. Their latest historian, Miriam Rothschild, believes there was a further reason. They kept no muniment room. They were not interested in their history. They were respectful towards their ancestors, as a matter of good form, and prudently thought about tomorrow. But they lived for the present and did not care deeply about past or future.
⁹

All the same, the salient facts about the Rothschilds are clear enough. They were a product of the Napoleonic Wars, just as the first phase of large-scale Jewish finance was a product of the Thirty Years War, and for the same reason: in wartime, Jewish creativity comes to the fore and gentile prejudice goes to the rear. In all essentials, the family fortune was created by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in London. What happened was this. Until the beginning of the revolutionary wars in France, in the mid-1790s, European merchant banking was dominated by non-Jews: the Barings of London, the Hopes of
Amsterdam and the Gebrüder Bethmann of Frankfurt. The war quickly expanded the money-raising market and so opened room for newcomers.
¹⁰
Among them was a German-Jewish group—Oppenheims, Rothschilds, Heines, Mendelssohns. The Rothschild name derived from the sixteenth-century red shield on their house in the Frankfurt ghetto. The family patriarch, Mayer Amschel (1744-1812), was a money-changer who also traded in antiques and old coins. He branched into textiles, which meant a British connection, and from selling old coins to William
IX
, Elector of Hesse-Cassel, he became his main financial agent. The elector had made himself very rich by supplying mercenaries to the British army. So that was another English connection.

In 1797 Mayer Amschel sent his son Nathan to England to attend to his affairs there. Nathan went to Manchester, the centre of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution and of what was rapidly becoming a world trade in cotton manufactures. He did not make cottons himself but bought them from small spinners, sent them out for printing, and then sold the finished product to Continental buyers direct, by-passing the fairs. He thus pioneered a path later trodden by other Jewish textile families: the Behrens in Leeds, for example, and the Rothensteins in Bradford.
¹¹
Nathan’s direct-selling method involved giving three months’ credit, and that in turn meant access to the London money market. He had already ‘studied’ there under his father’s connection, Levi Barent Cohen, and married Cohen’s daughter Hannah. In 1803 he transferred his operations to London, in time to enter the government loan business as the war expanded. The British government needed to sell £20 million of loan stock every year. The market could not absorb this amount directly, so portions of it were sold to contractors who found customers. Nathan Rothschild, who had already established a good reputation for his bills of exchange in the textile trade, participated in these contractor syndicates and at the same time acted as an acceptance house for international bills of exchange.
¹²
He had one enviable advantage in getting working capital. After the disastrous Battle of Jena in 1806, the Elector of Hesse-Cassel sent his fortune to Nathan in London for investment in British securities, and Nathan built up his own resources while serving William
IX
’s interests too. Thus Nathan’s reputation in the City was established. But he also excelled in the traditional Jewish skill of transferring bullion quickly and safely under trying conditions. In the six years 1811-15, Rothschild and the British Commissary-in-Chief, John Herries, contrived to get £42.5 million in gold safely to the British army in Spain, of which more than half was handled by Nathan
himself or by his younger brother James, operating from France.
¹³
By the time of Waterloo, the Rothschild capital was £136,000, of which Nathan in London had £90,000.
¹⁴

James’s operations in Paris from 1811 marked the expansion of the family network. A third brother, Salomon Mayer, founded a Vienna branch in 1816, and a fourth, Karl Mayer, set one up in Naples in 1821. The eldest son, Amschel Mayer, ran the Frankfurt branch after the old patriarch died in 1812. This network was ideally suited to the new era of peacetime finance which opened in 1815. Raising the vast sums needed to pay the armies had brought into existence an international finance system based on paper and credit, and governments now found they could use it for all kinds of purposes. In the decade 1815-25 more securities were floated than in the whole of the preceding century, and Nathan Rothschild gradually succeeded Barings as the principal house as well as London’s top financial authority. He did not deal with volatile Latin American regimes but mainly with solid European autocracies—Austria, Russia, Prussia, known as the Holy Alliance; he raised an enormous sum for them in 1822. He handled seven of the twenty-six foreign government loans raised in London, 1818-32, and one jointly, making a total of £21 million or 39 per cent of the whole.
¹⁵