History of the Jews (57 page)

In Vienna, the Rothschilds sold bonds for the Habsburgs, advised Metternich and built the first Austrian railway. The first French railways were built by Rothschild Frères in Paris, who also raised money, in turn for Bourbons, Orleanists and Bonapartes, and financed the new king of Belgium. In Frankfurt they floated issues on behalf of a dozen German thrones. In Naples, they raised money for the government there, for Sardinia, Sicily and the papal states. The combined Rothschild capital rose steadily, to £1.77 million in 1818, to £4.3 million in 1828, to £34.35 million in 1875, of which the London house controlled £6.9 million.
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The wide spread of the network’s contacts made the money-power the firm could actually deploy very much greater. They exploited to the full the traditional Jewish flair for news-gathering and transmission. Jews by mid-century were already turning from banks to wire-services. Paul Julius Reuter (1816-99), whose name was originally Israel Beer Josaphat, left his uncle’s bank in Göttingen to set up the world’s greatest news-agency in 1848. Adolf Opper, or as he called himself Adolphe Opper de Blowitz (1825-1903), made himself, as
The Times
Paris correspondent, the centre of Europe’s finest personal news-network with private telegraph lines when necessary. But no newspaper has ever been better served with key financial news than the Rothschilds. As late as the 1930s, their
couriers were still recruited in the Folkestone area, descendants of the sailors who took cutters carrying dispatches across the Channel in the age of Waterloo.
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Unlike the old court Jews, the new kind of international firm the Rothschilds created was impervious to local attack. In 1819, as if to demonstrate that newly acquired Jewish rights were illusory so far, anti-Semitic violence broke out in many parts of Germany. These ‘Hep Hep’ riots as they were called (perhaps after a crusader war-cry, or more likely after a goat-drover’s call from Franconia) included an assault on the Rothschild house in Frankfurt. It made no difference. Nor did a further attack during the 1848 revolution. The money was no longer there. It was paper, circulating through the world. The Rothschilds completed a process the Jews had been working on for centuries: how to immunize their lawful property from despoiling violence. Henceforth their real wealth was beyond the reach of the mob, almost beyond the reach of greedy monarchs.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the financial genius who made the firm’s fortunes, died in 1836 in Frankfurt, while attending the marriage of his eldest son Lionel to Charlotte, daughter of his brother Karl, head of the Naples branch. The Rothschilds nearly always married each other: when they spoke of ‘marrying out’ they did not mean out of Jewry but out of the family. The object of intermarriage was to keep dowries within the firm; though it was said that wives’ settlements were usually shares the men wanted to unload, such as South American railway stock.
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The Lionel-Charlotte wedding was celebrated at the old family houses in the Judengasse, where the eighty-four-year-old matriarch, born Gudule Schnappers, who had produced nineteen children, still lived: she was to survive another decade. Nathan’s death was a matter of considerable importance: the carrier-pigeon dispatched to London with news of it was shot down over Brighton and was said to have borne the cryptic message, ‘
Il est mort
.’
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But his branch, N. M. Rothschild, heart of the firm’s power, continued to grow in strength, as was natural: London was the financial centre of the world, Rothschilds its most reliable pillar. Thus, in the sixteen years 1860-75, foreign governments raised over £700 million in London. Of the fifty banks involved, ten were Jewish, including such important names as Hambro, Samuel Montagu and Helbert Wagg.
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Rothschilds, however, played the biggest and most varied role of all fifty.

Inevitably, such financial pull brought political influence as well. It was the young Disraeli who first argued that Jews and Tories were natural allies, pointing out that the critical City of London elections of
June 1841 and October 1843 had both been decided by Jewish votes: in the second, he noted, the Rothschilds brought out the Jews to win the seat for the anti-Corn Law Liberal even on a Saturday!
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Lionel, as head of the family, won the City seat himself in 1847 (though he could not take his place in parliament until disabilities were finally removed in 1858), and the Tory leader, Lord George Bentinck, pointed out in a letter to J. W. Croker the significance of the vote: ‘The City of London having elected Lionel Rothschild one of her representatives, it is such a pronunciation of public opinion that I do not think the party, as a party, would do themselves any good by taking up the question against the Jews. It is like [County] Clare electing O’Connell, or Yorkshire Wilberforce. Clare settled the Catholic question, Yorkshire the slave trade and now the City of London has settled the Jew question.’
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But the Rothschilds wisely did not try to force this issue, or any other. They knew time was on their side and were prepared to wait for it. They hated to make undue use of their financial power or to be seen exercising it at any time. Collectively, the Rothschilds always favoured peace, as one would expect; individually, the branches tended to back the policy aims of their respective countries, as one would also expect.
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In Britain, where they had most power if they chose to exercise it, a recent sifting of the evidence shows they rarely if ever took the initiative in pushing government.
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In moments of doubt over foreign affairs, it was their custom to ask government what ministers wanted them to do, as for instance during the 1884 Egyptian crisis.

They took, in fact, a very English line of deprecating money as such—they always referred to it as ‘tin’—and using it, rather, to build up a social position. They created two palatial ghettos, one urban, the other rural. The urban one was at the bottom corner of Piccadilly, where it joins Park Lane. Old Nathan began the process in 1825, when he stopped living ‘over the shop’ in 2 New Court, St Swithin’s Lane in the City, and bought 107 Piccadilly from Mrs Coutts, the banker’s widow. Other members of the family, English and Continental, followed him. His son Lionel built 148 Piccadilly, next to Apsley House, in the 1860s, providing it with the finest ballroom in London: the housewarming was combined with the marriage of his daughter Evelina to her cousin Ferdinand of Vienna; Disraeli proposed the toast to the bride’s health. Ferdinand himself bought 143 Piccadilly, and that too had a famous ballroom, all in white. Next door, at 142, was his sister Alice. At the back, Leopold de Rothschild bought 5 Hamilton Place. Round the corner, at 1 Seamore Place, was Alfred de Rothschild, the famous dandy. Hannah Rothschild, the heiress who married Lord Rosebery, took over the original 107.
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For a country house, old Nathan paid £20,000 for Gunnersbury, near Acton, in 1835. But that was a false start. The rural ghetto began when his widow bought a house near Mentmore in the Vale of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Gradually they all settled in this part of Bucks, spreading into nearby Hertfordshire. Baron Mayer Rothschild built Mentmore Towers, modelled on Wollaton. Sir Anthony de Rothschild moved into Aston Clinton. In 1873 Lionel bought Tring, in Hertfordshire, for £250,000. He also had a 1,400-acre estate at Halton, later owned by Alfred de Rothschild. Then there was Leopold de Rothschild’s house Ascott, at Wing near Leighton Buzzard. In the 1870s Baron Ferdinand built Waddesdon, and he had other houses at Leighton Buzzard and Upper Winchendon. His sister Alice had Eythrop Priory. So the Vale of Aylesbury became Rothschild country. They owned 30,000 acres there and represented it in parliament from 1865 to 1923.

The rural headquarters was Tring, extended by Lionel’s son and heir Nathan to an estate of 15,000 acres. He became the 1st Lord Rothschild and Lord-Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire. In the true Jewish tradition, he turned Tring into a miniature welfare state. He supplied the locals with water and electricity, a fire service, a reading-room, allotments, a health service, even a cemetery for their dogs; for employees there were holiday camps, a pension scheme, apprenticeships, an unemployment plan, hampers and parties. The estate engaged in stock-breeding, sylviculture, sheep trials and conservation experiments.
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Lord Rothschild’s father, Lionel, had taken charge of many government loans, to finance Irish famine relief, fight the Crimean War, buy the khedive’s Suez Canal shares; he was very close to Disraeli, much closer than either found it convenient to admit, both in the City and in public life. He was felt to be disinterested because it was known he had forgone a £2 million profit rather than float a £100 million loan for the anti-Semitic Russian government.
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He was on excellent terms with Gladstone and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville. But he got on equally well with the Tories. He transformed Lord Randolph Churchill from a conventional slanger of Jewish ‘vested interests’ into a notable philosemite. He turned round A. J. Balfour too, making him into perhaps the most effective British friend the Jews ever had. He was the unofficial spokesman for the City from his father’s death in 1879 to his own in 1915. In her account of him, his great-niece Miriam Rothschild reflects that in world-wide terms he probably had a greater influence than any Jew since antiquity.
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‘I should like to know’, asked Lloyd George rhetorically in his 1909
Limehouse speech, ‘is Lord Rothschild the dictator of this country?’ He was nothing of the sort: merely beneficently powerful. In 1915 on his death-bed in 148 Piccadilly, he was visited by Lord Haldane (temporarily in charge of the Foreign Office) who asked him to stop a neutral ship taking gold to Germany. He said: ‘That is a very simple matter,’ and scribbled an instruction on the back of an envelope.
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Rothschild was popular because his princely acts of charity were not just wise and systematic but eccentric. Children who waved to his carriage were liable to experience a shower of glittering half-sovereigns. His wife Emma denounced this as ‘insensitive and insulting’, but he replied that children took a different view and he was right—an old woman at Tring told Miriam Rothschild she remembered such an incident for the rest of her life. The Rothschilds were generally liked in England not just because they ran highly successful racing stables but because ‘they never pulled their horses’. So ordinary folk did not mind if Lady Rothschild’s chef, Grosstephen Senior, probably the world’s best, ran a fishmonger’s bill alone of £5,000 a year. Rothschild gave the East End cabbies he used a brace of pheasants each at Christmas, and when he died the costermongers put black crêpe on their barrows. The
Pall Mall Gazette
wrote: ‘It is owing to the life of Lord Rothschild that Great Britain has escaped those collections of race feeling…with which so many other countries have been embarrassed during the last generation. He was at once a Prince in Israel and an Englishman of whom all England could be proud.’

It was Disraeli who first perceived that the Rothschild approach, with its unaffected rejoicing in Jewish capacity, including skill in making money—to be spent equally joyfully—had a lot to be said for it. Early in his career he was enjoying the Gunnersbury hospitality, writing to his sister Hannah (1843): ‘I got well waited on by our old friend Amy, who brought me some capital turtle, which otherwise I would have missed.’
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Disraeli thought the Rothschilds were an immense asset to the Jewish race, to be boosted to the full at every opportunity. He published his novel
Coningsby
in 1844, the same year in which Marx, as we shall see, took a viciously destructive view of the ‘Jewish problem’. The all-seeing mentor of the tale is Sidonia, the Jewish superman, whom Disraeli let it be known was based on Lionel Rothschild. This was a very flattering portrait. But then Disraeli was always concerned to exaggerate Rothschild wisdom and foresight, just as he made mysteries and dramas of their activities. It was he himself who sensationalized the purchase of the khedive’s shares in 1876 and he was responsible for much of the absurd, but in Disraeli’s eyes valuable and creative, mythology which grew up around the family.

Of course Disraeli would have freely admitted that presenting Rothschild success as a magic fairy-tale could only work in a country like England where the political and social climate was hospitable. From 1826, when all restrictions were lifted, Jews were free to come to Britain from anywhere without hindrance. Once in, and naturalized, their position was summed up by Lord Chancellor Brougham in 1833: ‘His Majesty’s subjects professing the Jewish religion were born to all the rights, immunities and privileges of His Majesty’s other subjects, except in so far as positive enactments of law deprived them of those rights, immunities and privileges.’
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These restrictions did indeed exist, and Jews usually found out about them through test-cases. But once a difficulty had been discovered and agitated about, parliament, or the appropriate body, usually acted to give the Jew equality. Thus in 1833, the year of Brougham’s pronouncement, Jews were admitted to practise at the bar. Thirteen years later, a statute resolved in their favour the vexed question of whether Jews could own freehold land.

Moreover, from an early date, Britain had been prepared not just to welcome and accept Jews, but to help them abroad. The first time occurred in 1745, when Maria Theresa expelled Jews from Prague; her ally, George
II
, protested through diplomatic channels. In 1814 Lord Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary, instructed his envoy, the Earl of Clancarty, to ‘encourage the general adoption of a system of toleration with respect to individuals of the Jewish persuasion throughout Germany’. No doubt with the Rothschilds in mind, he made special efforts on behalf of the Frankfurt community. Britain also helped the Jews at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle.
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Lord Palmerston was very active on behalf of the Jews, both on general grounds of policy and because his stepfather-in-law, Lord Shaftesbury, believed strongly that the return of the Jews to Jerusalem would hasten the Second Coming.
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Between 1827 and 1839, largely through British efforts, the population of Jerusalem rose from 550 to 5,500 and in all Palestine it topped 10,000—the real beginning of the Jewish return to the Promised Land. In 1838 Palmerston appointed the first western vice-consul in Jerusalem. W. T. Young, and told him ‘to afford protection to the Jews generally’.
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Two years later he wrote to Lord Ponsonby, British ambassador in Constantinople, instructing him to put pressure on the Turks to allow Jews from Europe to return to Palestine. He was to argue that hard-working Jewish settlers backed by Rothschild money ‘would tend greatly to increase the resources of the Turkish Empire, and to promote the progress of civilization therein’. ‘Palmerston’, noted Shaftesbury, ‘has already been chosen by
God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people’; the letter to Ponsonby was ‘a prelude to the Antitype of the Decree of Cyrus’.