The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Sometimes Dr. Rosen seemed blind to distasteful realities of the workers’ paradise. When a critic objected that the Soviets would betray the Jews, Joseph Rosen reacted in high dudgeon, asserting that nearly 90 percent of the Soviet people were peasants whose lives were better after the Revolution. Felix could also duck some ugly truths. When asked about the persecution of rabbis under the Bolsheviks, he deplored it, but was quick to note that the Soviet government was improving the economic lot of the Jews.14

  In the last analysis, it was impossible for these capitalist islands to survive in a socialist sea. Stalin was extremely anti-Semitic and by the late 1920s had purged Jews from high positions. In late 1929 Communist party ideologists (including Jewish ones) denounced the foreign bourgeois organizations behind the Agro-Joint, as the great wave of forced collectivization got under way. In January 1930, the Joint Office in Berlin sent a confidential cable to New York that resonated with horror: “Stalin group complete control adopted decidedly left wing policy.” It described the ruthless extermination of Kulaks, or rich peasants, and the brutal collectivization of millions of poor ones.15 Before long, Jewish colonies were forced to accept as much as 50 percent non-Jewish workers, destroying their rationale for being.

  Felix was terribly shocked by events, and Rosen struggled to prevent him from losing heart. In 1930, Max warned his brother that the colonies couldn’t withstand Stalinist policy and that the dream had expired.16 Agro-Joint autonomy was whittled away by ideological assault. Where it once built individual houses, it now had to create houses with communal arrangements and state agronomists superseded those from the Joint. Many Jews who had welcomed the colonies as havens from state interference began to abandon them. As many Jews drifted off to work in factories and became approved proletarians, the very need for the colonies seemed to disappear. By 1932, the Soviets began a program to dismantle the Agro-Joint project in stages.

  As the settlements evolved into a bizarre hybrid of Park Avenue charity and Marxist agriculture, some Agro-Joint staffers evolved into Soviet fellow-travelers. In the mid-1930s, the group sent Evelyn Morrissey to spend four weeks in the Soviet Union. She wrote a book about her travels in which she seemed bewitched by the country and gushed about the marble pillars, wide platforms, and leather seats of the Moscow subway. She solemnly visited Lenin’s tomb and stared agog at Moscow construction sites. She concluded: “We have read much of forced and prison labor conditions and its horrors, but here in these golden fields of sunflowers we cannot visualize what it means.”17

  Until the very end, Felix was reluctant to surrender the Agro-Joint experiment. In 1937, its factories and workshops were absorbed into local Soviet agencies. A few years later, the State Department informed the Joint that the Soviets had confiscated its funds and shot many Jews.18 Hundreds of Agro-Joint agronomists were evidently imprisoned or vanished. In 1940, the last assets were transferred to the Soviet government. However worthy and ambitious, the experiment had backfired and vindicated the warnings of the Zionists. Whether from confusion, embarrassment, or disappointment, the episode was buried, forgotten, obliterated. Most people don’t know it ever happened or that in the 1920s American capitalists had briefly been the largest landlords in the Soviet Union.

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  Zionist displeasure over the Soviet misadventure was exacerbated by a severe economic downturn in Palestine in the late 1920s. Weizmann repeatedly complained to Felix about high unemployment in Tel Aviv and the costly dole needed to cope with it. In 1927, the Zionist enterprise itself seemed in peril as more Jews left Palestine than arrived. When Felix donated fifty thousand dollars to cushion unemployment, Weizmann responded with extreme gratitude. That year, Felix also participated in the Survey Committee, which worked to establish spending priorities for Palestine.

  Weizmann felt confident that he had implanted in Felix and Frieda an enduring interest in a Jewish homeland. Now he started to court the German Warburgs. German Jews generally felt threatened by the Zionist movement. Max mocked his brother’s flights of enthusiasm about Palestine and faulted his handsome bequest to the Hebrew University. Like other German Jews, Max dreaded the dual loyalty charge and stressed that his principal fidelity rested with Germany, not Palestine. He viewed Palestine as a possible sanctuary to restore the Jewish spirit, a cultural gift to mankind, but not as a refuge for stateless people.

  Hence, when Weizmann wooed Max in Berlin in 1928, he proceeded in low-key style. “It is admitted on all sides in Germany that any favourable attitude on his part would be of enormous value in German Jewish circles,” Weizmann told Felix.19 Later, Weizmann would grumble that Max had “never been friendly” to the Zionist cause.20 During their two-hour talk in Berlin, they were joined by Max’s daughter, Gisela. The sixteen-year-old Gisi was a skinny, idealistic teenager, petite and blue-eyed, who hungered for religious involvement. She said she felt like a fool when she sat in synagogue and didn’t know Hebrew.21 A principled girl, she once learned that a friend’s parents had excluded Jewish girls from a dance. She approached the girl and said they would stay friends, but she would never set foot in her house again.22 Max found his youngest daughter’s passionate idealism praiseworthy, if occasionally excessive.

  Gisi sat rapt during the two-hour talk. Max frequently contradicted Weizmann and came across as an unyielding German nationalist. After the meeting, Gisi went into the bathroom and burst into tears. When Max asked why she was crying, she said bluntly: “Because Mr. Weizmann was so much more convincing than you were.” Of her conversion to Zionism by Weizmann, Gisi said, “He picked me like a ripe apple.”23 Weizmann reciprocated Gisi’s admiration and predicted that she would someday be his secretary. In alarm, Max and Alice packed Gisi off to a rugged Zionist camp, hoping a summer of shoveling manure and menial tasks would cure her. The tactic boomeranged and she was soon sending letters to Weizmann in Hebrew. After leaving school, she worked for Youth Aliyah, which trained adolescents for rural life in a future Jewish state.

  A more fateful encounter occurred between Weizmann and Max’s exquisitely beautiful eldest daughter, Lola Hahn-Warburg. While her sisters Renate and Gisi took their Abitur and Anita attended the Salem school, “Stupid Lola,” as her mother called her, received private instruction and a strict Victorian upbringing. Lola found bright, fiery, intellectual men irresistible and they fully repaid the compliment. Max said that a father of daughters was nothing but a cannon to shoot down boys, and with Lola his cannon had to boom away. When she fell in love with a Viennese banker in Hamburg, Max had the young man transferred back to Austria. When Max prodded his feisty daughter to marry a suitable Swiss banker, she retorted, “If you want to merge with that particular bank, why don’t you do so outright instead of using me.”24

  In 1921, Lola had married Rudolf Hahn, who came from a powerful Jewish industrial family associated with the Warburgs. Rudo was then apprenticing in the foreign exchange department of M. M. Warburg. With her stubborn, independent streak, Lola took the hyphenated name of Hahn-Warburg. Rudo’s older brother, Kurt, had been secretary to Prince Max of Baden and the founder of the progressive Salem school. From an emotional (but not sexual) standpoint, Lola’s marriage to Rudo would be a ménage à trois. Lola was forever spellbound by the charismatic Kurt, who sparkled beside the stolid, manly, sports-minded Rudo. Years later, when Kurt told Lola that he had picked her as Rudo’s wife the first instant he saw her at a ball, Lola shot back, “Why didn’t you ask me yourself?”25

  By the time she met Weizmann, Lola had blossomed into a glamorous Berlin hostess, with an enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile. A woman of fine-boned beauty, she combined great willpower with physical fragility. Even as a young woman, she had a slight hand tremor so that people at parties would hold straws to her mouth and feed her cocktails. “She had an intense way of establishing contact with people,” said a friend. “She asked penetrating, interesting questions and always maintained a lively interest.”26 Fiercely principled, a born fighter, she wanted to be more than a social lioness. As a
Hilfsverein member, she had already helped to rescue Jewish children stranded in Poland.

  In the late 1920s, Berlin Jews were swept up in a vogue for the Habimah theater troupe, the first Hebrew theater. Started in Moscow and influenced by Konstantin Stanislavsky, its eclectic repertoire ran the gamut from Shakespeare to Sholom Aleichem. When it got to Berlin in 1927, it was nearly bankrupt. Along with two other rich boosters, Margot Klausner and Wilfrid Israel, Lola became the group’s financial backer, soliciting funds in Berlin drawing rooms. She learned Chaim Weizmann was in Berlin and went to his hotel to ask for a donation. He refused to divert money from his Zionist work, but Lola evidently made a strong impression on him.

  The mutual attraction was foreordained. Weizmann was a mesmerizing orator and committed to a noble crusade—a sure recipe to entice Lola. Weizmann and his wife, the elegant, snobbish Vera, had briefly separated in 1925. Although they were reunited the next year, Weizmann pursued romances with other women, and Lola was certainly among the most important of these liaisons. After the cool, rather remote Vera, Lola must have seemed hot-blooded indeed. Of this affair, we shall say more later. We should note that Weizmann was also aware that Lola might convert Max to Zionism. As he told Felix after meeting with Max, “I have great hope that his daughter, Lola, will continue the good work.…”27

  Adopting a tactic he had used with Felix, Weizmann persuaded Max that he couldn’t judge Zionism fairly from afar. So Max decided to make his first trek to Palestine. In April 1929, he and Alice, along with Gisi and Anita, met Felix and Frieda in Genoa. Proceeding to Jerusalem, they were met by Weizmann, who had been extremely sick and defied his doctor’s orders to stay in bed, so important did he deem the Warburg trip. Staying at the American School for Oriental Research, the group observed excavations at the Wailing Wall next door. Every morning, cars would arrive to whisk them to kibbutzim or historic shrines, all accompanied by the hypnotic, running commentary of Chaim Weizmann. The place exerted its spell on the Warburgs. “Nobody had told us how beautiful the country was,” said Anita.28 Gisi wrote to Aby that Palestinian Jews were the world’s best, tough and self-sacrificing, “with blond, strong, Hebrew-speaking farmers’ children.”29

  Everywhere Felix was received as a great patron and Max was impressed by his social skills; he hadn’t appreciated before the amazing rapport his brother had developed with people of varied backgrounds. Previously blasé about Palestine, Max marveled at the land reclamation and the draining of malaria-infested swamps and at how downtrodden Jews from the Pale were turned into dignified, self-reliant figures. He grew enthusiastic about the Holy Land as a laboratory for a more humane capitalism—a quixotic turn typical of Max. “Both brain and brawn are being developed,” he told a Berlin meeting. “When the farm laborer returns to his home from the fields, he finds a well-stocked library at his disposal, where he not only can read the latest literature on agricultural subjects or on Palestine, but can obtain a knowledge of things outside his immediate scope and horizon.”30 Max helped to start an economics archive in Palestine. He believed Palestinian Jews could only prosper in harmony with their Arab neighbors and opposed tariffs that might segregate the Jewish economy from the Mideast marketplace.

  To ensure a steady cash flow for the Hebrew University, Weizmann contrived a little plot. Before the Warburgs arrived, Weizmann told F. H. Kisch to propose to Felix that he buy coastal land for an orange plantation, with its revenues earmarked for the university. “It should be pointed out to him that there are 70,000 or 80,000 dunams of land available on the coast useful for orange plantations, in a pivotal position, the most valuable land in Palestine, yielding a good return.…”31 Indeed, Felix bought a lovely orange grove on the main highway to Jaffa and had an architect draw up plans for a house, hoping to spend a month there each year. After Palestine, Felix and Frieda vacationed in Cannes with Chaim and Vera Weizmann. This perhaps represented the high-water mark in the highly mutable relationship between the Warburgs and Weizmann. Back in New York, Frieda began taking Hebrew lessons, frugally scribbling her exercises on the backs of envelopes.

  When Theodor Herzl first launched the Zionist movement in the 1890s, he had expected affluent Jews to bankroll it. Yet from the outset, the poorer masses had provided the foot soldiers and the emotional impetus for the movement. Now rich German and American financiers seemed ready to fulfill the role Herzl envisaged. The occasion for this rapprochement was a Zurich meeting in the summer of 1929, when Zionists and non-Zionists created a comprehensive Jewish Agency, the administrative body for world Jewry provided under the British Mandate. Before the meeting, Felix and Weizmann retreated to Louis Marshall’s house in Saranac Lake, New York, to thrash out a compromise plan. Zionists and non-Zionists would split the Agency seats fifty-fifty in a so-called “pact of glory.” Under this mutually beneficial arrangement, Weizmann would get the non-Zionist money needed to solve Palestine’s economic problems, while non-Zionists welcomed an opportunity to develop Palestine without being obligated to create a Jewish state.

  Wariness existed on both sides. Some hard-core Zionists dismissed the pact as a simple sellout for money. When they grumbled that the new recruits would dilute the movement’s purity, Weizmann assured them that Zionists would retain the upper hand. When non-Zionists wondered whether they were being tricked into supporting a Jewish state, Felix countered that their role had nothing to do with Jewish nationalism. Afterward, Weizmann rhapsodically thanked Felix for his help: “It would not have been possible but for your kind magnanimous soul and Mr. Marshall’s broadminded desire to see things through.”32

  When the Jewish Agency met at Zurich’s Tonhalle in August 1929, it proved a grand moment of amity and concord for Jews everywhere. Besides Felix and Louis Marshall, a cavalcade of Jewish dignitaries entered the hall, including Albert Einstein, Léon Blum, Sir Herbert Samuel, and Lord Melchett. The Jewish elite was joined by many poor Jews who came on foot. As one participant said, “Dress ranged from Oriental-looking caftans to the most modern western styles.”33 The Warburgs were well represented. Felix’s daughter, Carola, dropped off the children with Frieda and came along with her father while Weizmann persuaded Lola to come. Max turned down an invitation from Felix to participate in the Jewish Agency, yet convinced other German Jews that their involvement in no way impugned their German loyalty. “They are assisting in an heroic work without doing their native Germany the least slight or harm,” he maintained.34

  Cheered by a standing ovation, Weizmann spoke in Hebrew and English, but mostly in German. He extended an olive branch to non-Zionists. “We never wanted Palestine for the Zionists; we wanted it for the Jews.… The Balfour Declaration is addressed to the whole of Jewry.”35 The meeting represented a personal triumph for Weizmann’s legerdemain. He was elected president of the Jewish Agency and Felix became chairman of the Administrative Committee. For a fleeting moment, the political infighting ceased, dissolved in a spirit of fraternity.

  As a rule, Felix Warburg steered clear of Jewish politics, preferring to mediate among warring groups. In charity work, he always pleaded for the common cause against factional agendas. As Carola said, “Father was never one who was very much interested in political action and maneuvering. He rather preferred to have men of good will sit around a table and come to a consensus and agreement.”36 Here, however, Felix brought an inappropriate standard to the bruising world of Jewish politics: Zionism was a tough-minded movement, not a global philanthropy, and the great conciliator would find himself pestered by conflicts that couldn’t be healed by soothing words or compromise. In the struggle for Palestine, people weren’t sane or moderate, but uncompromising. Felix’s work in the Jewish Agency would therefore be his life’s most exasperating experience, for he never entirely understood the nature of the beast.

  While the Jewish community celebrated the pact of glory, it was received with equivalent dread by the Arabs. In late August 1929, a minor altercation between Jews and Arabs at the Wailing Wall flared up into a confrontation. Se
izing on statements made by Zionists in Zurich, the grand mufti of Jerusalem warned of Jewish genocide against Arabs and issued a plea for Holy War against Jewish settlers. Sword-wielding Arab mobs rushed into the Jewish quarters of Jerusalem and Hebron, massacring 133 Jews and wounding three hundred others. There were only a few hundred British police in Palestine, and their first response seemed slow and half-hearted. The belated crackdown by British troops imported from Egypt proved bloody, leaving 116 Arab dead and 230 wounded.

  On September 11, the Jewish Agency suffered another terrible setback. Louis Marshall died from pancreatic disease, leaving Felix as undisputed head of American non-Zionists. (That year, he also joined the executive committee of the American Jewish Committee.) Then the crash on Wall Street dealt a staggering blow to short-lived hopes that Zionism had surmounted its chronic financial crisis.

  Far from discouraging Jews, the Palestinian riots prompted a huge outpouring of support. Felix and Lord Melchett headed a worldwide call for help and appealed to British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald. Felix and Frieda contributed two hundred thousand dollars to pay Jewish teachers, and Felix also organized the Palestine Emergency Fund, which raised more than five million dollars to repair riot damage. This money reposed in the Broadway National Bank and Trust Company in New York since its chairman, David Brown, took part in the relief effort. Felix was extremely dubious about the safety of this bank and, as we shall see, his hunch would prove sound.