The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  If Frieda lightened up in later years, Alice Warburg never shed her rigidity. Suffering did not soften her personality; in fact, it made it even more brittle. Unlike Eric, Alice refused to forget the Third Reich and at first wouldn’t set foot in Hamburg. Fearing Eric might try to waylay her to Germany, she decided to boycott Europe. Only when Eric swore that he would never try to steer her back did she visit Lola and Renate in England. Old German sentiment welled up only once. When Chancellor Adenauer made his first official trip to America, Eric took his mother to hear him speak in German. At the end, she suddenly rose up from her aisle seat and made her way to the lectern. Extending her hand to Adenauer, she said, “Mr. Chancellor, that is the first time in many years that I am once again proud of a German!”5

  Nobody thought Alice could survive Max’s loss but she had her own plucky energy and proudly stoic humor. With Russian toughness in her soul, she never lost her martinet manner. With her cane, she would tap imperiously on Madison Avenue store windows to criticize the floral decorations. Taking refuge in art, she set up her easel en plein air and painted landscapes at Woodlands, in Scotland, and in the French Alps. Small, precise, elegant, she clung to small rituals of fashion, as if outer order might translate into inner peace. Eric left this telling image of her at Max’s grave: “Watching her stand high above the Hudson River at Father’s grave on his anniversary days, one cannot help but wonder if the flowers which she arranges for him again and again with endless pain in always varying ensembles do not give to her something similar to a prayer.”6

  Every Sunday, Alice brought caviar to Frieda at Woodlands. The two aging dowagers would converse on the balcony of the indoor pool, sitting beneath potted palms and watching their grandchildren splashing below. They had sixty years of turbulent, eventful history to share. On September 14, 1958, Frieda died in her sleep at Meadow Farm. Alice was in Europe at the time and ailing and her children pleaded with her to skip the funeral. “Friedel would have gone,” she said with crisp resolution and she went.7 On December 7, 1960, Alice Magnus Warburg, age eighty-seven, also went to her grave.

  Before she died, Frieda had decided to deed the large house and 150 Woodlands acres to the local school district. Suburbanization had set in locally, and Paul’s old house, Fontenay, had been torn down to make room for a real estate development. The imposing Woodlands entrance now yielded to a shopping center, and the main house became a school administration building. The Warburg wood was chopped down for a high school. Despite decades of active philanthropy, Frieda’s estate was still valued at $9.1 million. Having made several munificent gifts in the 1950s, she pledged in her will another third of her money to pet Warburg charities, including the beloved Joint, the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, and the Hebrew University.

  After Frieda’s death, the Warburgs suddenly seemed more scattered and anonymous. “It was sad that with her death, the cohesive force in the family became splintered,” Edward wrote. “From then on, while we all remained close, the family broke up into its several component parts.”8 Over the previous century, the tight-knit Hamburg family had been dispersed to many countries and then split up within their adopted lands. But the Hamburg bank had endowed them with shared purpose and interests, drawing them into a partnership both real and figurative. They had also been united by suffering, the recurring bouts of anti-Semitism reminding them of their common ancestry.

  Now the American family bonds were dissolved by enormous wealth and success. The American Warburgs proved the possibility of successful acculturation, but at the expense of their religious identity. With their good looks and great charm, they found a welcome place in many blue-ribbon families. Piggy’s daughter, Felicia, married Robert Sarnoff, son of the chairman of RCA and NBC; she later married Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. Eddie’s daughter, Daphne, would marry Michael Astor.

  It was Carola who held together the Warburg family. She kept up many charitable alliances, and her afternoon tea table was the Warburg clubhouse. She nearly ended up married to Lord Mountbatten after Edwina Mountbatten—the granddaughter of Sir Ernest Cassel—and Walter Rothschild both died in the 1960s. “Dickie” and Edwina had been frequent Woodlands guests and one of their daughters spent the war with Carola. In later years, Dickie stayed with Carola whenever he visited New York; they shared ice-cream sodas, Rockefeller Center, and the Rockettes. For his seventieth birthday, Carola gave him a swimming pool and Dickie invited her over to use it. “He was famous for his courage but just on a personal basis he was so stimulating, attractive and so very thoughtful,” said Carola.9 If they had met twenty years earlier, Mountbatten mused, they might have married. Now he felt it too late for anything beyond an affectionate friendship.

  Henceforth, the Warburgs would resemble other modern families, leading separate lives, seeing one another at the random, intermittent collisions of wedding and funerals. They had lost the tradition that welded them together. Judaism had been the focal point for Warburg charitable and political involvement, tying them to transcendent causes and steering them away from the pursuit of pleasure that comes to dominate many rich families. The American Warburgs found it harder to maintain the disciplined sense of duty amid material splendor that had been the historic hallmark of the family. And the fabled fortune was chopped ever finer by inheritance. In many ways, the withering of Jewish identity completed the process of assimilation that had started in late nineteenth-century Germany. Once emptied of spiritual content, Judaism became a series of onerous obligations. For a socially ambitious family, mingling with fancy gentile society, it was a barrier to social advancement, an unwanted burden from a darker past.

  Ironically, within a generation, discrimination against American Jews would largely cease in housing, schools, clubs, and corporations. In fact, by century’s end, the American Jewish experience would seem to prove that Jews could be a successful minority, even as the German-Jewish experience seemed to prove the reverse. The Nazi experience itself had worked to strengthen the group identity of the American Jewish community.

  The Warburgs retained their Jewish charitable interests, less from conviction than from homage to the past. Their ambivalence was seen in their attitudes toward Israel. Before World War II, the American Jewish community had been embroiled in feuds between Zionists and non-Zionists. Then the Holocaust convinced nearly all Jews of the need for a sovereign state. The American Warburgs were proud and jubilant when Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, and won President Truman’s blessing. Felix’s nemesis, David Ben-Gurion, became prime minister, Weizmann took the ceremonial post of president, and James G. McDonald was named first U.S. ambassador. Some sixty thousand German Jews ended up in Israel and became important factors in the country’s life. In many ways, the European socialism represented by Ben-Gurion and other early leaders pleased the Warburgs more than the conservative nationalism that later predominated, for the socialists at least embodied the Utopian, idealistic vision of Israel that had animated Felix, Frieda, and Rabbi Judah Magnes.

  First as cochairman of the Joint starting in 1939, then chairman from early 1941—a tenure interrupted only by his war service—Eddie headed the organization until 1965, carrying on Warburg tradition in Jewish philanthropy. Right after the war, he toured Jewish communities across Europe for the Joint and was decorated by Belgium and Italy for his work in helping to evacuate five hundred thousand Jews from displaced-persons camps. During the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Palestine, Weizmann delightedly accepted Eddie’s help, exulting that Felix’s son “has come very close to the Zionist ideology.”10 Eddie led an emergency fund-raising drive to house Holocaust survivors in Palestine and another to evacuate Jews from Arab countries after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war worsened their plight. In the 1950s, he also became the sole Jew on the New York State Board of Regents.

  For years before the war, the Joint had vied with the United Palestine Appeal (UPA) for charity dollars, the Joint being favored by the fat cats of Jewish philanthropy and the UPA by the Zionist mas
ses. After Kristallnacht the two groups decided to stop bickering and merge their fund-raising into the United Jewish Appeal with Eddie leading its first fund drive in 1939. From 1950 to 1955 Eddie served as its president, helping to raise one billion dollars for the UJA, which became the principal source of American money for Israel. (Frieda would contribute up to $500,000 per year.) He also recruited Nelson Rockefeller for the nonsectarian side of the campaign.

  By the 1950s, the world of American Jewry had been radically transformed by prospering Russian and Polish Jews. The former pushcart peddlers from the Lower East Side now owned small businesses and sent their children to college to become doctors and lawyers. As professional charity staffs tapped this new pool of wealth, they no longer needed to rely upon the German-born banker and merchant princes. The old Jewish power structure had been based on a lopsided distribution of wealth between German Jews and their poor Eastern European brethren. Now the astonishing growth of the American Jewish middle class reduced the role of the Jewish banking families. The state of Israel also turned the whole power structure topsy-turvy.

  Given this situation, it is to Eddie Warburg’s credit that he maintained the Warburg presence in the Jewish charity universe. As a gregarious fund-raiser, he exhibited a schmaltzy side that appealed to the Ostjuden and brought out a warm side of his own nature. Whether in New York or Florida, he pressed the flesh in a way that would have horrified the starchy old German-Jewish elders. Eddie’s influence never rivaled that of Felix, but at a time when Israel relied upon American Jewish goodwill, he occupied a pivotal position. The American Jewish community was now the world’s largest, and New York City was its thriving hub. Eddie visited Israel more than thirty times, becoming a tireless booster of its image as a democratic island. On trips, he often acted as cicerone for wealthy donors, introducing them to Abba Eban, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, or his close friend, the Austrian-born mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek.

  In the 1950s, the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental body that handled immigration to Israel, received as much as two thirds of its budget from the United Jewish Appeal. Anything that threatened the UJA therefore had major implications for a Jewish state predicated on gathering Jews worldwide. As Eddie helped to funnel massive amounts of money to Israel, he had to counter a stinging attack from his cousin, Jimmy Warburg. Jimmy always claimed to have no problem about religion and professed contempt for Jews who changed their name to hide their identities. “I have never pretended not to be a Jew; I’ve always declared myself as a Jew, but I am always a little puzzled to know why I do, except from a sense of loyalty and of not wanting to be a renegade.”11 This was much more high-minded than he actually felt. He elsewhere admitted that, “Religion was an empty space in my family background.”12 By no accident had he married three non-Jewish women and moved to the WASP enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut, when it wasn’t hospitable to Jews.

  For Jimmy, Judaism represented a set of universal moral principles and he thought a good Jew was a world citizen. Never endorsing Zionism, he faulted American Zionists during the 1930s for focusing on German-Jewish emigration to Palestine as the sole legitimate solution to the problem. Having been bar mitzvahed and taught Hebrew by Rabbi Magnes, Jimmy supported his appeal for a binational Arab-Jewish state, a fanciful notion that had intrigued Felix too. He recognized that the West’s shameful failure to absorb persecuted Jews in the 1930s and 1940s made Israel an absolute necessity, but he worried that American support of Israel would alienate the Arabs. To Adlai Stevenson, he touted an even-handed Mideast policy, condemning both Arab terror raids against Israel and Israeli reprisals against Arab villages.

  Jimmy fearlessly criticized Israeli policy at a time when American Jews reflexively rallied around Israel, treating its policies as sacrosanct. In the historic mold of Max and Felix, he saw the need for a sanctuary for persecuted Jews. At the same time, he hotly disputed Zionist ideology that urged all Jews to move to Israel. Under the 1950 Law of Return, Israel recognized the right of every Jew in the world to settle there. In Jimmy’s view, this would engender frightful population pressures and ultimately an expansionist Israeli state. Where most American Jews approached Israel warily, Jimmy waded in with both feet, saying in June 1958 that, “The treatment of the Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens is not only morally indefensible but stultifies the Israeli Government’s professed desire to see justice done to the refugees.”13 Israeli policy, he insisted, was debated with more candor in Israel than in American Jewish circles. “If an American Jew deprecates the growing influence of the Orthodox theocracy in Israel, or the chauvinistic worldwide nationalism of Zionist leadership, or the treatment of the Arab minority in Israel, he is likely to be denounced as a renegade, if not as an anti-Semite.”14

  Once again, Jimmy courted controversy with his own personal brand of courage and perversity. He didn’t hedge his views or modulate his language. In incendiary language, he inveighed against the United Jewish Appeal, lashing out at the leadership long symbolized by the Schiffs and Warburgs. It wasn’t lost on the Warburgs that Eddie had been five-time national chair of the UJA. Jimmy committed the unpardonable sin of criticizing Israel in public. On November 27, 1959, he delivered an inflammatory speech to Congregation Mishkan Israel in New Haven that caused an uproar. He conceded the need for a haven from anti-Semitism, but said, “It is quite another thing to create a new chauvinistic nationalism and a state based in part upon medieval theocratic bigotry and in part upon the Nazi-exploited myth of the existence of a Jewish race.”15 Jimmy warmly supported charitable work in Israel, but blasted the United Jewish Appeal for contributing charitable funds to propaganda activities that encouraged emigration to Israel. He also charged the UJA with aiding particular Israeli political parties, including the nationalist Herut Party, later the Likud Party associated with Menachem Begin. It is interesting that Jimmy’s position echoed Felix’s last speech at Briar cliff Lodge in 1937, when he said that if a Jewish state were established, he would urge friends to contribute only through nonpolitical channels.16

  With the New Haven speech, Jimmy achieved the status of a certified Traitor to His Religion, having broken the tacit code that American Jews could only dissent privately from Israeli policy. The UJA trotted out Senator Jacob Javits of New York to defend the organization and Jimmy was tagged an enemy of Israel and an Arab propagandist in various quarters.17 While he suffered unfair abuse, he had also expressed his views in a way calculated to antagonize his opponents. Still the angry young man, he needed to rile authority figures and later conceded that in attacking the UJA, he hadn’t sufficiently emphasized his support for Israel.18

  After the New Haven speech, Eddie stopped talking to Jimmy. In the end, Jimmy won the fight. Afraid of losing its tax-exempt status, the UJA began to segregate political from charitable contributions in 1961. That year, when Jimmy underwent a cancer operation, Eddie sent him an ivory walrus as a peace overture. The rift was healed, but the damage was done. The episode confirmed Jimmy’s status as a black sheep of the American Warburgs.

  No less than her brother, Bettina defied convention and broke from the Warburg mold. She, too, had prided herself on her distance from the Warburgs and her repudiation of their conservative, monied past. Even when Bettina finally married in her early forties it caused a row. Nina had been a patroness of Malvina Hoffman, a talented sculptor who had studied with Auguste Rodin. In the 1920s, Malvina had married a gentle, effeminate Englishman named Samuel Grimson, a concert violinist who had been gassed in the trenches during World War I. While on a twenty-four-hour leave to see the Cremona violins during the war, his hands were crushed in a truck accident, ending his career. Afterward, he collected antique instruments and paintings and invented a color-television tube.

  When Nina gave Malvina and Sam a cottage at Woodlands, Bettina, age twelve, set her sights on Sam right away. Malvina may have been either lesbian or bisexual—according to which Warburg you talk to—and that, in turn, may have encouraged Bettina to th
ink she could succeed with this older man. When Bettina snatched Sam away from Malvina after an extended romance and married him in 1942, there was a noisy ruckus among the Warburgs, many of whom took Malvina’s side. Starting with her marriage to Sam Grimson (who died in 1955), Bettina either played the role of daughter to a much older man—reenacting her relationship with Paul—or mother to a much younger man.

  Not surprisingly, Jimmy griped about Sam, and Bettina’s baby talk with him drove Jimmy wild. Bettina, in turn, was hypercritical of Jimmy’s three wives. Brother and sister circled each other like scorpions, never able to let go. Raised in a gloomy, puritanical household, they savored forbidden fruits and thought they had the power to do anything. Bettina became involved with psychoanalysis when it was daringly avant-garde and she developed into a doctrinaire Freudian. Extremely bright, she was also rigid and prone to stick reductive labels on people. She had no scruples about contacting analysts who were treating younger Warburgs to offer her own diagnosis and to reveal family secrets. Like Jimmy, she was smart, headstrong, and extremely willful. At the same time, she had a flirtatious, girlish side that would suddenly peep out beneath the stern professional air.

  For all their competitiveness, Bettina was asked to read and criticize Jimmy’s writings in manuscript. Once, when Jimmy couldn’t make a foreign-policy trip to Iran, he suggested that she take his place. This began an infatuation with Iran that lasted until the shah’s overthrow dashed Bettina’s dreams. She spent years working to modernize the Iranian medical system, helping to complete the Shiraz Medical Center and acting as a roving psychiatrist. The younger Warburg women were stunned that Bettina developed such admiration for Iran, not just because of her Jewish background, but because of the subservient role of women in Islamic culture. Bettina brushed aside objections, saying Westerners didn’t understand the Moslem world.19 As early as 1960, Eric warned her that the shah’s repressive government would produce popular revulsion. Bettina preferred to believe that such bogus rumors were fanned by regime opponents. Her love of Iran forms a striking parallel with Jimmy’s apostasy on Israel. To the extent that Bettina cared at all about Israel, it involved Palestinian justice and the need for Arab-Jewish reconciliation. Besides her Iranian work, she also donated enormous time and money to Native American projects. Bettina was a woman of exceptional generosity, who quietly paid for the college education of at least two dozen students over the years without any fanfare. (She called them “Grimson Scholars.”) But, like Jimmy, she always had to lead the parade and never fit easily into a traditional family setting.