The House of Rothschild

by Ferguson, Niall

  Another welcome ally in this period was Lady Ely, who invited Natty, Alfred, Ferdinand and Evelina to a select ball for the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1865.

  But neither she nor the heir to the throne was in a position to influence the Queen on matters of royal patronage. That Victoria was reluctant to give “a title and mark of [her] approbation to a jew” had been intimated to the Rothschilds as early as 1867 by Disraeli, though it should be emphasised that Lionel himself had no desire to accept a peerage from Disraeli. “Our friend [Charles Villiers, the Liberal MP for Wolverhampton] is famously intrigued about the paragraph in the papers respecting my being raised to the Peerage,” he remarked in a letter to his wife in March 1868:Just the same as everything else, the Liberals would like to carry out everything themselves ... He could not understand nor could they at Lady P[almerston]’s that I won’t accept anything from the present Government. They all fancy Dis is under great obligations to us—so the best thing is to hold my tongue and let them think what they like—it is only amusing to hear all their nonsense.

  That was prescient, for no sooner had he become Prime Minister than Gladstone proposed Lionel as one of eleven new Liberal peers he wished the Queen to create. The idea, as expressed by the Liberal leader in the Lords Earl Granville, was that the Rothschilds now represented “a class whose influence is great by their wealth, their intelligence, their literary connections, and their numerous seats in the House of Commons. It may be wise to attach them to the Aristocracy rather than to drive them into the democratic camp.” But the Queen would have none of it.44 Granville had to report regretfully that the Queen had “a strong feeling on the subject”: “To make a Jew a peer,” she told him, “is a step she cd. not consent to.” Beaten, Granville advised Gladstone not to force the issue: “She will yield, but reluctantly, and there will be criticism enough reaching Her, to confirm her in her opinion that she was a better judge than her Govt, and make her more difficult on another occasion.” Gladstone was irked by what seemed to him an inconsistency, and refused to find an alternative (Christian) “commercial man.” “The merit of Rothschild is that his position is well defined and separated,” he argued with his usual intellectual rigour. “Her argument is null and void. If it be sound, she has been wrong in consenting to emancipate the Jews.” Lionel, he argued, stood “so much better for the promotion, than anyone whom we can put in his place.” To exclude him would be “to revive by Prerogative the disability which formerly existed by Statute, and which the Crown and Parliament thought proper to abolish.” The Prime Minister explored every available option—giving Lionel an Irish peerage, for example—but was eventually forced to back down. He sought to revive the idea again in 1873, but was again overruled. As a result, Lionel died a commoner.

  Was Queen Victoria an anti-Semite? She certainly did admit to a “feeling of which she cannot divest herself, against making a person of the Jewish religion, a Peer.” But the charge of racial prejudice seems unfounded in view of her affection for Disraeli, who made so much of his Jewish origins.45 In fact, her objections were as much social and political as religious. As she put it in her journal, “I shall have to refuse on the score of his religion, as much as on that of his wealth, being in fact derived largely from money contracts &c., also pointing out the folly of the Whigs wanting to make such a number of Peers.” She elaborated on the second point in a letter to Gladstone of November 1, 1869:She cannot think that one who owes his great wealth to contracts with Foreign Govts. for loans, or to successful speculations on the Stock Exchange can fairly claim a British peerage. However high Sir [sic] L. Rothschild may stand personally in Public estimation, this seems to her not the less a species of gambling, because it is on a gigantic scale—and far removed from that legitimate trading which she delights to honour, in which men have raised themselves by patient industry and unswerving probity to positions of wealth and influence.—such men as the late Thomas Cubitt [the builder], or George Stephenson would have done honour to any house of Peers.

  This, however, can be dismissed as mere excuse-making, as at this date there were already three peers whose fortunes stemmed from banking.46 A more plausible reason for her opposition can be inferred from Granville’s allusion to “the present unfortunate antagonism between the Lords and the Commons.” The Lords had been the principal source of opposition to the admission of Jews into Parliament and had consented to a fudged compromise only in 1858, giving the Commons the right to modify its own oath to new members. The Queen may have feared that making Lionel a peer would lead to a repeat of the constitutional wrangles of the 1850s. It is noteworthy that Gladstone had deliberately raised the possibility of a “Jew peer” at the same time as that of a Roman Catholic peer (in the person of Sir John Acton). As Granville put it when the issue resurfaced in 1873, the idea of a Rothschild peerage was intended to “be a complement to that of the Catholic.” Much more was at stake here than a reward to a loyal Liberal MP for services rendered.

  It is worth noting that all this went on without any encouragement from the Rothschilds themselves. Many years before, Lionel had turned down the offer of a baronetcy as beneath his dignity, but by the 1860s he was evidently unwilling to chase after a peerage. “Rothschild is one of the best I know,” commented Gladstone as he broached the issue at Balmoral in 1873, “and if I could but get from him a Mem[orandum]. of certain services of his father as to the money during the war I think it wd carry the case over all difficulty. But though I have begged & they have promised for about 4 years, I have never been able to get this in an available form.” Nor can it be said that Lionel’s son set out to acquire a peerage for himself after his father’s death; on the contrary, as we shall see, his politics were increasingly at odds with those of Gladstone (so much so that Alphonse assumed it was Salisbury who had secured him the peerage in 1885). During the long debates between the Queen and her Prime Minister, the Rothschilds were entirely passive.

  So what happened between 1873 and 1885 to “overcome the strong scruples” in the Queen’s mind? As far as Gladstone’s secretary Hamilton was concerned, the significance of a Rothschild peerage had not changed: “[I]t removes the last remnant of religious disqualifications.” Natty himself echoed the sentiment when he thanked “the greatest champion of civil and religious liberty” for “bestow[ing] for the first time a peerage on a member of our faith”; and he doubtless relished re-enacting his father’s triumph in the Commons when, on July 9, 1885, he was sworn in with his hat on his head and his hand on a Hebrew Old Testament. Gladstone’s allusions to “really valuable public service” may help to explain why the Queen withdrew her opposition.47 True, Gladstone was alluding to Nathan’s role in the Napoleonic Wars; but, as we shall see, the Rothschilds’ direct and enthusiastic involvement in British imperial finance can really be dated from Disraeli’s period in office in the mid- 1870s, and it seems plausible that this did not go unnoticed by the Queen—though it is too much to portray the peerage as a direct reward for financial services rendered in Egypt. As we shall see, elevating Natty to the Lords may even have been Gladstone’s attempt to “kick upstairs” an increasingly troublesome backbench critic of his foreign policy.

  The Rothschild peerage also needs to be seen as part of a more general social sea-change. The aim, as Edward Hamilton put it, was “to give an addition to commercial strength to the House of Lords,” and Natty’s elevation coincided with Edward Baring’s becoming Lord Revelstoke. Cassis has also shown that a high percentage of City bankers were titled in the two and a half decades before the First World War and nearly a fifth of them acquired their peerages in the period after 1890. Most of the inherited peerages had been created only in the previous decade. (Lord Adding-ton, Lord Aldenham, Lord Avebury, Lord Biddulph and Lord Hillingdon were all hereditary peers created at around the same time.) The creations of 1885 were thus part of a veritable boom in City peerages. Moreover, Natty was soon joined in the Lords by other Jewish peers: Lord Wandsworth (Sydney James Stern), Lord Swaythling (Samu
el Montagu) and Lord Pirbright (Henry de Worms, himself a descendant of Mayer Amschel’s eldest daughter Jeanette).

  That did not mean that Natty’s elevation secured the “universal welcome” predicted by Gladstone; as Hamilton observed, some people “turn[ed] up their noses at the Rothschild peerage.” Such snobbery persisted; many of the adverse comments about Alfred and other members of the family cited above can be read as its typical expressions. For the Rothschilds, however, it was a moment to reassert familial pride. Unlike most other business peers, and to the delight of his relations, Natty retained his surname by taking the title of Baron Rothschild of Tring. After 1885 any traces of prejudice within the royal family seem to have vanished. Members of the Rothschild family were involved in the various commemorations of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee; and in May 1890 the Queen herself paid a visit to Ferdinand at Waddesdon. Indeed, the effete and fussy “Ferdy” became something of a royal favourite in his old age. The Queen also visited his sister Alice’s villa at Grasse several times while she was staying in the south of France in 1891.48

  In other words, the fact that the Rothschilds formally joined the aristocracy and entered “court society” in this period should not merely be seen as a sign of “feudalisation” or docile assimilation to the values of the established European elite. Even those of the fourth generation who devoted themselves to their gilded palaces and manicured gardens remained conscious and proud of their family’s Jewish identity. Ferdinand was typical in that he was (to quote Edward Hamilton again) “proud of his race and his family; and liked talking about his predecessors as if he had an illustrious ancestry and the bluest of bloods.” He, Alfred and Nathaniel had ceased to be hard-working businessmen; but in becoming fin de siècle aesthetes they had not ceased to be Jews, just as Hannah had not ceased to be a Jew in marrying a Scottish earl. Assimilation is the wrong word to describe the Rothschilds’ assertion of their own status as—in Charlotte’s idiosyncratic phrase—“the Caucasian royal family.” In the 1840s Georges Dairnvaell had commented that the Rothschilds were, after the Saxe-Coburgs, “the most numerous dynasty in Europe”; and the similarities between the two extended, cosmopolitan families had increased over the succeeding years. When Alfred visited Leopold II in Brussels in 1892, at least one of them saw it as a meeting of equals: “To me the King simply said: ‘Votre famille m’a toujours gate’ [‘Your family has always spoiled me’], upon which I replied: ‘Pardon Sire, c’est Votre Majesté qui a toujours gate notre famille.‘ Short and sweet.”49

  EIGHT

  Jewish Questions

  Gentlemen, if you do not give us your support, we will probably have to proscribe you ... If you do support us, however, we will make you greater than the modest founder of your house, or indeed his proudest grandson, could ever have dreamt... We will make you great as we shall take our first elected prince from your house.

  THEODOR HERZL, “ADDRESS TO

  THE ROTHSCHILD FAMILY COUNCIL,” 1895

  The relationship between the Rothschilds and the wider Jewish communities of Europe remained in many ways unchanged in the time of the fourth generation. The aristocratic marriages described in the previous chapter were, it must be emphasised, the exceptions. Most Rothschilds still married other Jews. Indeed, the really significant change in the period was that those other Jews were no longer other Rothschilds. In the third generation there had only been three such marriages, two of which were in fact to cousins through the female line. The first real Jewish outsiders to marry into the family were the Italian industrialist Baron Raimondo Franchetti, who married Sara Louise, daughter of Anselm, in 1858; and Cécile Anspach, who married Gustave the following year. The animosity felt by Betty and her daughter-in-law Adèle towards Cécile provides a good indication of how difficult it was for such outsiders to win acceptance by the family. After 1877 that changed, and marriage to other members of the Jewish social elite rapidly became the norm. In 1878 Wilhelm Carl’s daughter Minna married Max Goldschmidt, whose sister was Maurice de Hirsch’s wife. It gives an indication of how persistent the practice of endogamy was that Minna’s son Albert married Edmond’s daughter Miriam in 1910—by which time his father had taken the name von Goldschmidt-Rothschild on being ennobled.1 Another family which established marital links to the French Rothschilds in this period were the Halphens: in 1905 Alphonse’s son Edouard married Germaine Halphen and in 1909 Edmond’s son Maurice married her sister Noémie.

  Perhaps the best example of a dynastic alliance was between the Rothschilds and the Sassoons, a family who had made their fortune in India and the Far East, some of whom settled in England in this period. In 1881—at a ceremony attended by the Prince of Wales and notable for the wide press coverage it received—Leo married Marie Perugia, daughter of the Trieste merchant Achille Perugia, whose other daughter married Arthur Sassoon. Another link to the Sassoons was forged in 1887, when Gustave’s daughter Aline married Sir Edward Sassoon, son and heir of Albert Sassoon. And in 1907 Gustave’s son Robert married Nelly Beer, whose family was also linked by marriage to the Sassoons. All the other marriages of this generation were to wealthy Jews of a comparable social standing.2 This signalled the end of the marital exclusivism of the mid-nineteenth century and the integration of the Rothschilds—albeit as primus inter pares—into a wider “cousinhood” of wealthy Jewish families.

  The Rothschilds thus remained confidently Jewish; indeed, they became less remote from the Jewish community as a whole as a result of such marriages. True, there were flickers of religious uncertainty, and not only on the part of Constance. The tragic death of Alphonse’s and Leonora’s infant son René as a result of an infection (erysipelas) following his circumcision precipitated much soul-searching on Charlotte’s part. She was also shocked by the strictly kosher diet kept by Wilhelm Carl and his family: “To eat ... as they do,” she commented, noting their “wan and feeble” appearance, “means not to eat at all; it is worse than doing penance.” When they met in Frankfurt after a long separation, Natty thought his uncle Wilhelm Carl “too Caucasian in looks to be ornamental. His gait and manner and mode of speech are jewish, not his features.” Yet Natty’s own fidelity to the religion of his forefathers was unshakeable. As an undergraduate, he dismissed Paley’s Evidences of Christianity as “the most absurd conglomeration of words I ever broke my head over, so that there is no danger of my being converted as many up here have prophesied.” Leo had been forced to study more than his fair share of Paley too; but there is no mistaking the enthusiasm with which he described attending synagogue in Vienna with his uncle Anthony and cousin Albert in 1869. When a new synagogue was built at St Petersburg Place, Bayswater, in 1877 it was Leo who laid the foundation stone, as his father had done seven years before when work was begun on the Central Synagogue.

  Like their grandfather and father before them, Natty and his brothers were not much interested in the finer points of theology or religious ritual. In 1912, for example, Natty was reported as saying that he did “not consider it the part of an orthodox Jew to discuss the shape and size of a mikvah [Jewish bathhouse].” For them, religion meant the organisation and functioning of the Jewish community; and as Rothschilds, they regarded it as self-evident that they should act as the lay leaders of that community in England. The extent to which they were able to occupy this position in the late nineteenth century is remarkable. Natty was President of the United Synagogue from 1879 to his death in 1915 (though he took little interest in day-to-day matters).3 Between 1868 and 1941, a Rothschild served without interruption as treasurer of the Board of Deputies: first Ferdinand (1868—74) then Natty (to 1879) then Leo (to 1917) then Lionel. Natty was also honorary president of the Federation of Synagogues, president of the Jews’ Free School, vice-president of the Anglo-Jewish Association and a member of the Sanitary and Legislative Committees of the Board of Guardians. Leo succeeded him as president of the Free School and was also vice-president of the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter (see below). The Rothschilds also had influence over the Je
wish Chronicle when it was owned by Asher Myers (though not after it was acquired by the Zionist Leopold Greenberg in 1907). In France the Rothschilds built several new synagogues, including one in the rue de la Victoire (1877) and three others financed by Edmond between 1907 and 1913. By comparison, the Viennese Rothschilds were less engaged with their fellow Jews.

  To be sure, Rothschild primacy was not wholly undisputed in what was, after all, less a single community than a number of more or less distinct communities (besides the United Synagogue, there were also the Sephardic Spanish and Portuguese, the Reform and a growing number of Orthodox congregations established by immigrants from Eastern Europe). The most often cited example of a challenge to Natty’s position came with the creation in 1887 of the Federation of Synagogues, the brainchild of the bullion dealer and politician Samuel Montagu, which was intended to act as an umbrella for the Orthodox congregations. Natty had for some time been concerned about what he saw as the “spiritual destitution” of the East End, and at the Federation’s foundation he was made its president, but in December 1888 he was forced to surrender the office to Montagu after a confrontation at the United Synagogue Council over the admission of the Federation to the London Shechita Board (the authority overseeing ritual slaughter). It would seem that what he wished to achieve was the imposition of the United Synagogue’s authority over the newcomers—hence his original scheme for a large synagogue in Whitechapel Road to be linked to a “Jewish Toynbee Hall.”