The House of Rothschild

by Ferguson, Niall

  Drumont’s later Testament of an Anti-Semite (1894) further developed these poisonous ideas, partly in order to explain the limited political achievements of the anti-Semitic movement. Here he adopted a more pseudo-empirical style, calculating how much the Rothschilds’ supposed fortune of 3 billion francs would weigh measured out in silver—and how many men it would require to move it!—and comparing the number of acres of land owned by the Rothschild family with the number owned by the religious orders. If the Boulangists had eschewed anti-Semitism, it was only because “Rothschild had paid [them] 200,000 francs for the municipal elections, on condition that the candidates would not take an anti-Semitic stance,” and because the Boulangist leader Laguerre had personally received 50,000 francs. If the French economy was depressed, it was because “Léon Say ... had handed over the Banque [de France] to the German Jews,” allowing the Rothschilds to lend out its gold to the Bank of England.4 If France was internationally isolated, it was because the Rothschilds had handed over Egypt to England and financed Italian armaments with French capital. This last charge of lack of patriotism was repeated a few years later in The Jews against France (1899). “The God Rothschild,” Drumont concluded, was the real “master” of France: “Neither Emperor, nor Tsar, nor King, nor Sultan, nor President of the Republic ... he has none of the responsibilities of power and all the advantages; he disposes over all the governmental forces, all the resources of France for his private purposes.”

  Drumont was only the most prolific of a group of anti-Semitic writers of the period who directed their fire at the Rothschilds. Another purveyor of similar libels was Auguste Chirac, whose Kings of the Republic (1883) mingled old chestnuts like the myths of the Elector’s treasure and Waterloo with new claims about the Nord line and the Rothschilds’ relationship with the revolutionaries of 1848 and 1870-71. Once again, there was both a racial and a national dimension to the argument: not only were the Rothschilds Jews, they were also Germans—hence their eagerness to despoil France by financing reparations payments in 1815 and 1871. Chirac’s later book, The Speculation of 1870 to 1884 (1887), was a more sophisticated work which sought to explain the Rothschilds’ recent profits by analysing the fluctuations of bond prices in the period before and after the Union Générale crisis—a not unreasonable enterprise in itself, but compromised once again by its intemperate and unsubstantiated allegations against the Rothschilds and Léon Say. Though superficially empirical, this was in reality just another diatribe against “the triumph of the feudalism of money and the crushing of the worker” and the control of the Republic by “a king named Rothschild, with a courtesan or maidservant called Jewish finance.” The main allegation made here was that the Rothschilds had conspired to undermine French influence in Egypt for the benefit of England, as part of their historic mission to “kill France” by financial means. The outwardly unremarkable Alphonse was in truth “Moloch-Baal, that is to say the God Gold, marching towards the conquest of Europe and perhaps the world, possessing [real] power behind the royal names and political garb, having, in a word, all the profits and avoiding all the responsibilities.”

  Predictably, such diatribes were accompanied by numerous hateful caricatures, of which the best known is probably Léandre’s God Protect Israel. Here Alphonse is portrayed as an emaciated, half-slumbering giant who clutches the globe in claw-like hands and wears on his bald head a crown shaped like the golden calf (see illustration 8.i).

  In a similar vein is Lepneveu’s Nathan Mayer or the Origin of the Billions which portrays a bearded Rothschild with the body of a wolf lying on a bed of bones and coins on the battlefield of Waterloo (see illustration 8.ii). More crudely, another cartoon (probably from the political left) portrayed “Rothschild” as a giant pig being pulled in a carriage by ragged workers with the caption: “What a fat pig! He grows fat as we grow thin.”

  8.i: C. Léandre, Dieu protège Israel, Le Rêve (April 1898).

  Though primarily conpiracy theorists, writers like Drumont and Chirac were also preoccupied with the Rothschilds’ penetration of French high culture and society. In the second volume of Jewish France, Drumont devotes a long passage to the château and gardens at Ferrières. The art and furnishings, he concedes, are magnificent; what is lamentable is that so many jewels of French heritage should belong to Jews who can only jumble them together like so much “bric-à-brac.” Nor is it only French culture which the Rothschilds can buy. “This château without a past,” he comments, “does not recall the grand seigneurial lifestyle of the past”; yet the visitors’ book now contains “the most illustrious names of the French nobility.” A prince de Joinville—“a man in whose veins flow drops of the blood of Louis XIV”—abases himself before a mere “money-lender.” At Rothschild marriages, the list of noble names is complete: “[A]ll the [ancient] arms of France... gathered to worship the golden calf and to proclaim before the eyes of Europe that wealth is the sole royalty which now exists.” It is the same story at the costume ball given by the princesse de Sagan in 1885: “this miserable aristocracy” shamelessly rubs shoulders with Mme Lambert-Rothschild, Mme Ephrussi and the rest of “Jewry.” At heart a romantic Legitimist, Drumont regarded the Bourbon and Orléanist nobility as traitors to their Gallic race. It was a theme he returned to in his Testament, noting with dismay Charlotte’s purchase of “an abbey founded by Simon de Montfort” (Vaux-de-Cernay), Edouard’s election to the exclusive Cercle de la rue Royale and the presence of the usual grand names at a Rothschild garden party. Chirac too commented sourly on the relationship between the Rothschilds and the elite of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which had once disdained James and Betty but now accepted their children as social equals.

  8.ii: Lepneveu, Nathan Mayer ou l‘origine des milliards, cover of Musée des Horreurs, no. 42 (c. 1900).

  It was one of the oddities of the Jewish experience under the Third Republic that a high degree of social assimilation coincided with very public expressions of anti-Semitism. Nor was it merely a matter of outsiders like Drumont carping while royalist aristocrats put prejudice aside; often the very people who socialised with the Rothschilds sympathised with the views propounded by Drumont and Chirac. The almost schizophrenic nature of attitudes towards the Rothschilds can be illustrated with reference to two important contemporary sources: the Goncourt brothers’ journal and Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. The Goncourts not only shared Drumont’s views; they knew him well. Their journals for the period 1870 to 1896 are full of spiteful anecdotes about the Rothschilds’ “Jewish” character—their materialism, their Philistinism and so on. Yet the Goncourts were also themselves quite happy to accept Rothschild hospitality: discussing French engravings with Edmond in 1874 and 1887, dining with Nat’s widow in 1885, dining with Leonora in 1888, dining at Edmond’s in 1889. It was characteristic of the period that the Goncourts could quote Drumont approvingly less than a year after praising Rothschild cuisine; could dine with Drumont and listen happily to his talk of putting “Rothschild against a wall” in March 1887, then discuss engravings with Edmond that December; could dine at Edmond’s in June 1889, then exchange anti-Semitic anecdotes with Drumont in March 1890, just months before his abortive anti-Semitic call to arms on May 1.

  This world of Parisian salons, in which Jews and anti-Semites routinely mixed, was dramatically polarised in 1894 when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was accused of being a German spy, court-martialled, found guilty on the basis of forged documents and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Alphonse’s reaction to the allegations against Dreyfus was initially one of alarm at the effect the case would have in encouraging anti-Semitism, on the assumption that Dreyfus was guilty; but this soon turned to anger as the evidence accumulated to suggest that Dreyfus had been framed. According to one clerical memoir, Alphonse was “irritated by the condemnation of Dreyfus and by the indifference of the French aristocracy.” However, other members of the family were less willing to be identified publicly as “Dreyfus
ards,” preferring to try to minimise the schism within their own upper-class milieu.

  Proust gives a flavour of the atmosphere of this time, with Dreyfusard sympathies being studiously concealed by members of the heterogeneous circle around the duchesse de Guermantes. To Bloch, a Jew of relatively undistinguished origins, the very name Rothschild inspires awe; when he realises that an old English woman whom he has been patronising at the duchesse’s is “La baronne Alphonse de Rothschild” he is thunderstruck:At that moment there suddenly flooded through Bloch’s arteries so many ideas of millions and prestige... that it was as if he had suffered a stroke, a mental spasm, and he exclaimed involuntarily in the presence of the amiable old lady: “If only I had known!”—an exclamation of such stupidity that it kept him awake for eight nights in a row.

  The prince de Guermantes, on the other hand, will not even receive a Rothschild—indeed, would rather let a wing of his chateau burn down than ask for water-pumps from the neighbouring Rothschild house. In fact, he turns out to harbour secret Dreyfusard inclinations; but he keeps these hidden because to be identified as a Dreyfusard carries a social price. The duc de Guermantes pays that price when he fails to secure election to the presidency of the the Jockey Club because his wife “was a Dreyfusard ... received the Rothschilds, and... for some time... had shown favour to great international magnates who, like the duc de Guermantes himself, were half-German.” This in turn makes the Duke bitter:The Alphonse Rothschilds, although they have the tact never to speak about this abominable affair, are Dreyfusards in their hearts, like all Jews ... If a Frenchman steals or murders I do not feel obliged to find him innocent simply because he is a Frenchman. But the Jews will never admit that one of their fellow citizens is a traitor, although they know it perfectly well, and could not care less about the frightful consequences (the Duke was naturally thinking of the damned election...)

  The Dreyfus affair exposed similar attitudes on the political left as well. When a Jewish journalist named Bernard Lazare published a pro-Dreyfus pamphlet, he was immediately attacked by the socialist Alexandre Zévaès in the Petite République as “one of the faithful admirers of His Majesty Rothschild.”

  Such attitudes existed in England too. In June 1900 David Lindsay recorded in his diary his attendance at “Hertford House, where a large party invited by Alfred Rothschild and Rosebery assembled to meet the Prince of Wales.” “The number of Jews in this palace,” Lindsay declared,was past belief. I have studied the anti-semite question with some attention, always hoping to stem an ignoble movement: but when confronted by the herd of Ickleheimers, Puppenbergs, Raphaels, Sassoons and the rest of the breed, my emotions gain the better of logic and injustice, while I feel some sympathy with Lüger [sic] and Drumont—John Burns [the labour leader and future Liberal Cabinet minister], by the way, says the Jew is the tapeworm of civilization.

  Yet Lindsay continued to accept invitations to Waddesdon and Tring. Similar sentiments were sometimes privately expressed by non-Jewish bankers in the City, though none could avoid doing business with Jews. There are also a number of stereotypical Jewish financier-villains in late Victorian fiction: Trollope’s uncouth Melmotte in The Way We Live Now is not based on a Rothschild, but there is no mistaking the provenance of Baron Glumthal—“the great Frankfurt millionaire” with the “slightest trace of a foreign accent” and the politically all-powerful “house” in Charles Lever’s Davenport Dunn.

  The difference between England and France is that anti-Semitism was more likely to be given a political outlet on the left than on the right. Where Drumont was a frustrated clerical legitimist, the English writers who explicitly attacked the Rothschilds were as likely to be socialists or New Liberals like John Burns as radical nationalists. A good illustration is John Reeves’s book The Rothschilds: The Financial Rulers of Nations (1887), which returns a typical verdict: “The Rothschilds belong to no one nationality, they are cosmopolitan ... they belonged to no party, they were ready to grow rich at the expense of friend and foe alike.” Four years later, it was the Labour Leader which denounced the Rothschilds as ablood-sucking crew [which] has been the cause of untold mischief and misery in Europe during the present century, and has piled up its prodigious wealth chiefly through fomenting wars between States which ought never to have quarrelled. Wherever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumours of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity you may be sure that a hook-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbance.

  Perhaps the most intriguing case of all is that of the left-leaning Liberal J. A. Hobson, author of the classic Imperialism: A Study (1902). Like many radical writers of the period, Hobson regarded the Boer War as having been engineered “by a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race” who were “prepared to fasten on any ... spot upon the globe ... taking their gains not out of the genuine fruits of industry, even the industry of others, but out of the construction, promotion, and financial manipulations of companies.” There is no question that he regarded the Rothschilds as central to this group. It is true that in later years Hobson moved away from this anti-Semitic line of argument in favour of a more orthodox socialist anti-capitalism. But such rhetoric had become part of the political language of Edwardian radicalism. As we shall see, it was Lloyd George, the most radical of pre-war Chancellors of the Exchequer, who singled out Natty for a remarkable personal attack during the debates over his 1909 budget, though Lloyd George himself was denounced by the right for his own involvement with Jewish financiers (the Isaacs brothers) in the Marconi affair.

  8.iii: “Coin” Harvey, The English Octopus: It Feeds on Nothing but Gold! (1894).

  In America too there was anti-Rothschildism. Ever since the 1830s, the Rothschilds had been political targets in the United States, despite their relatively limited financial influence there. But even the attacks they had suffered during the Civil War paled alongside those during the brief heyday of the People’s Party in the 1890s. The Populists were essentially opponents of American entry into the gold standard, mobilising the discontent of mid-Western farmers with the low grain prices of the 1880s. However, their critique of the “gold gamblers of Europe and America” and “the secret cabals of the international gold ring” had a strong anti-Semitic as well as anti-English component, due not least to the prominent role played by the London Rothschilds in the loans which facilitated the American transition to gold. Gordon Clark’s book Shylock: as Banker, Bondholder, Corruptionist, Conspirator alleged that a deal had been struck between Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln and Johnson, and James de Rothschild: “The most direful part of this business between Rothschild and the United States Treasury,” he claimed, “was not the loss of money, even by the hundreds of millions. It was the resignation of the country itself INTO THE HANDS OF ENGLAND, as England has long been resigned into the hands of HER JEWS.” In Coin’s Financial School (1894), “Coin” Harvey depicted the world in the clutches of a huge, “English Octopus” bearing the name: “Rothschilds” (see illustration 8.iii). In the same author’s novel A Tale of Two Nations, the mastermind of the English plan to “destroy the United States” by demonetising silver is a banker named “Baron Rothe.” These allegations became something of an embarrassment when the Populist movement was absorbed by the Democrat Party. The Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan had to explain to Jewish Democrats that in attacking the Rothschilds he and the Populist leaders were “not attacking a race; we are attacking greed and avarice which know no race or religion.”

  It might be asked how far such polemics could actually hurt the Rothschilds, secure as they seemed in their palatial residences. Yet the repeated identification of the Rothschilds as the architects of a Jewish capitalist conspiracy almost inevitably inspired acts of violence directed against members of the family. The least serious of these were the crude assault on Natty’s son Walter, who was dragged off his horse by some unem
ployed workmen while hunting near Tring, and the “Jew hunts” experienced by his brother Charles at Harrow. More serious were the two assassination attempts of the period. In August 1895 a crude letter bomb was sent to Alphonse at his home in the rue Florentin; in his absence it was forwarded to the rue Laffitte where it blew up and seriously injured his head clerk. “An Anarchist outrage on one of the Rothschilds is not greatly to be wondered at,” commented The Times. “In France as elsewhere they are so wealthy and hold so prominent a place that they stand out as the natural objects which Anarchists would seek to attack, and when we take further into account the intense anti-Jewish feeling which exists in France, we are the more inclined to wonder that they have escaped so long.” Nor was the threat of assassination confined to France. In London in 1912 a man named William Tebbitt fired at Leo five times with a revolver as he was driving out of New Court, riddling his car with bullets and badly wounding the policeman on guard at the door. Tebbitt appears to have been insane (Leo had apparently done him some kindness); but the attack was symptomatic of the vulnerability of the family at a time when handguns and hand-grenades were making assassination easier than it had ever been in the past.