The House of Rothschild (61 page)

The significance of this should not be exaggerated, however. In fact, Natty retained the title of honorary president and even performed the opening ceremony for the Federation’s first synagogue in New Road in 1892. Indeed, his desire to unite the various Jewish communities was more welcome to Montagu than to many members of the United Synagogue. It was to this end, following the death of the long-serving Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler in 1890—and despite opposition from Adler’s son and successor Hermann—that Natty called a conference of the various synagogues, arguing “that the time had come when even the humblest portion of the Communiry ... and certainly the most orthodox, should invite the other branches of the Community to join with us in attempting to unite us all. I will not say under one head, but under one spiritual Chief.” However, it proved impossible to reconcile the competing claims for influence of the different communities; and a similar effort failed in 1910 for the same reason. Still, Natty was powerful enough to secure the appointment of Joseph Herman Hertz as Chief Rabbi in succession to Adler in 1912, largely (according to one account) on the strength of Lord Milner’s recommendation, though more probably because he saw Hertz as likely to appeal to both the Federation and the United Synagogue—to the Orthodox East End and the more assimilated West End.

If his influence extended this far on an essentially religious question, it is hardly surprising that on more political questions relating to the Jewish community Natty was accorded quasi-regal status. As the scion of the richest of all Jewish families, a key figure in the City, an MP and then a peer, and as an unofficial diplomat with direct access to most senior politicians of the day, he had no equal. It might not be possible to get the various Jewish communities to agree on a single spiritual “Chief”; but there could be little doubt that Natty was their
de facto
temporal chief.

To appreciate the significance of this, it is necessary to appreciate the profound—and alarming—questions which were being raised about the position of Jews in Europe at this time. When Natty became a peer, Alphonse’s reaction was revealing: “This news will have great repercussions in Austria and Germany,” he wrote, “where anti-Semitism is still so virulent.” The late nineteenth century saw the transformation of what had previously been an incoherent and politically heterogeneous prejudice against Jews—sometimes harking back to the restrictions imposed on them under the
ancien regime,
sometimes looking forward to a utopia in which they and all other exploitative capitalists would be expropriated—into something more like organised political movements. It is no coincidence that the term “anti-Semitism” itself dates from this period: racial theories were developing which purported to explain the supposedly anti-social behaviour of Jews in terms of their genes rather than their religion. As political life became more democratised by the development of mass literacy and the widening of the franchise, the years after c. 1877 saw a great upsurge of anti-Jewish journalism, speech-making and, in some countries such as Russia, actual policy. The Rothschilds had little other than their religion in common with the Jews who came westwards from Eastern and Central Europe. As we have seen, they were part of a wealthy elite which had overcome virtually all of the social barriers which remained against Jews in Western Europe. Yet, having since the 1820s been the targets of political malcontents on both the left and right, it was probably inevitable that the Rothschilds would once again be identified as the personification of the “Jewish problem.” This was the disadvantage of being “Kings of the Jews.”

Events in the mid-twentieth century tempt us to exaggerate the importance of anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century. As an organised political movement it was minor compared with socialism; and it is a mistake to see every expression of hostility towards Jews as a manifestation of it, for these were as ubiquitous as votes for anti-Semitic candidates were sparse. The memory of National Socialism also inclines us to look first to the German lands for signs of anti-Semitism. Of course, there were some there (more in Austria than in Germany, where the Rothschilds’ financial importance was declining); but traces can also be found in Britain, while Russia was the only major state which systematically discriminated against the Jews. Yet France, where Jews had enjoyed equal rights for longer than anywhere else, was also the country where the volume of anti-Semitic publication was greatest.

It is not without importance that Wilhelm Marr, the man who introduced the specifically racialist term
Antisemitismus
to German politics, had worked as a young man for the Wertheimsteins, a family closely linked to the Vienna Rothschilds. In an unpublished memoir, Marr recalled how he had been dismissed in 1841 despite working harder than many of the Jewish clerks in the firm. “It was,” he recalled bitterly, “the ‘goi’ who had to bear the consequences of the economic crisis.” Such experiences seemed to find an echo in the economic difficulties of many Germans after the 1873 crash. A good example of the kind of anti-Rothschild polemic inspired by writers like Marr was
The Frankfurt Jews and the Mulcting of the People’s Wellbeing
published by “Germanicus” in 1880. The title speaks for itself: beginning with the now familiar garbled version of the Elector’s treasure story, the author is primarily concerned to relate Germany’s economic difficulties during and after the
Gründerzeit
to capital export (especially to Russia) encouraged by the Rothschilds and their lackeys in the financial press. There is not a great deal to choose between this and the claim made by the Hessian Reichstag Deputy Otto Böckel in 1890 that the Rothschilds had cornered the world market in oil—a charge which was being repeated in Social Democrat pubs in Berlin five years later (illustrating how readily this rhetoric could still be used by the left). Friedrich von Scherb’s 1893
History of the House of the Rothschild
developed this point in some detail, arguing that the Rothschilds’ relentless profiteering had found a new target: having dominated state loans and then railway construction, they were now seeking to establish global monopolies of raw materials.

By 1911, when Werner Sombart published his tendentious but influential book
The Jews and Economic Life,
such claims enjoyed a degree of intellectual respectability. For Sombart, “the name Rothschild” meant “more than the firm which bears it”; it meant “all the Jews who are active at the bourse”:

But it was not necessary to root anti-Semitism in this kind of bogus sociology: the racial differences between Jews and Germans could simply be asserted. Max Bauer’s pamphlet
Bismarck and Rothschild
(1891), contrasted Bismarck, the embodiment of Teutonic, peasant virtue, with Rothschild, his cosmopolitan antithesis:

There were similar publications in Austria; but there, where the Rothschilds remained a major economic force, anti-Semitism was more politically effective than in Germany. It was in the years after the 1873 Vienna stock market crash that Karl Lueger conceived his “Christian Social” campaign against Jewish financial power. A turning point in this campaign was Lueger’s call in 1884 for the nationalisation of the Rothschild-owned Kaiser-Ferdinand-Nordbahn when the government proposed renewing the original charter granted to Salomon in 1836. Lueger’s demand that the government pay “attention for once to the voice of the people instead of the voices of the Rothschilds” was echoed by Georg Schönerer’s German National Association, and their ire was only increased when Albert was awarded the Iron Cross in 1893 for his role in Austro-Hungarian monetary reform. However, when Lueger himself came to power as Mayor of Vienna in 1897, he quickly discovered how difficult it was to dispense with the Rothschilds. By the late 1890s, critics like the conservative Karl Kraus (himself a Jew by birth) and the Social Democrat newspaper the
Arbeiterzeitung
were accusing Lueger of being “on good terms with the Rothschilds” and even working “hand in hand with the Jew Rothschild.” At the same time, in classic Habsburg fashion, the
Jüdische Zeitschrift
accused the Rothschilds of employing anti-Semites in preference to Jews! Rothschild power remained a byword even among those without a political axe to grind. To give just one example, the Tyrolean poet and professor of geology Adolf Pichler remarked in 1882 how “Rothschild” could “make the Mount Olympus of Austrian government bonds totter.” It was, he added sarcastically, “a sublime spectacle.”

But it was in France that anti-Semitism was most articulate and all-pervasive. The outpouring of publications hostile to the Rothschilds which characterised the 1880s had no real parallel in nineteenth-century history; not even the great pamphlet war after the Nord railway accident in 1846 produced so many libels. This time the catalysing “accident” was the collapse of the clerically backed Union Générale bank in 1882. No sooner had the Union Générale folded than its founder Paul Eugène Bontoux began laying the blame on “Jewish finance” and its ally “governmental freemasonry.” This refrain was taken up by sections of the press: the
Moniteur de Lyon
spoke of a “conspiracy orchestrated by a society of Jewish bankers from Germany” and a “German-Jewish conspiracy.”

Perhaps paradoxically, in view of his later role as a Dreyfusard, few writers did more to give this idea currency than the novelist Emile Zola. Although set in the Second Empire, his novel
L‘Argent
—part of his vast Rougon Macquart cycle—was obviously inspired by the Union Générale débâcle (with occasional allusions to the Credit Mobilier). And although the character of Gundermann was plainly not based on Alphonse, there is no doubt whatever that it was based, with one or two modifications, on his late father James. There is an eerie quality to this unflattering resurrection, for Gundermann lacks the redeeming humanity of Balzac’s Nucingen, the other great literary creation James inspired. The best explanation for this is that Zola had not known James as Balzac had; over a decade after his death, he had to turn for inspiration to the memoirs of others—indeed, passages of
L’Argent
are lifted more or less verbatim from Feydeau. Gundermann is introduced early on as:

He is cool, calculating, dyspeptic (a fictional touch), ascetic, workaholic. Saccard, by contrast, is an impetuous young would-be financier with clerical sympathies who dreams of financing projects in the Balkans and Middle East which might eventually lead to the purchase of Jerusalem and the re-establishment of the Papacy there. In the hope of winning his support, he goes to see Gundermann in his “immense hôtel” where he lives and works with his “innumerable family”: five daughters, four sons and fourteen grandchildren. Once again we enter the thronged offices of the rue Laffitte, where queues of brokers file past the impassive banker, who treats them with indifference or—if they dare to address him—outright contempt; where art-dealers vie with foreign ambassadors for his attention; and where (the debt to Feydeau is unmistakable) a small boy of five or six bursts in, riding a broomstick and playing a trumpet. This bizarre court confirms in Saccard’s eyes “the universal royalty” of Gundermann.

Saccard wants Gundermann’s backing—yearns, in fact, to make money on the bourse just as he has. Yet as he contemplates “the Jew” he instinctively imagines himself “an honest man, living by the sweat of his brow” and is overwhelmed with an “inextinguishable hatred” for

As Saccard sees it, the Jew has a hereditary advantage over the Christian in finance, and he foresees—even as he enters Gundermann’s office—“the final conquest of all the peoples by the Jews.”

When, inevitably, Gundermann dismisses his proposal, Saccard’s antipathy becomes positively violent: “Ah the dirty Jew! There’s one it would be a decided pleasure to chew between one’s teeth, the way a dog chews a bone! Though certainly it would be too terrible and too large a morsel to swallow.” “The empire has been sold to the Jews, to the dirty Jews,” he cries: