The House of Rothschild (63 page)

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:

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 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,

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 a

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.

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 unemployed 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.

The most elementary response to attack is to fight back. That was the response favoured by Alphonse’s son Edouard and Gustave’s son Robert, both whom responded to racial insults by demanding satisfaction on the field of honour.
⁵
But one could not duel with every anti-Semite. The question of how to respond to religious and racial intolerance had long preoccupied the Rothschilds; but the new forms of prejudice which characterised the
fin
de
siècle
called for new responses. These were not easy to formulate.

Because of their unique social position—simultaneously at the apex of the respective Jewish communities and in increasingly close contact with the European aristocracies—the Rothschilds were sometimes inclined to blame anti-Semitism not just on anti-Semites but on other Jews. In 1875 Mayer Carl told Bismarck: “As for anti-semitic feeling the Jews themselves are to blame, and the present agitation must be ascribed to their arrogance, vanity and unspeakable insolence.” To modern eyes, this seems a shocking statement, suggesting a kind of disloyalty to the wider Jewish community which is not at first sight easily reconciled with the Rothschilds’ claim to be that community’s lay leaders. Yet the fact that the man who tried to assassinate Leo was (as Natty put it) “of our own persuasion” is significant: there were profound tensions between Jews too in this period.

The two groups which gave the Rothschilds most concern were
nouveaux
riches—Jewish bankers and businessmen who had made their fortunes more recently than the Rothschilds—and, perhaps more important,
Ostjuden:
the much more numerous Jews of Eastern Europe (principally though not exclusively from the Russian Empire), 2.5 million of whom migrated westwards after the pogroms sparked off by the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and the new discriminatory laws introduced the following year.
⁶
In the former category, Gerson Bleichröder was viewed with especial distaste, though it is reasonable to assume that part of Mayer Carl’s grievance against Bleichröder had its origins in their business disagreements. Forwarding a letter from Bleichröder on the subject of German anti-Semitism in November 1880, Natty told Disraeli:

As these comments suggest, the new poor were at least as great a source of embarrassment as the
nouveaux riches.

The Rothschild response to anti-Semitism was not just (as Drumont alleged) to demand high levels of police protection and to fortify their houses; though they can be forgiven for doing so in the light of the assassination attempts described above. There was a long-standing family view about how best to deflect or mitigate anti-Jewish feelings. Ever since the time of Mayer Amschel, the Rothschilds had taken care to make charitable contributions not only to the Jewish communities where they lived, but also to non-Jewish “good causes” as part of a conscious strategy to win social acceptance. There is some evidence to suggest that members of the third generation had tended to neglect this tradition during the last decades of their lives. The younger Rothschilds, however, consciously revived it in the 1880s and 1890s, though in England the emphasis was now laid as much on public service as on finan cial donations; and in every case there was a new interest in the provision of housing for the poor, in addition to the traditional preoccupations with health care and education.