He seems to have been right, though it seems unlikely that this was a reflection of love for the aristocracy; the fact was that Lionel’s family, like James‘s, did not keep strict kosher. Indeed, Mayer was such an enthusiast for venison that he defended stag hunting in a political speech at Folkestone in 1866!
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On broader religious questions, the English brothers inclined towards the Reform movement, such as it was in England. When an attempt was made (in 1853) to exclude representatives of the Reform-inclined West London Synagogue from their places on the Board of Deputies because they had fallen foul of the conservative Chief Rabbi, Lionel spoke out against what he called “popery.” “He had every respect for the ecclesiastical authorities,” he declared, “but he was not going to be led by them as by a Catholic priest. They might be, and no doubt were, very learned men but they had no right to enquire of him whether he kept one day or two days of the festivals”—an important distinction between Reform and Orthodox practice. Such views may explain why the Reform community in Frankfurt had appealed to Lionel for help in their struggle against the dominant Orthodoxy the previous year.
This tendency towards Reform was more pronounced in the case of their wives. This may have been because the traditional synagogue service had been a masculine affair: there is some evidence that Rothschild women had little or no knowledge of Hebrew. Anthony’s wife Louisa, for example, shared the Reform movement’s aspiration to modernise Jewish forms of worship precisely because synagogue services compared unfavourably with church services. “What a pity one cannot go to church and hear a good sermon,” she exclaimed in 1847, frustrated by her inability to understand Hebrew. This did not imply leanings towards apostasy, however. Rather, she was determined that her children should “be better instructed and able to join their brethren in public worship.” Accordingly, her daughters Constance and Annie were brought up on a strong blend of Jewish doctrine and Anglican forms. After a short family service at home on the Sabbath, she gave her daughters Bible lessons and spent the rest of the day reading Jewish and non-Jewish religious literature while they studied subjects like the “History and Literature of the Israelites.” Yom Kippur was solemnly observed, as Constance recorded in her diary in 1861. Yet the Sabbath lectures her mother published in 1857—with chapters on “Truthfulness,” “Peace in the Home” and “Charity”—contained much that could equally well have appeared in a contemporary Anglican book of homilies:
Oh Lord, Thou hast made me so much happier, Thou hast vouchsafed to me so many more blessings than to thousands of Thy creatures, that I know not how I can ever thank Thee sufficiently. I can only pray to Thee to make me charitable and compassionate towards those who suffer and are in want, and to prevent me from being selfish and from thinking only of my gratification. Place in my heart, O Lord, the wish and inclination to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked and to console the sorrowful, as long as I have the power and the means to do so, that I may thereby be less undeserving of all Thy bounteous goodness to me, and less unworthy of Thy favour and merciful protection, O my God, Amen.
Raised on a diet of this sort of thing, it is not wholly surprising that, like their mother, Louisa’s daughters preferred Westminster Abbey to the synagogue. What is more unusual is that Charlotte, who had been raised in a far more Orthodox atmosphere in Frankfurt, should have felt similar inclinations. Her letters to her son Leo show that she frequently attended non-Jewish services and institutions. She saw no reason not to participate in the affairs of the Anglican Church in her capacity as a landowner. She heard the Bishop of Oxford preach at the consecration of Acton church (near Gunnersbury) in 1866, confessing that she had been “really spell-bound” by his sermon, though she was less impressed when the Bishop of London performed the same office for a church in Ealing. In this she was far from unique: Mayer’s wife Juliana took such a close interest in one of the livings in the gift of the Mentmore estate that she drove one incumbent to resign.
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Charlotte was also attracted to the fashionable world of Anglo-Catholicism, witnessing (in the space of just over a year) a Catholic bazaar, the consecration of Nazareth House by Archbishop Manning, a service in a Carmelite chapel in Kensington and another at the House of the Sisters of Mercy. On each occasion, she owed her invitation to Catholic friends like Lady Lothian and Lady Lyndhurst.
Charlotte constantly compared what she saw on these occasions with analogous Jewish gatherings and, although the comparisons were not always unfavourable to her own faith, there was a strong vein of criticism. Attending a prize-giving at the Jews’ Free School, she was:
painfully struck by the contrast of those engaged in the ceremony among Jewish children, and the prelates, patrons, friends and visitors, who witnessed a similar function in the [Catholic] House of Charity ... Dr. Adler [probably the Chief Rabbi’s son Hermann, the first minister of Bayswater Synagogue], after having said a few words rushed away, as if the plague had been in the building, while Mr. Green [Rabbi A. L. Green of the Central Synagogue, who also acted as her almoner] escaped by a side door, without even saying a single word to any one. There was not one single visitor, man or woman, a large open space filled with empty chairs and I felt so shy at occupying the vast area that I was obliged to retire to a corner near the singing class.—Whatever may be said of the genuflexions and outward, showy ceremonies of the Catholics, their works, their good works, are noble and sublime, and among us there really is no heartiness.
In the light of this it seems less remarkable that explicitly Christian institutions appealed to members of the Rothschild family for financial assistance. These appeals were sometimes successful: in 1871, for example, a Catholic priest persuaded Charlotte to give £50 to his school in Brentford.
As this suggests, it was still mainly through charitable work that the Rothschilds continued to give expression to their religious impulses. The traditional forms of male philanthropy were remarkably long-lived. In Vienna Anselm began each working day at 9.30 a.m. by going through all the begging letters, personally determining the sums to be paid to each supplicant; and even when he went for his daily constitutional to the Schönbrunn zoo, a bank clerk accompanied him to distribute coins to the beggars he encountered. In Frankfurt Jacob Rosenheim acted as Wilhelm Carl’s “beggars’ secretary”; but Wilhelm Carl himself still made the decisions. As his son recalled:
Every evening, often as late as eight or nine o‘clock, my father would go to the Baron at his business premises on Fahrgasse, and sometimes also to the Grüneburg, in order to present him personally with a list, carefully drawn up by my mother, of the petitions—20 to 30 of them on average—received from all over the Jewish world, personal appeals for help, letters from the most esteemed rabbis in every country, the
yeshivot
and welfare institutions in the East and the West. In each individual case, the Baron personally decided on what seemed to him to be an appropriate amount. Incidentally, he also read with a certain amount of satisfaction every single letter of thanks received. Before it was presented to the Baron, information on each request had to be sought from one of the rabbis in the Baron’s confidence who were located throughout the world. Each item of information was registered and copied verbatim into a book.
The punctiliousness in each case is impressive. Yet there came a point when the volume of requests for aid could no longer be managed in this old-fashioned way, especially as the numbers of poor Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe began to rise. When a man like Lionel was dealing with millions, it was absurd to expect him personally to authorise contributions like the hundred pounds he paid in 1850 “towards the Fund for the erection of Almshouses for Indigent Foreigners”; or the comparable sum his uncle Amschel asked him to contribute to a Jewish girls’ school in Frankfurt two years later. Much of this work therefore began to be delegated. In London Asher Asher—a doctor from Scotland who worked as secretary of the Great Synagogue after 1866—acted as Lionel’s unpaid “private almoner,” virtually “the manager of the ‘Charitable Department’ of New Court,” according to one contemporary source. Likewise in Paris, Feydeau recalled “a special office ... where several employees were exclusively occupied with recording the requests for help, studying them, and gathering information on the actual position of those seeking help.” Charity was turning into a chore scarcely distinguishable from the more humdrum aspects of banking. After 1859, some of this work could be passed on to, or at least co-ordinated by, the new Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor. In 1868, for example, one Emanuel Sperling, a father of four and “a highly respectable man well worthy of recommendation” was “desirous of opening a small shop for which purpose he has got a little towards the same”; Sophie Bendheim, the daughter of a distant member of the Davidson family, needed money for her daughter’s dowry. This, however, was never a substitute for the philanthropic activities of the family and firm.
The women of the family were in a position to be more actively engaged; indeed to some extent philanthropy became their work, performed as assiduously as their husbands’ work at the bank. The Jews’ Free School had been an important focus of Rothschild benefaction since Nathan’s day; in the 1850s and 1860s it began to attract not just money but personal involvement in its affairs from Charlotte and Louisa (whose husband Anthony had become president of its board of governors in 1847). When she first visited it in 1848, Louisa found it “an excellent institution” providing “gratuitous instruction” to “about nine hundred poor children taken from the very lowest classes,” but its educational standards were low. Her sister-in-law Charlotte despaired of “the little learners in Bell Lane” whom she described to her son as “indescribably dingy and dirty—and uncouth.” “It is quite disheartening to be perpetually trying to improve those Caucasian
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arabs,” she declared in 1865, “and without ever being able to descry any real progress in them.” Her weekly visits to Bell Lane were “far from agreeable to me” as “the humble classes of our community [are] terribly dirty and ragged in bad weather.” On the other hand, she found it “impossible ... to go among all the poor, dirty little children without becoming deeply interested in their progress and general improvement.” By the 1870s, her efforts—which included arranging an inspection by Matthew Arnold—and those of her brother-in-law Anthony had transformed it, more than trebling the number of pupils, increasing its annual budget by a factor of twenty and raising the number of teachers twenty-five-fold.
Other educational institutions in which Rothschild women took an interest included the Jews’ College, founded in 1855; the Sabbath schools of the Association for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge; and the Borough Jewish schools founded in south London by Mayer’s wife Juliana in 1867. There were also, as in the past, efforts to relieve the sick. In addition to being a member of the Jewish Ladies Benevolent Loan Society and the Ladies Benevolent Institution, Louisa established a Jewish Convalescent Home, which was supplied with food from a special kitchen financed by Charlotte in Artillery Lane. In addition, Charlotte established a Home for Aged Incurables, reorganised the London Lying-in Charity and was President of the Ladies’ Benevolent Loan Society and the Needlework Guild for the East End Maternity Home. There was also a Rothschild-founded Day Nursery for Jewish Infants in Whitechapel and a Jews’ Deaf and Dumb Home on Walmer Road, Not-ting Hill. Finally, Charlotte sought to involve herself in the new Board of Guardians. In 1861, for example, she enabled Rabbi Green to present the Board with ten sewing-machines which were to be hired out or sold to poor immigrant women who wished to earn money as seamstresses. She later donated £100-£200 a year to a “Girls’ Workroom” established by Green.
In his sermon at her memorial service in 1884, Hermann Adler recalled that the principal theme of Charlotte’s published Prayers
and
Meditations and Addresses to Young Children (originally composed for the Girls’ Free School) had been “that those who suffer and stand in need of assistance should be near to us and our sympathy ... that the rich must meet the poor by ‘giving not only gold, but time, which is life.’” This she had very definitely done. Her dying words, he told the congregation, had been: “Remember the Poor”—and by this was primarily meant the Jewish poor. However, Adler did not allude to an important distinction which Charlotte had made throughout her adult life between charitable “giving” and donations of a specifically religious character. In 1864, she had a revealing conversation with Rabbi Green when he
asked for a new scroll of law for his synagogue. He says that formerly there were religious persons who had great generosity—and superstitious people, who though not very wealthy or liberal, gave to the Temple from feelings of awe and dread; but that superstition has been annihilated by civilization, and that the religous Jews have ceased to be generous—while the generous Israelites allow their bounty to flow into secular channels.—I dare say he is right.—I would infinitely rather give twenty pounds to a school than expend it for a
sepher ...
Sincere concern for the material needs of the Jewish community, in other words, could be accompanied by a critical stance towards Judaism as an organised religion. It is also worth noting the first signs of disquiet within the Jewish elite at the rising rate of immigration from Eastern Europe. In 1856 Charlotte organised an “Amateur Concert in aid of the Funds of the Jewish Emigration Loan Society” at which her children Evelina and Alfred performed, and Louisa was a member of the Society’s Committee. The purpose of this organisation may easily be inferred. As we shall see, the more poor Jews immigrated to England from Eastern and Central Europe, the more members of the Jewish elite wished to see emigrating elsewhere.