King of the Zionists

In the 1840s, French antisemites of the left like Mathieu-Georges Dairnvaell and Alfred de Toussenel first began to describe the Rothschilds as “kings” of the Jews. The persistence of that antisemitic trope is surely one reason why Jewish historians have preferred to shy away from it. Many share the democratic, not to say socialist, instincts of those early French antisemites. As proud men and women of the people, they have naturally preferred to invest the people with agency. The Rothschilds, not so much.

This is certainly true when it comes to writing about Zionism, which is classically presented as a movement of the Eastern European Jewish masses, rooted in Russian social, political, and revolutionary contexts. But as James McAuley argues in his beautifully written new life of Edmond de Rothschild, composed for the Yale University Press Jewish Lives series, without the “Jewish royal family,” there would have been no State of Israel at all.

McAuley admits to having had initial reservations about taking on this project. He was inclined to dismiss the idea of a Jewish royal family and worried he might find himself “recycling some of the most dangerous antisemitic clichés of the past, conspiracy theories that have again become all too present.” After all, who wants to lionize the superrich?

The original Rothschild brothers were born in a dilapidated four-story house in the Frankfurt Ghetto. Edmond, however, was third-generation wealthy. “Born in a glittering chateau outside Paris,” he was a child of the French Second Empire, not the eighteenth century. Indeed, the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, that brought Napoleon III to power was also his first political memory. “I can still see all the housemaids panicking around me when they heard the shots in the boulevard on the corner,” Edmond wrote in his unpublished memoir, Coup d’oeil sur ma jeunesse—a source McAuley deploys here for the first time.

World history, as McAuley remarks, “often knocked at the door of the Rothschild mansion.” Edmond may have been too young to follow the Crimean War closely, but he remembered the party his parents hosted for the foreign diplomats who came in 1856 to sign the Treaty of Paris—and how he pressed them all for autographs. Just as he remembered the emperor’s most celebrated mistress, the crumbling old city replaced by Haussman’s famous boulevards, the brilliance of the epoch’s decadent social scene. It all came crashing down with the Prussian invasion of 1870, and after that things began to change—not least for French Jews.

Edmond’s father, James, was a French patriot. He couldn’t stop the Prussians setting up camp in the family château at Ferrières, but he did what he could to make the financial penalties of defeat more bearable—cutting out German bankers and even dipping into his own capital on occasion. The upshot was that the 5 billion francs debt imposed by the victors was paid off more quickly than Bismarck had thought feasible. As McAuley comments, “It is not at all an understatement to say that the Rothschilds, almost singlehandedly, ensured that France after 1871 would avoid the disastrous fate that befell Germany after the First World War.” Still, antisemites like Édouard Drumont attacked them as disloyal foreigners, and there, of course, was the rub.

This was only part of Edmond’s family inheritance. His grandmother Betty is best remembered now as the subject of a well-known Ingres portrait, seated on a sumptuous velvet sofa, leaning forward in an attractively thoughtful posture. She “hosted soirées for le Tout-Paris.” Yet she was also deeply pious, and, though she wrote to her English cousins in French, she never forgot the Judendeutsch of her childhood. “When it comes to Judaism,” her husband, James, is said to have joked, “ask my wife.”

Judaism, for Betty, went beyond observance. She pressed her menfolk, and they lobbied the great and good of Europe on behalf of unemancipated Jews everywhere. She took an interest in Jewish womens’ causes, establishing treatment centers for pregnant women in both Paris and Jerusalem. She also hired the distinguished Hebraist Albert Cohn to tutor her children and prepare the boys for their bar mitzvahs.

At Betty’s behest, Cohn visited Palestine several times. In 1855, he took ten-year-old Edmond with him as well. There he would have visited holy sites, like the Kotel, as well as his family’s growing philanthropic empire in Palestine. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a traditional practice in the Ottoman world, and we know that a handful of elite British Jews also visited Palestine—carefully reared Parisian Jewish children, not so much. Unquestionably, the experience left its mark. “Without religion Palestine does not mean a thing,” Edmond explained many years later. “For if I am not religious, what does Eretz Israel mean to me?”

In October 1877, Edmond, age thirty-two, married his cousin Adelheid. The Frankfurt branch of the family were sticklers in matters of religious observance. Their French cousins did maintain a nominally Orthodox household, but it was never good enough for Adelheid’s father, Willy—who made a point of eating all his meals with Rabbi Moses Weiskopf whenever he visited Paris. When he granted Edmond permission to marry his daughter, he insisted the young man install kosher kitchens in each of his homes—and also on his yacht.

The marriage was a happy one, and Adelheid kept a low profile. She and Edmond watched askance as members of their Jewish circle began to marry out. “Everybody makes the mistake of assuming that I joined the Palestine effort because I happened to see a couple of Jews from Russia,” Edmond protested many years later:

The truth is that I arrived at the idea much earlier when I observed the rapid strides of assimilation among the Jews of France. . . . I saw great families, once the strongholds of Judaism, become estranged from us. Their children and their children’s children leave the fold.

In France, Edmond is celebrated today as a great collector who left his extraordinary collection of Old Master drawings to the Louvre. This is familiar territory for McAuley, whose first book, The House of Fragile Things, was an elegant meditation on the theme of Jewish collecting and patriotism in Third Republic France. Many of the protagonists in that book rejected the more or less traditional and socially restricted elite Jewish lives they had been raised to lead. Edmond took a different path.

Yet McAuley emphasizes the connection between his two great passions—Zionism and collecting. The former was, he argues, an extension of the latter. McAuley writes of Edmond:

He approached his colonial endeavors with the mindset of the collector he was—the mania, the obsession, the control. . . . If collecting was a means of ordering the world anew, the same could be said of Zionism, or at least Edmond’s particular Zionism.

He had the passion, the wealth, and the arrogance to believe he could build a new world and control the people who lived in it.

Practicalities were important, but so were aesthetics. When he assumed control of the northern town of Zikhron Ya’akov in 1883 (and named it after his father), Edmond insisted that those who lived there write professing their willingness to follow his guidance in matters great and small. Colonists even had to apply for Edmond’s approval to marry and demonstrate their worth to attain it; they were also expected to dress in uniforms that reflected his ideal of the noble farmer and to live in simple buildings designed at his behest.

At this point in Edmond’s life, the book opens out and becomes larger than a biography. We learn something about Franco-Judaism, Chief Rabbi Zadoc Kahn, and the early forays of the Alliance Israélite into supporting Jewish agriculture in Palestine. We learn about the Hovevei Zion, the pogroms, and the early phases of Zionist settlement, and we learn how, in 1882, Kahn introduced Edmond to Shmuel Mohilever: a rabbi from the pogrom-hit city of Bialystok, who persuaded him to give a little to support a convoy of religious Zionist pioneers.

To begin with, Edmond’s aims were (comparatively) modest. In June 1883, less than a year after he began dipping his toes into Zionist waters, he wrote: “What I desire is to encourage elements of serious colonization in such a way as to prepare the ground for the relatively long-term future when the question will be much riper than the present.” So he set about amassing what McAuley describes as the “sprawling, legally acquired body of territory” that was “perhaps his greatest success.” This—quite as much as the Zionist political movement—was the essential starting point for any future Jewish polity in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Twenty-one colonies housing five thousand Jews on 276,000 acres: by 1899, when Rothschild passed them on to the Jewish Colonization Association, they comprised more than 70 percent of all Jewish-owned land.

Like it or not, this was a de facto political entity—a precocious experiment in Jewish self-government: both the forerunner and progenitor of later institutions like the Jewish Agency, which played a central role in the emergent Jewish state. Edmond’s approach to these settlements was shaped by his immediate political context as well as his personal predilections. He was French, and so he imposed a top-down governing structure that mirrored the way the French authorities ran their colonies in North Africa and East Asia. Zionist pioneers, however, were imbued with a different vision: They “never stopped seeing themselves, and only themselves, as the driving force behind the Jewish settlement of Palestine.” They had suffered in their native countries and sacrificed everything to build a future in this distant and inhospitable, but still deeply beloved, land. And because their descendants were in some sense the mothers and fathers of the future Israeli nation, that perspective has shaped the story historians chose to tell.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about this dynamic. It’s hard to magic a state out of nowhere. You need money, men, and political influence to claim territory and create space for a country. Both Italy and Germany were made from above as well as below. If Herzl was the Giuseppe Mazzini of Zionism—the charismatic visionary who built a nationalist movement from afar—then Edmond played the role of Victor Emmanuel: the Savoyard monarch whose dynastic power lay at the heart of the new Kingdom of Italy, which was also assembled piece by piece.

The Italians celebrated their monarchy, but the idea of a Jewish royal family was—at best—an embarrassment. If the Rothschilds came to assume this role, they did so, at least in part, by default. Not for the glory, because there was none to be had in it, but for a complex of reasons that included family tradition, a sense of religious obligation, and even a certain noblesse oblige. After all, they could also have made other choices.

Meanwhile, in France and in Austria, political antisemitism infused the body politic. Not just the socialism of fools, though it had that dimension, but an all-encompassing conspiracy theory with the Rothschilds at its heart. “The Republic you loved . . . is not the Republic of the French, but the Kingdom of Rothschild,” wrote the vicious polemicist Édouard Drumont in 1891.

Despite their wealth, they suffered. Not just the slings and arrows of gutter journalism but an actual plot to kidnap Edmond’s father in 1892—and a letter bomb three years later that left his fifty-year-old secretary with only one eye. The New York Times was inclined to blame the anarchists, while The Times of London dismissed the incident with a shrug: “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.”

Throughout his life, Edmond consequently preferred to keep a low profile. He was, in fact, a founding member of the Committee Against Antisemitism, established in 1895 after Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of selling secrets to Germany. The group funded countless Dreyfusard groups, articles, and brochures, but it did not announce its existence to the wider public until 1902.

Earlier, when a Hebrew-language journalist sought to write an article about his philanthropy in the Holy Land, Edmond closed down his efforts: “The baron wishes that there should be no public recognition for that would be bound to harm the great work to which we are all committed with our whole heart.” Herzl, who was after all just another Jewish journalist, had better luck. Their meeting has become the stuff of legend.

At the time, it seemed a disaster. Edmond later recalled:

[We] did as best we could to advise against Herzl’s project, pointing out the danger he was going to bring about with regard to Judaism, the impossibility to set up on his own the regulations of such a movement and how difficult to get the enormous capital necessary for this purpose.

As for Herzl, he declared himself “an opponent of the House of Rothschild because I consider it to be a national misfortune for the Jews.” In that virulently antisemitic moment, perhaps neither was entirely wrong.

Herzl may have spoken disparagingly about Rothschild colonization at the First Zionist Congress, but the Jewish National Fund—established just two years later—effectively followed where Edmond had led. The spirit in which it operated was different, but that is how the movement gathered pace. Much later, Edmond supposedly admitted that he had been frightened by their initial encounter; in the long run, he concluded that Herzl was right. When Chaim Weizmann met him in Paris in December 1914, he thought the baron “magnificent.” “We talked for five hours, in two sessions. He wants a State, nothing less.”

The key point is that together they rendered the Zionist idea politically viable. As McAuley writes, “Left in the hands of either one alone, it would likely have remained a utopian vision, somewhere at the intersection of fanciful delusion and distant dream.”

Unlike Herzl, Edmond lived long enough to see that vision bear political fruit: the Balfour Declaration (formally speaking a letter from the British government to one of his English relations); the British Mandate and the appointment of an elite British Jew to run it; but also the successive waves of violence, rioting, and immigration that slowly ripped the established web of social relations apart.

When he addressed the Great Synagogue of Tel Aviv on his final visit to Palestine in 1925, Rothschild preached the virtues of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs: “As in times past, you will continue to have the best relations with your neighbors; thus remaining faithful to the principle proclaimed by our ancestors: ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

Nevertheless, McAuley does cite a letter written shortly before his subject’s death in 1934, in which Rothschild recognized the need to make a place for the Arabs while also asserting, “Where I would not like to see them employed is in the cities and in industry.” This quote is not well contextualized by McAuley, whose command of the intricacies of Zionist politics appears patchy—the remark was made in the midst of the 1930s controversy over the use of Arab labor in Zionist enterprises—but it still serves to underline the ambiguity of Edmond’s vision.

McAuley also quotes Rothschild’s final remarks on Jewish-Arab relations. Speaking with a reporter months before he died, Edmond declared:

We only want one thing: to live in common and in friendship with the Arabs. In the Bible it says: “Be good to your slaves, for remember that you yourselves were slaves in Egypt.” Since then, we have been mistreated, like wandering Jews. It is not our idea to make Arabs “wandering Arabs.”

Although these words should probably be read in the same spirit as his 1925 lecture in Tel Aviv, McAuley suggests that they could also be taken as emphasizing the subordinate status of Arabs as “slaves” to European Jews. That reading hinges on an overliteral understanding of the word and a misunderstanding of the verse, both of which speak to twenty-first-century concerns rather than Rothschild’s twentieth-century hopes. Edmond, however, had received the very best Jewish education mid-nineteenth-century Paris had to offer. It is unlikely that he meant anything of the kind.

Nonetheless, McAuley largely succeeds in understanding his subject in his historical context and on his own terms. That aim may be hard to apply to a subject as politically charged as this one, but it remains the essence of all good biography.