Resplendent Cosmopolitanism: On the opportunities afforded by elite decadence

Including Jews in ‘society’ was novel and, to some, disturbing.1 Edward’s set was already unconventional in the inclusion of ‘new money’, and the Prince’s eagerness for horse-racing, hunting and gambling was crass by royal standards. He overate and smoked heavily, caused numerous scandals, had affairs openly and visited the bordello Le Chabanais in Paris frequently enough that a room was customised for him.2 He devoted care to sartorial matters, though, and was popular for his amiable personality, and in his time as heir to the throne, Edward’s coterie became identified with ‘smartness’ and an earlier, print media-based celebrity culture whose ‘Professional Beauties’ included some of his many mistresses. Involvement with ‘the smart set’, especially the Prince himself, was immensely helpful to Jewish upcomers who sought to corrode British social exclusivity. In the latter decades of the Victorian Era, and in his own reign, Edward and his friends helped identify cosmopolitanism, and especially Judeophilia, with prestige and fashionability; ethnoreligious homogeneity was increasingly portrayed to the public as moribund. This aspect of Edwardianism has not become archaic.

In finance and communication, the Rothschilds had made themselves useful to rulers in many countries over the previous century, sometimes becoming involved in diplomacy as the best-placed go-betweens. During the 1877 Balkan crisis, Disraeli, eager for war with Russia, used the Rothschilds (who were sympathetic to the Ottomans) as diplomatic intermediaries with Austria (Russia’s rival for control of the Balkans) to bypass his war-sceptical Foreign Secretary Lord Derby.6 Until made obsolete by the spread of telegraphy, their courier network was both a premium service to rulers and a means to spy on them.7 Abusing the customers’ trust (by reading or even altering their letters) was not without risk, but evidently they never lost the favour of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Edward became friends with Nathaniel and Alfred de Rothschild at Trinity College, Cambridge. According to Richard Davenport-Hines, “His dependence on Rothschild subventions began at Trinity.” His parents, Victoria and Albert, appear to have entered such dependence earlier. There is circumstantial evidence that Anthony de Rothschild loaned or gave Albert a large sum to buy Balmoral Castle in 1852.8 Niall Ferguson also tells us that:

“[H]aving risen so far by their own efforts the Rothschilds considered themselves in many ways superior to the aristocracy, not least in financial terms. It was well known that the Prince of Wales and his brothers were inclined to live beyond their allowances provided by the Civil List; keeping up the family tradition of lending to future rulers, Anthony offered his assistance and by August 1874 the Queen was alarmed to hear of “a large sum owing to Sir A. de Rothschild” by her eldest son. However, the Rothschilds’ role between then and his accession twenty-seven long years later seems primarily to have been to keep the Prince out of debt, aside from a £160,000 mortgage on Sandringham which was discreetly hushed up.”9

The Rothschilds were far from over-awed by the royal family, and several, including the Prince’s ostensible friend Nathaniel, privately disparaged the Prince and his mother.10 Nor did they aspire to assimilate into the aristocracy. Several Rothschilds entered Parliament, but “The Rothschilds did not think of themselves as becoming aristocratic, even if it appeared that they were; if anything, they wished the aristocracy to become more like them. … The key to the Rothschild attitude was that, as the nearest thing the Jews of Europe had to a royal family, they considered themselves the equals of royalty.”11 Within Jewry, they were also seen as the equivalent of royalty: “the ‘Kings of the Jews’ as well as the ‘Jews of the Kings.’12

Edward never learned to spend within his own means, and appears to have exceeded the Rothschilds’ willingness to lend. “By the late 1880s,” according to Davenport-Hines, “the prince’s finances were in a critical state. He had a parliamentary grant of £39,000 a year, and revenues of £64,500 from the Duchy of Cornwall, but his gross income had fallen since 1881. Rather than raise parliamentary controversy or republican sentiments by soliciting a larger grant, he borrowed money from the Rothschilds, including £100,000 in 1889 and £60,000 in 1893 (possibly neither sum was repaid). He met another financial saviour, during a journey from Vienna to Bucharest, at the Hungarian shooting lodge of Crown Prince Rudolf in 1888. In return for having some debts paid, his host presented to him Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Bavarian-born financier who had taken Belgian nationality, and controlled the railway linking Vienna to Constantinople. Hirsch’s passions were blood sports, litigation, tax avoidance and ladling out millions to save persecuted Jews from Russian violence.”13 De Hirsch thus bought his way into the Marlborough House set.

“After Hirsch’s fatal coronary in Vienna in 1896, his role as the prince’s financial protector was taken by another man who sought royal favour as compensation for prevalent anti-Semitism, Ernest Cassel. Born into a Cologne banking family, Cassel began as a confidential clerk in the London office of Hirsch’s banking firm Bischoffsheim & Goldschmidt. He was naturalized as a subject of Queen Victoria in 1878, amassed millions by exploiting Swedish phosphorus iron ore deposits, financing American railways, raising loans in London for Latin American, Chinese and Egyptian governments, profiting from the South African mining boom, funding the construction of the underground railway from Bank to Shepherd’s Bush and of the Aswan dam, and founding the National Bank of Egypt. Cassel was a proud, taciturn, unyielding man, devoid of humour or charm, but with crushing self-assurance. No man had more of the monarch’s trust during his reign.”14

Cassel was certainly close to Edward, often joining the king on holiday where he conducted informal diplomacy. “The history of the world became linked to the king’s visits to Marienbad. The spa lay in a district that had been occupied by the Prussians in their war against Austria of 1866, and retained an anomalous frontier tone. Many of its smarter hotels (including the Weimar, where he stayed) were Jewish-owned. There was a resplendent cosmopolitanism which made differences of nationality seem vestigial. All this was congenial to the king, whose imagination dwelt in Europe, not merely in his own domains. Every August for seven summers, from 1903 until 1909, he pitched a continental version of the Marlborough Club in Bohemia.”15 According to Davenport-Hines “it was not until 1907 that, with Cassel’s help, he was finally rid of old obligations.”16 On the day Edward died in 1910, “Cassel visited him in the morning (apparently leaving £10,000 in banknotes – perhaps a solace for [the king’s favourite mistress] Alice Keppel). Thereafter his vital spirits petered out.” Quite a solace, of which no further explanation is given.

As at Marienbad and Marlborough House, Edward’s court was cosmopolitan, and “differences of nationality” were rendered more “vestigial” every time Edward left another fortune at the baccarat table. To call his associates resplendent would be generous, though, as ‘Edwardianism’ included much nepotism and quid pro quo:

“Edward VII hoped that his court would be more efficient, glamorous and spectacular than its predecessors. What in fact made it distinctive was its venality. … The corruption of the governing class by the new millionaires was certainly pervasive. Cassel paid [£40,000] for the furnishing of Winston Churchill’s drawing room; the New York financier Pierpont Morgan bought a country house for the Asquiths; George Riddell of the News of the World supplied Lloyd George with his house at Walton Heath (and was later recommended for a barony by him); Lloyd George took holidays on the French Riviera provided by the newspaper tycoon Harold Harmsworth. It was truly Edwardian that Cassel employed [Lord] Esher in 1902–4 at a salary of £5,000 a year and 10 per cent of profits. Such arrangements would have been unthinkable in the households of Victoria or George V.”17

That is to mention only a few examples out of many. Edward also pressed successfully for Cassel and Nathaniel Rothschild to be added to the Privy Council. Among his closest courtiers was the corrupt Horace Farquhar, via whom Herbert Stern (whose family was intermarried with the Rothschilds and Goldsmids) was included; their Siberian Proprietary Mines scandal raised the question of why the king kept such unedifying company. It remains unanswered. Among several unwarranted ennoblements was the granting of a baronetcy to the “ruthless” Jewish lawyer George Lewis, a “repository of Society secrets, and not above blackmail in the interests of his clients”.18 Edward Levy-Lawson, owner of the Telegraph, became Lord Burnham. The Telegraph under Harry, Edward’s father, had exceeded the Times in the hysteria of its reporting on the riots of 1882. Levy-Lawson was the only one of Edward’s courtiers who became a friend of Edward’s more conservative son, George V, and George’s son, Edward VIII.19

Historians tend to say little about the motives of Edward’s lenders, but greater acceptance in society as Jews was not the only benefit of royal propinquity.20 Being the prime financiers of the government and the industrial concerns of the British Empire, the Rothschilds were concerned with foreign policy and sought to influence it. “Furnished with impeccable political intelligence from the Paris house, they were able to command the attention of any government, Liberal or Tory.”21 They also made friends with all the leading politicians of the later 19th century: both Disraeli and Gladstone, the latter of whom made Nathaniel Rothschild the first Jewish peer in 1885, and Richard Haldane, Herbert Asquith, Lord Salisbury, Reginald Brett (later Lord Esher) and George (later Lord) Curzon all dined at Waddesdon, Wentworth and other Rothschild mansions. The Earl of Roseberry went further and married Hannah de Rothschild; the men of her family declined to attend as marrying into the aristocracy was not enough to justify marrying a gentile, but the Prince of Wales and Disraeli attended.22 Nathaniel was a comrade of Alfred Milner, Arthur Balfour and Joseph and Austen Chamberlain, along with Randolph and Winston Churchill. Several of these men formed the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1902, and Lord Esher as a permanent member from 1904 served as a conduit for King Edward to influence governments on military policy. “It was in this milieu that many of the most important political decisions of the period were taken”, according to Ferguson.23 Party mattered little.24 Nathaniel went from being a Liberal MP to a Conservative in the Lords without inconsistency.25

Friendships with politicians were useful to a limited extent. The Crimean War of 1853-6 had been profitable for the Rothschilds: “Even for those powers which did not directly fight in it, the Crimean War increased military expenditure above the level of revenues available from taxation, and therefore forced all concerned — even parsimonious Britain — to go to the bond market.”26 However, deliberate balancing of budgets and reduction of debts by British governments in the later decades of the 19th century abated lenders’ political influence for a time. “A government that did not borrow money was a government the Rothschilds could advise, but not pressurise.”27 Still, they were the closest of advisers at a time of pivotal geopolitical change. “Dorothy Pinto [a relative born in 1895] recalled how ‘as a child I thought Lord Rothschild lived at the Foreign Office, because from my schoolroom window I used to watch his carriage standing outside every afternoon, while in reality of course he was closeted with [Prime Minister] Arthur Balfour.” (italics in original)28 The same Lord (Nathaniel) Rothschild had his correspondence destroyed when he died.29

The Rothschilds are famous as bankers but less so as activists for Jewry. Yet, as Ferguson says, “they sought, from their earliest days, to use their financial leverage over individual states to improve the legal and political position of the Jews living there.” 30 They played a leading role in removing Jewish civil disabilities (and used bribery)31. Lionel Rothschild’s motive for entering Parliament as the first professing Jew appears to have been to empower Jewry as a whole.32 The Goldsmids, Montefiores and other Cousinhood families contributed to the same cause in the 1830s and 40s.33 As participants in “the rise of modern Jewish politics”, Cousinhood members increasingly acted as intercessors and benefactors of Jews in more difficult circumstances in other countries.34 Intercession was a practice pioneered by the famous Moses Montefiore in earlier decades. By the time of the 1881–2 pogrom panic, these efforts resembled the conduct of diplomacy by states:

“In late December of 1881, Russian ambassador Lobanov-Rostovskii … was in communication with Jewish communal leaders Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and Sir Nathaniel Rothschild, leading members of the RJC. They had advised him that the Jews of London had prepared a “demarche” for the government, consisting of a proposed delegation to St. Petersburg to intercede for the Jews and to secure authorization for as many of them as possible to emigrate.”

By the time they gave him their petition, they had changed it to call for full equality in Russia rather than emigration; emigration was already occurring anyway.35

As the world’s leading financiers, the Rothschilds were more intimidating than most private petitioners. The cost of borrowing determined states’ ability to wage war. The Russian finance minister Nikolai von Bunge reported in 1881 that “the foreign credit of Russia was being harmed by ‘the unsatisfactory condition of the Jewish Question, which encourages dissatisfaction with Russia within the very highest and most influential group of foreign capitalists.’ In April 1882, he noted that ‘it is well known that Rothschild recently announced to anyone who would listen that he would not buy Russian state bonds; these words of Rothschild carry very heavy weight on all European stock exchanges, and the consequence was an unusual decline in the value of our issues, and the stock market as a whole.’”36

This public boycott followed the quieter withdrawal of Rothschild lending from Russia in 1877 which, according to Ferguson, “was a real sacrifice, as it more or less excluded the Rothschilds from Russian finance for a decade and a half.” The Rothschilds had profitably participated in bond issues in Russia since 1870. “The only credible explanation is therefore a non-economic one.”37 After the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-5 and the revolution of 1905 forced the Russian government to seek new lenders, Nathaniel refused because of the unresolved Jewish question.38 Nathaniel wrote a letter to the Times in the same year, imprecating Russia and Romania, and prevailed upon Arthur Balfour to intercede for the Jews there.39 He implored Foreign Secretary Edward Grey to ask for “international action” to be taken, but Grey prioritised the forming of the Triple Entente with France and Russia.40 In 1908, Nathaniel’s brother Leo asked King Edward to raise the matter on his imminent visit to Russia.41 Then, “the charge of ritual murder was revived in 1912 during a trial at Kiev … and Natty had to resume his campaign, corresponding publicly on the issue with Cardinal Merry del Val and drawing up a formal letter of protest which was signed by various political grandees including Rosebery and Cromer. Natty continued to hope that the Anglo-Russian entente would founder — if not over the treatment of the Jews, then on some traditional bone of contention like the Straits — but he underestimated Grey’s willingness to appease the Tsarist regime, and the City’s willingness to absorb new Russian bonds.”42 The Rothschilds were missing out on Russian business that their rivals like Barings were finding lucrative. Above both the profit motive and any loyalty to Britain, for Nathaniel, came his allegiance to what he called “my co-religionists”.43

Assistance for Jewish westward immigration from Eastern Europe was given transnational form by the founding of the Jewish Colonisation Association, which drew upon the huge Baron de Hirsch Fund established in 1891. The Fund was co-founded by Nathaniel Rothschild, Frederick Mocatta, Julian Goldsmid and Benjamin Cohen, all from the Cousinhood, with several French equivalents, and Maurice de Hirsch who provided millions of pounds. The Fund and the JCA assisted Jews to settle and find work in America, and sponsored the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Alliance Israélite Universelle to do likewise in Britain and France.44 Other Rothschilds later began to assist in Jewish colonisation of Palestine. Jacob Schiff, a US-based financier militantly opposed to the Russian monarchy, was Vice-President of the Fund. As a leading member of the American Jewish Committee, he lobbied to sever American trade with Russia. Schiff (with the Rothschilds and Warburgs) financed Japan’s war against Russia in 1905; he attempted to finance Germany in the First World War; he maintained a boycott on lending to the Russian Empire following the Kishinev riots of 1903 and lifted it when Emperor Nicholas abdicated in February 1917.45 Trustees of the de Hirsch Fund included Mayer Sulzberger, a Jewish activist and lawyer related to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, later son-in-law of Adolf Ochs and the heir to Ochs’ controlling stake in the New York Times.46 Ochs’ paper would mimic the reaction of the Times to the atrocity stories of 1882 in its own reporting of the Kishinev riots of 1903.

King Edward was more amenable to the influence of such men than that of his common subjects. Shortly after the Kishinev riots, at “the suggestion of Jewish friends, despite the opposition of his ministers, he remonstrated with Russian ministers” on behalf of Jewry in the Russian domain.47 Perhaps several dozen people had been killed in Kishinev, though the atrocity stories are not necessarily more reliable than those of 1881–2. I find no record of Edward remonstrating with anyone about the thousands of Bulgarian or Armenian Christians slaughtered in 1876 and the mid-1890s by their Ottoman occupiers; in contrast to the inter-communal violence in Russia, these mass murders were committed by imperial forces reimposing Ottoman rule on foreign nations they had originally subjugated by conquest. Benjamin Disraeli appears to have never suffered for trivialising the reports of the crimes in Bulgaria, even after the otherwise pro-Ottoman British commissioner Walter Baring verified their enormity.48

Disraeli and the Tories’ practice of denying Ottoman barbarism was fortuitous for the emergence of ‘modern Jewish politics’. In subsequent decades, ever more intense demands would be issued for British policy to prioritise the interests of Jews worldwide regardless of any contrast with those of native British people or Christians; this continues to be the implicit demand of mainstream Jewish advocacy. Gladstone was struck by the contrast between such tribal demands in 1876–7 and the more humane course of foreign policy from which they sought to divert. According to Robert Blake, “English Jewry tended to be pro-Turk for obvious reasons.” The justifications are less obvious than the reasons. As Ferguson describes,

“[T]he Rothschilds regarded a Slav nationalist triumph in the Balkans as undesirable from the point of view of their “co-religionists.” From … September 1876, Gladstone had made his campaign against Disraeli’s policy a religious crusade. … As Derby commented, “Gladstone… deplores the influence of ‘Judaic sympathies,’ not confined to professing Jews, on the eastern question: whether this refers to Disraeli, or to the Telegraph people, or to the Rothschilds … is left in darkness.” Lionel was scathing about “all these public meetings” where the Turks were attacked but nothing was said “about the cause of the insurrection & disturbances.” His concerns were quite different … : it was the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe (particularly Rumania) to which he wished to draw attention. Alphonse sought to exert similar pressure on Bismarck through Bleichroder. Article 44 of the final Treaty of Berlin, which guaranteed religious toleration for all faiths in the Balkans, manifestly counted for more in the Rothschilds’ eyes than the convoluted compromise over Bulgaria.”49

The Jewish Chronicle, then friendly to the Rothschilds, “expressed serious concern over the fact that ‘Gladstone and his followers’ seemed to show concern only for Christians” and argued in the 1880s that Jewish MPs were justified in breaking from the Liberals, which most did; as Gladstone had “accused Disraeli of operating British foreign policy in the interests of international Jewry rather than in the interests of the United Kingdom” as Geoffrey Alderman puts it, the Chronicle urged Jews to seek new allies.50 The Liberals, who had been their faithful friends, were now just burnt matches. The Chronicle today praises the Ottoman Empire without qualification for having had “an egalitarian, multi-cultural outlook which protected Jews.”51

A lot of nonsense is written about the Rothschilds. Their critics usually miss, and their admirers praise, what was most malign about them: they lobbied and used bribery to open Parliament to self-interested foreigners and used Britain’s tolerance and generosity of spirit solely for the benefit of their own tribe. Largely unopposed, this became precedent. Later arrivals from around the world have learned to imitate such practices for their own groups. A tiny few have any consideration for the consequences for British people, and many are openly hateful toward us. ‘Modern Jewish politics’ achieved the first stages in this process and, to this day, not one ‘anti-racist’ Jewish organisation says a word for us. Quite the opposite. David Aaronovitch in the Times informs us that “Defending ‘white interests’ can never be right”.52 Allison Pearson in the Telegraph proclaims that “Standing up for British Jews is our duty and privilege.”53 Little of this subversion entailed felonious means. The Rothschilds became rich by prudence above all. Edward and his parents overspent by choice. The same went for Disraeli, Churchill and other warmongers. Their dissolute inadequacy beckoned to opportunists. ‘Modern Jewish politics’ is our problem thanks to our prodigal rulers.