Baron Edmond de Rothschild Was a Prince of Paris and Zionism’s Secret and Indispensable Benefactor

Baron Edmond de Rothschild is referred to in Hebrew as “Nadiv Hayaduah,” or the “Well-Known Benefactor.” The appellation acknowledges the irony of a scion of one of history’s most mythologized families insisting on anonymity with respect to his efforts on behalf of the Jewish homeland. How this prince of fin de siècle Paris became a hero of Zion is the subject of James McAuley’s new biography of the man Israelis refer to simply as “The Baron.” Rothschild, whose long life stretched between 1845 and 1934, was a grandson of the clan’s patriarch, Meyer Amschel. He was born and died at Frankfurt’s punishing Judengasse, but his trade first in rare coins and then in banking laid the foundation for a family whose name would become synonymous with fabled wealth. Rothschild dispatched five sons across Europe. Each would charter a bank. Together, they would amount to an empire.Edmond was the youngest son — by a wide margin — of Meyer Amschel’s youngest son, Jacob, who went by James. Together with his brother Nathan, the eldest and most gifted of the brothers, he executed the daring scheme to fund the armies of the Duke of Wellington against Napoleon. Nathan has been called the “greatest figure ever to adorn the international capital markets, greater even than J.P. Morgan and Michael Milken in their primes.”James, installed at Paris — called the “capital of the 19th century” — captured the imagination of writers like Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola. The poet Heinrich Heine, who frequently visited James at his offices at 21 Rue Laffitte, wrote of how “the people, and not only the Chosen People but all the other Peoples of the world, bow and pay obeisance to him.” The family bank had little attraction for Edmond, who instead turned his energies to culture.Edmond James de Rothschild stamp, Israel, 1954. Via Wikimedia CommonsFor a sense of Edmond’s exquisite taste, look no farther than the Louvre. The Edmond de Rothschild Collection at the world’s premier art museum, endowed after his death, comprises 90,000 pieces, among them 3,000 drawings of Old Masters. Mr. McAuley calls him “an exacting aesthete and consummate collector, a dilettante and a dabbler.” Simon Schama calls him the “most reasonable fanatic the Rothschilds ever produced.”By 1900 that reasonable fanaticism had led Rothschild to found 21 colonies, spreading across 276,000 acres, at Ottoman Palestine. That amounted to more than 70 percent of Jewish owned land. He even tried to buy the Western Wall for 700,000 francs. The Turks, it seems, were willing to sell, but the Sephardic chief rabbi thwarted the plan — possibly because he feared that his Ashkenazi brethren would wrest away control of the site.Mr. McAuley writes that Rothschild was an “obsessive, impassioned, compulsive aesthete” and links his heavy-handed rule over settlements as Rishon Le Zion, Zikhron Ya’akov, and Rosh Pina with his insatiable collecting. The baron might have been reclusive, but he was anything but an absentee landlord. He dictated whom his pioneers could marry, the design of the dormitories where they lived, and even the cut of their uniforms.A remarkable split screen emerges. At Paris, Rothschild honed Le goût Rothschild, or “Rothschild taste,” a sensibility Mr. McAuley describes as “a mélange of lavish European styles whose ultimate expression was opulence.” By 1899, though, he was looking beyond all that fabulousness to laud the pioneers of Rishon as the “realizers of the renaissance of Israel and of that ideal so dear to us all, the sacred goal of the return of Israel to its ancient homeland.”Rothschild and Herzl did not get along well, with the baron reckoning that the Visionary of the State was, as Mr. McAuley puts it, “a mere newspaper columnist.” During their stormy meeting at Rue Laffitte the two clashed over whether a state was feasible. The baron was skeptical, preferring a gradualist approach. Herzl writes in his diary that Rothschild told him during their parley that “One shouldn’t have eyes bigger than one’s stomach.”Rothschild enjoyed warmer relations with Chaim Weizmann, the chemist and charmer who secured the Balfour Declaration and would go on to become Israel’s first president. Edmond’s son, known as Jimmy de Rothschild, served in the Jewish Legion during World War One. One of the soldiers who reported to him during his time in the Legion was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the prophet of Revisionist Zionism.The State of Israel was established at four o’clock in the afternoon on May 14, 1948 at 16 Rothschild Boulevard at Tel Aviv. That thoroughfare, lined with Ficus trees, is now the pulsating heart of the first Hebrew city, a metropolis where French is increasingly spoken on beaches and in cafes. In 1954 the remains of Rothschild and his wife Adelheid arrived to Israel accompanied by a 19- gun salute. They rest now on the slopes of Mount Carmel.

Baron Edmond de Rothschild Was a Prince of Paris and Zionism’s Secret and Indispensable Benefactor

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