Baron Edmond de Rothschild

1845 - 1934  (89 years)    Has 8 ancestors and 8 descendants in this family tree.

• Name	Edmond de Rothschild
  Prefix	Baron
  Birth	1845
  Gender	Male
  Death	1934
  Siblings	4 Siblings
  + 1. Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild,   b. 1825   d. 1899  (Age 74 years) ▻ Nathaniel de Rothschild,  m. 1842 + 2. Baron Alphonse de Rothschild,   b. 1827   d. 1905  (Age 78 years) ▻ Baroness Leonora von Rothschild,  m. 1857 + 3. Baron Gustave de Rothschild,   b. 1829   d. 1911  (Age 82 years) ▻ Cécile Anspach,  m. 1859 + 4. Baron Salomon de Rothschild,   b. 1835   d. 1864  (Age 29 years) ▻ Baroness Adèle von Rothschild,  m. 1862 + 5. Baron Edmond de Rothschild,   b. 1845   d. 1934  (Age 89 years) ▻ Baroness Adelheid von Rothschild,  m. 1877
  Person ID	I303200	Geneagraphie
  Last Modified	22 Sep 2001

  
  

  Father	Baron James de Rothschild,   b. 1793   d. 1868 (Age 75 years)
  Mother	Baroness Betty von Rothschild,   b. 1805   d. 1868 (Age 63 years)
  Marriage	11 Jul 1824
  Family ID	F121622	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Baroness Adelheid von Rothschild,   b. 1853   d. 1935 (Age 82 years)
  Marriage	1877
  Children	1. James Armand de Rothschild, "Jimmy",   b. 1878   d. 1957 (Age 79 years) + 2. Baron Maurice de Rothschild,   b. 1881   d. 1957 (Age 76 years)   3. Baroness Miriam de Rothschild,   b. 1884   d. 1965 (Age 81 years)
  Family ID	F121635	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	22 Sep 2001

  
  

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• Notes

  The youngest sons of great European families often resort to the army, where they make do with colonelcies, or to a church career sans true vocation, or to an untalented expatriatism. The Rothschilds know no such case in all their ranks. Their youngest sons get so much more to start with, and, as Edmond's example shows, they can make so much more of what they get. This baby brother of Alphonse (he died only in 1934, at the age of ninety) engaged in the customary activities on the Family program. He sat behind his desk in the Partners' Room at rue Laffitte (his specialty was dividing the world's oil with Shell and Standard Oil); he built a great town house; he married another Rothschild, Adelheid of the German branch, in a round of festivities which were both religiously orthodox and religiously splendid. He had powerful cultural interests. If his brother Alphonse gathered rare goldsmith work of the Renaissance, if his cousin Willy in Frankfurt became a celebrated bibliophile and cousin Nathaniel in Vienna specialized in late eighteenth. century bijoux---he, Edmond, assembled a sumptuous collection of engravings and left no less than twenty thousand of them to the Louvre. But Edmond also turned to an interest that gradually consumed his long and characteristically energetic life. It began as charity and ended, in our time, as history. It can be summed up in one word: Palestine. The story starts on September 28, 1882, with an incongruous interview in Edmond's office. Behind his desk sat the Baron with his manicured imperial, his velvet bow tie and fragrant buttonhole. A strange apparition faced him, wreathed in wild prophetic whiskers. The Grand Rabbi of France, who acted as the Baron's appointment secretary in such matters, introduced the man as Reb (Rabbi) Samuel Mohilever, and endorsed his mission: to raise money for the support of new Jewish colonies in Palestine. Reb Mohilever did not look like a fund raiser, though; he certainly didn't act like one. The conversation began with an inquiry. Would the Baron mind if he, Reb Mohilever, did not discourse in the modern manner, but employed the tone of voice used by a rabbi in front of the congregation? All right, to the first main point. Why was Moses, who was tongue-tied and stuttered---why was he picked to be the leader of the Jews and to take them from Egypt to the land of Israel? After discussing the pros and cons in the Talmudic manner, the Reb disclosed to the astonished Baron that the reason lay in this: God deliberately avoided a smooth talker for the revelation of His word. He chose a stutterer to show that what was so compellingly convincing in Moses' mouth was not a clever tongue but the Voice of the Lord. A series of similar sing-song reasonings led Reb Mohilever to the conclusion that he, too, was a poor speaker; but that perhaps his smallness had been chosen to demonstrate the greatness of his cause: to show that the soil of Zion was the one haven for his persecuted brethren in Eastern Europe. He had come to Paris hoping to commit to Palestine the innermost fiber of Baron Rothschild's soul. Edmond answered that he was prepared to contribute the necessary sum---which his visitor had not even mentioned. But Mohilever's Talmudic dialectics steered the interview straight back to the soul again. The Baron, not prepared for a spiritual set-to, kept stressing his willingness to give money; the Rabbi would not let go of the innermost fiber. At last the deep black eyes of the old man won out. Edmond promised ". . . to consult myself and make a trial to see what will result from it." Grand Rabbi Kahn, who played interpreter whenever the Baron's Yiddish gave out, has handed down the phrase. It turned out to be no mere politesse. For the remaining fifty years of his life Edmond made a trial of the question, and it made a trial of him. He became the greatest activating force in Jewish colonization prior to Zionism. He began by financing the settlement of exactly one hundred and one Russian Jews not far from Jaffa. Gradually he went on to subsidize needy Jewish colonies and to create others. His funds drained swamps, dug wells, ploughed land, built houses, surveyed terrains. Of the seven new Jewish agricultural communities existing in Palestine in the middle 1880's, three escaped bankruptcy only through Rothschild. A fourth was altogether of his own making. The rest benefited vitally, if more indirectly, from his help. The initial colony of Rothschild-propelled emigrants was soon followed by many hundreds and later thousands of such settlers. All that constituted Edmond's outward involvement. It didn't really harmonize with a rather fastidious, saturated, retiring inner nature. Gladly he would have let just his checks speak for him. In fact his first contribution was signed "Nadev Hayeduha," the Hebrew term for "anonymous benefactor." A contradiction developed in the man. Chaim Weizmann noted it the first time he met him. "Everything about him was in exquisite taste," Weizmann recalled later, ". . . his clothes, his home---or rather his homes, his furniture and paintings. . . .,' And yet there he was---this aloof, immaculate dandy---hip-deep in the economics of irrigation, manure and soil rehabilitation. Apparently the eyes of Reb Mohilever remained fixed on him, demanding the innermost fiber of his soul. Some force always pulled him out of the drawing room into the heat of the Jewish battle. His princely reserve, fostered by secretaries and assistants, always lost to the Rothschild drive that must conquer definitely whatever it casually touches. Before long Edmond found himself intervening with the Turkish government, at that time in control of Palestine, in favor of Jewish colonization. He did diplomatic backstage work. And he was sucked into the internecine strife among the settlers. The distant donor changed into the querulously loving father and finally into the fond, familiar tyrant. When a deputation of Russian Zionists called on him to discuss the need for reform in some of his settlements, he grew purple like David mortified by Absalom's treason: "These are my colonies, and I shall do with them as I like!" Few of his friends in the Jockey Club would have recognized M. le Baron. It was an awful spectacle, this combination of paternal ire and Rothschild autocracy. Often he threatened to withdraw his immense subsidies and thus to wither all Jewish Palestine with one stroke. How seriously he meant such threats became plain later on, when some other Rothschilds began to show a tentative interest in Palestine. "What!" he said furiously to Weizmann. "After I've spent tens of millions on the project, while they made fun of me, they want to come in now with a beggarly few hundred thousand francs and share the glory? If you need money, you come to me!" The degree of his embroilment reached touching and tragicomic heights in 1889, a so-called Sabbatical Year. (Orthodox Jewish law, based on certain passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, forbids the tilling of Jewish land during every seventh year.) Edmond thought that idleness for so long a period would ruin most of the young settlements. He remonstrated with the rabbis of Jerusalem, who remonstrated right back. Edmond flew into a fatherly Jewish fit, the worst fatherly fit there is. He forsook racing, banking, collecting and all his other superb leisures. To combat one fanaticism, he had to assume another. For months on end he plunged into ferocious theological maneuvers. He convoked a series of secret conferences of rabbis friendly to his position. It was decided that the Sabbatical Year must be worked through, but without breaking orthodox tradition. Edmond's counselors devised a method to have this kosher cake and eat it too: all the Jewish land in Palestine had to be sold, for that one year only, to people of another faith. In the eyes of God the settlers would then be working for non-Jews---which was permissible ---and not for themselves. The rabbis of Jerusalem cried out at this as a blasphemous fraud upon the Eternal. They threatened to excommunicate anyone caught working. They promised to take up collections to support all those who abstained. They were dealing with a Rothschild. Edmond laid a powerfully worded brief of his argument before Rabbi Isaac Elchanan of Kovno, Lithuania, famed throughout the world as the greatest orthodox authority. After considerable coaxing on the Baron's part and deep study on the part of the savant, Reb Elchanan issued his verdict: under such safeguards as Edmond's rabbis proposed, the soil of Zion could be tilled during the Sabbatical Year. Thus Edmond won another victory. But the innermost fiber of his soul was sore. The very man who had first sensitized it, Reb Mohilever, had not spoken up for Rothschild's side of the controversy. A remarkable document survives from that time. It is a letter written by Edmond to the Grand Rabbi of France but meant for Reb Mohilever. The Baron, too hurt to address the Reb directly, asked the Grand Rabbi to bring the letter before the true object of his emotions. Edmond's indignation was such, in fact, that he even abstained from French. He wanted to berate Mohilever in Mohilever's own idiom. And so this outburst is innocent of the polished perfections of the secretariat usually in charge of the Baron's correspondence. Composed by Edmond himself, it consists of Jew Street jargon, a sort of Yiddish. And Edmond's halting Yiddish seems a good deal more pathetic than the primitive German once used by his ghetto-dwelling grandfather. With his poor German old Mayer Amschel pursued the success he fully achieved; while with his beginner's Yiddish the baronial grandson reached for a folk identity he could never quite attain. The missive, scrawled painfully in Hebrew letters, is an explosion of fond disappointment, overflowing with fury and love, and culminating tremulously: ". . . Herr Oberrabiner, do you know what I think? I will tell you the truth. . . . . These colonists want to take the land and the houses away from me and then scoff at me. . . . Let Rabbi Mohilever know that I will send the colonists . . . and all their families back to him and then we will see what he will do with them. And besides traveling expenses, I will not give them a cent." Needless to say, the threat was never carried out. Reb Mohilever could conclusively prove that he had worked undercover for Edmond against the hostile rabbis; had, in fact, clinched the supertheologian's favorable decision. He and Edmond resumed their curious friendship. The colonists did work through the Sabbatical Year and, for all their spasmodic rebelliousness, came to regard Edmond as their protector-king. His name merged with the designation "Nadev Hayeduha" under which he had first given money for their cause. At the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish Palestine knew him as Baron Rothschild, the Anonymous Benefactor. This particular wound healed. But there was another Palestinian problem Edmond could never quite resolve. The Rothschilds, in all their branches, kept their distance from Zionism. Official Family policy held that they and their coreligionists were European citizens of the Jewish faith, who must refrain from anything that might jeopardize emancipation. Most of the mishpoche looked at Edmond's Palestinian obsession with what was at best astonishment. Theodor Herzl, the political founder of the Zionist movement, sensed an opening. He considered The Family "the most effective force our people have possessed since the dispersion. " If only it were a force sympathetic to his aims! Albert von Rothschild, head of the house in Herzl's native Vienna, had not even deigned to answer a request for an interview. But perhaps this Paris Rothschild, this Palestine-prone Baron . . . . Herzl pulled a hundred wires to achieve an appointment with so great a prize. But Edmond closed his doors. His activities in Palestine were a matter of philanthropy, not of nationalist politics. Thereupon Herzl, in a letter to the Grand Rabbi of France, declared that he would resign Zionist leadership in favor of the Baron the moment he turned Zionist. Edmond agreed to a meeting. It took place on July 18, 1896, and ended fruitlessly. For the Baron, Palestine was a refuge for oppressed brethren, period. When Herzl met Lord Rothschild and his brothers later on, the encounter turned out even less happily. Natty, Leo and Alfred liked the man (they even helped to support his family after Herzl's death), but they were impervious to most of his ideas. "How is one to negotiate with this collection of idiots!" Herzl exclaims in his diaries. New Court, in fact, launched the bitterly anti-Zionist League of British Jews. Nothing seems odder, therefore, than the following letter by the British foreign minister, a letter known to the world as the Balfour Declaration. Foreign Office November 2nd, 1917 Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of his Majesty's government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet: "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation. Yours sincerely, Arthur James Balfour The Lord Rothschild apostrophized here is, of course, no longer Natty but Lionel Walter, his heir, in The Family's eyes a dangerous maverick because of his weakness for Herzl's dream. Yet not even he approached one tenth of Edmond's ostensibly non-Zionist efforts toward the realization of Israel. Thus the historic strangeness of the Balfour Declaration and the paradox of Edmond's own position. In his memoirs Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, recalls a remark by the "Nadev Hayeduha": "Without me, Zionism wouldn't have succeeded, but without Zionism my work would have been struck to death." A pregnant statement, it contains both the implied separation between Edmond's "work" and Zionism and his crucial connection to a cause he could never quite bring himself to espouse formally. (To Edmond is ascribed the saying that a Zionist is an American Jew who gives an English Jew money to get a Polish Jew to Palestine.) He considered Palestinian Jewry not as a polity but as his own obstreperous yet passionately loved family, whose duty it was to love him, its father, in return. But Zionism? The national goals, the propaganda apparatus, the official trappings of a political organization? That sort of thing dismayed him. After all, he, Edmond de Rothschild, was there, ready to take care of it all benevolently and privately. "Why must you people go around making speeches and attracting attention?" he once asked Menachem Ussishkin, a Russian Zionist leader. "Baron Edmond," the man answered, "give us the key to your safe, and we promise not to make any more speeches." Actually the Zionists had it both ways. They went on making speeches. And they did get the key to the Baron's safe, at least to one of his larger ones. The money went on flowing throughout the Baron's long life. In 1931, at the height of the depression, Zionism was out of funds. Dr. Weizmann was dispatched to the Baron. As soon as the Jewish leader reached Paris, the grippe struck him down. This most chronic of Zionist speech-makers was flat on his back when, surrounded by a panic of bellhops and concierges, the eighty-six-year-old Baron came in. In his hand he carried a check for forty thousand pounds. "This should help bring your temperature down," Edmond growled, put the piece of paper in Weizmann's hand and stalked out again. Never has an ideological shirker been more generous to the cause he shirked. Palestine flourished in a hundred places under his touch. His money helped start new soil cultures in the Holy Land: almond trees, mulberry bushes, jasmine, mint, tobacco. He not only pressed the introduction of viticulture, but guaranteed its financial survival by purchasing the entire grape crop of all Jewish settlements year after year---and at a higher price than the quotation on the world market. He also sparked the industrial development of Israel-to-be. His funds facilitated the formation of the Palestine Electric Corporation Ltd., the Portland Cement Company's "Nesher Ltd.," the Palestine Salt Company and the Samarita Water Company. And still this was not the end. He even made sure that the colonies he bought clustered strategically across Judea, Samaria and Galilea, to serve as strongholds in time of need. The time of need came, four decades later. At one point it puzzled Weizmann why Edmond spent such huge sums of money on excavating and exploring the Mount of Zion. The Baron claimed he was interested in finding the Ark of the Covenant. "I asked very seriously," Weizmann says, "what he hoped to achieve with the Ark. He answered, 'Les fouilles, je m'en fiche: c'est Ia possession.' Excavations be damned, it's the possession that counts." The Arab armies can deem themselves lucky that there weren't more such non-Zionists as he. Following Edmond's money came Edmond himself. The Baron and Baroness began to visit Palestine, perhaps the plushiest pilgrims the Holy Land had ever seen. The couple liked to travel in their own yacht, weighing anchor in Marseilles and docking at Jaffa. It was on May 5, 1887, that the "Nadev Hayeduha" first walked on Zion's soil. That day marked, in an observer's phrase, "the historical meeting between a prince and his people." Trailed by a great following, he prayed at the Wailing Wall and---he was, after all, a Rothschild---quickly undertook to buy it from the Arabs. Not only that; he aimed at the conversion of the surrounding neighborhood into one huge Jewish shrine. To meet Moslem objections, he made a second commitment: he would purchase another, equivalent plot of land; here hewould accommodate, in much more comfortable houses than they had near the Wall, all the Mohammedans who must be evacuated. Edmond appropriated three quarters of a million francs. The Pasha of Jerusalem had already given his approval. Yet the whole scheme died mysteriously of the opposition from Jerusalem's Chief Rabbi. Nevertheless, this and subsequent baronial visits were splendid occasions. The velvet bow tie was seen everywhere---in hospitals, schools, farms, industrial installations, workshops. Naturally Edmond took a cognoscente's interest in things familiar to him---the wine cellars, for example, or the perfume factories, or the display of horsemanship by young colonists. (Today his grandson, the present Baron Edmond, and England's Lord Rothschild jointly continue the administration of his huge Israeli interests. They also continue the tradition of pet luxuries: their special hobby is the development of Caesarea into a fashionable golfing resort.) No matter how occupied, Edmond did not forget the innermost fiber. Once, at Tel Aviv, he said publicly and bitterly, "Never before did I regret so much as now that I cannot speak Hebrew." Another time---it seemed the eyes of Reb Mohilever, now dead, would never release him---he called out his conviction "that if you abandon Judaism, all our people will suffer shipwreck . . . for you are the pride and hope of Jewry. . . ." Two days after this speech, settlement leaders were invited to dinner on the Rothschild yacht. They found great wonders there. The ship had a complete, specially fitted kosher kitchen, and a kosher Escoffier who created meals such as Solomon must have served Sheba. The satin-lined cabin used as a prayer room was in the stablest part of the ship. And all the doors of all the sumptuous staterooms had mezzuzahs. The story goes that one of the settlement elders, greatly taken with the prodigies of the vessel, kept walking its decks and almost missed the tender that took his colleagues back to shore. "Don't you want to return to Zion?" one of them twitted him. "You go to the Promised Land," he is supposed to have answered. "I'll stay on the Promised Yacht." april 1901 Edmond (son-in-law of Wilhelm) and Natty (son-in-law of Mayer) sent out a historic announcement to all friends and business acquaintances of the original House in Frankfurt: It is our sad duty to inform you that in consequence of the decease of Baron Wilhelm Karl von Rothschild, the Banking House of M. A. von Rothschild und Sohne will go into liquidation. The liquidators are 1) The Right Hon. Nathan Mayer, Lord Rothschild, London 2) Baron Edmond de Rothschild, Paris.