Anything “Our Crowd” can do, we—“The Cousinhood” of England—can do better: or so Chaim Bermant might seem to be saying in his highly entertaining-study of seven enormously wealthy and interconnected Jewish families that rose to dizzy heights of fame and influence in 19th-century Britain.1 In fact, however, Mr. Bermant's book is vastly—and significantly—different in range and style from Stephen Birmingham's study of the German-Jewish aristocracy in America.
Superficially the subject matter and method of approach of both books seem identical. In each country—the U.S. and Britain—a few Jewish immigrants arrive, move swiftly from trading into finance, and in no time at all—partly because of dynastic intermarriages—are fabulous powers in the City, launching vast issues, opening up new countries, amassing great fortunes, acquiring huge estates. Behind it, there is a specifically Jewish drama. Mighty as these rich families become, they are still arrivistes, fighting for full acceptance by the Gentile world. At the same time, as they struggle for a new image, they are restrained by a strong sense of loyalty (in varying degrees) toward the Jewish background from which they have emerged. It is a dilemma never fully resolved, with a paradox as epilogue. In the ordinary course of events, there would have been an inevitable one-way seepage of Jewish identity: and this to a great extent happened. The old simple meanings attached to being Jewish could never fully survive such astonishing changes in social position as occurred. Yet when everything might have disappeared, the sense of being Jewish came back into its own, with a new élan, through the emergence of the state of Israel. People hood over there—supported with true enthusiasm—became a safe and satisfying surrogate for an otherwise unconvincing kind of Jewish identity over here.
The family banners are still flying, therefore; yet there is a sense of epitaph about both stories. They cover a period of transition now over, unique in its vast opportunities for profit in financing industrial revolution, and unique also in its coinciding with the major experience of Jewish emancipation. A special aura clings to these families, the tiny few who were wealthy and free, revered (and resented) by the untold millions still caught in poverty and repression. The great fortunes that emerged subsequently among other Jews, and the powerful leadership which took over as the princely families gave way, can never generate the same interest, because the new wealth is so much more diffused. The tightly-knit sense of aristocracy and privilege, with its duties and eccentricities, has vanished forever.
In this broad sense, the two books cover the same ground, and the characters, of course, sometimes overlap. But the difference in locale is fundamental. One might have thought that the two essential strands of the stories—money and Jews—operate so similarly in different countries that this would outweigh national differences. In fact, the interest of each book lies precisely in the distinct flavor of its national setting.
The innumerable readers of Our Crowd know how essential this was to one's enjoyment. “Only in America . . . ,” one felt. In this place, and at this time, some extraordinary force emerged to create great family dynasties out of experience which was in itself prosaically and universally Jewish—Joseph Seligman arriving in Philadelphia from his German village in 1837 with one hundred dollars sewn into the seat of his pants by an adoring mother, Henry Lehman peddling his way up the Alabama river to set up shop in Montgomery, Abraham Kuhn taking on young Solomon Loeb to help out in his clothing store in Cincinnati. The transformation took place when New York drew them in at mid-century—a moment of fantastic potential, when the merchandising of goods could turn into the merchandising of money at huge profit, to finance the opening-up of railroads, mining, and industry on a scale and at a speed that the world had never seen. The style of life of these and the other magic-name-bearers had a gargantuan richness that was as flamboyantly American as their vast financial deals. And it was America, also, that set the limits on what could be achieved socially. For though their huge homes in New York and the country were staggeringly lavish in size and service by any standard, it was an existence that was cut off at many levels from top Gentile society with a sharpness not found in other countries. The families of Our Crowd may have opened up America with finance and dazzled it with benefactions; yet for some decades they seemed socially left to their own devices. They were larger than life, but could fail at the Social Register, or even a box at the Opera. More seriously, it was an existence out of the mainstream of active politics until relatively recent times.
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In almost all these respects, the atmosphere of The Cousinhood is very different. Great fortunes—sometimes dazzlingly great—surface in its pages, yet the overall picture is much more intimate, at home in a parochial way, in keeping with the scale and style of England itself. The story reaches a peak—unlike Our Crowd—in the first part of the 19th century, and had begun earlier, in the second half of the 18th century, with the arrival of a few key immigrants who put down firm roots in British trade and finance from this time on, and—to their great profit—were thus in a position to play a part in meeting the huge needs that arose for finance and supplies over the whole of Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. The essential quality of the Cousinhood families—especially in their first century—lies in the meaning one gives to the phrase “putting down roots.” They were not opening up a new country, as the Americans were, but adopting (or reaching out toward) an existing heritage. Certainly the vast wealth that came later to some of these families was an echo of something unprecedented for Britain herself—her expansion in the 19th century to the leadership of world economic development. But the built-in conservatism of British life was too strong to let its tone be affected seriously by newcomers, however powerful. Paradoxically, this meant that almost from the beginning, immigrants who made the grade financially could “safely” be given their head. British self-confidence was strong enough to throw its mantle over this alien element, so that it became a natural, acceptable, and convincing element in the British scene—always provided, of course, that the newcomers never tried to claim that they were really or fully English, in the way Lord Derby or the village blacksmith was. This paradox—that the Cousinhood was totally British (or rather English) yet ineradicably alien—survived countless different forms of expression. It was lived with, resented, obscured, and enjoyed in varying degrees. It had the great English virtue of never trying to push things to a logical conclusion. One could feel 100 per cent English (or more), participate very fully in political and social life, intermarry with the aristocracy, win the Derby, or—in the most English way of all—sink comfortably into the background in some quiet country seat: the price-tag on all this working was to acknowledge (however silently) one's ultimate difference. There was always a place—albeit sometimes an uncomfortable one—for oddities and eccentrics: England was full—as it still is—of rich and talented foreigners, taking on the local patina forcefully, brilliantly, amusingly. Eton, the clubs, the racecourses, even the palace—they were all open, but on terms.
Was it the old English sense of lineage—or just convenience—that caused these Jewish families to become so fantastically interwoven? The “Crowd” families intermarried to a certain extent, but the Cousinhood was built on family links to an extraordinary degree, the picture being presented in this book via seven immensely long and detailed genealogical tables. The magic names that everyone knows are Rothschild and Montefiore; but in fact the marriage alliances that forged the Cousinhood were really based more centrally on a humbly-named Mr. Cohen—Levy Barent Cohen—who had arrived in London in 1770 and became so rich in the City by the end of the century that young Nathan Mayer Rothschild was very happy to marry his daughter Hannah in 1806. Six years later, another daughter, Judith, married young Moses Montefiore. The Montefiores, though only second-generation immigrants, were already linked in marriage to the long-settled Mocattas, as well as to the Goldsmids, bullion-dealers with the Mocattas (as they still are) on a vast scale. It is the Goldsmids, perhaps, who generate best, in this book, the early period flavor of the Cousinhood. Interspersed among tales of their huge—and sometimes catastrophic—financial deals, we read of their taking several of the Royal Dukes with them to synagogue, and entertaining King George III and his Queen at their country house at Morden. Nelson, who visited them frequently with Lady Hamilton, had to sit silently there one night after dinner for what seemed to him hours, while Moses Montefiore, the most devout of all these characters, recited the Grace after Meals in Hebrew, in full.
The Rothschilds went on marrying Montefiores and Cohens, and, even more, an endless stream of cousins of their own in Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere. But this was to be only part of the Cousinhood. Up in the north of England—in Liverpool—a local cousinhood of families called Samuel, Yates (Getz), and Franklin had graduated from commerce to finance and was preparing to move south. The preeminent member of the first London generation—due to be ennobled later as Lord Swaythling—established the great merchant-banking firm of Samuel Montagu (he had begun life the other way 'round as Montagu Samuel) and married a granddaughter of Levi Barent Cohen. One of his sons married a Goldsmid, his daughter a Montefiore connection. His nephew Herbert Samuel, who became the most important Jewish politician that England produced (ennobled as Viscount Samuel) was thus a collateral member of the now proliferating Cousinhood. A quite separate Samuel family, which had immigrated in 1750, grew to fame in the person of Sir Marcus Samuel, the founder of Shell Oil (he was ennobled as the first Viscount Bearstead), and attached itself to the Cousinhood through marriages in the next generation. Even the Sassoons, who would surely have won a place in any case in a book on Anglo-Jewry through sheer exoticism (as do Sir Ernest Cassel and Baron de Hirsch), established a link with the Cousinhood by marrying into the Rothschilds.
The knighthoods and ennoblements which have been mentioned en passant are, we learn, only a small part of the honors that began to accumulate around the Cousinhood from the days of Sir Moses Montefiore (knight, 1837) and Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid (baronet, 1841). To a great extent it was a natural tribute in the British context to the power and influence in the City of these leading Jews, surfacing both in business terms and in the concomitant City “offices” (Sheriff, Lord Mayor, and so on) to which they began to be elected from about 1840 on. Ironically, the first burgeoning of honors of this kind took place at a time when the Jews, powerful as they might be in the City, were still excluded from normal citizenship, expressed supremely in the right to sit in Parliament. “Emancipation” in this sense arrived only in 1858, and even then was grudging, as if expressive of the fact that Jews were not to have a normal, but a special, place in English life. Perhaps it was in unconscious recognition of this that the first Jew to take his seat—symbolically, a Rothschild—-sat in the House for the next fifteen years without once opening his mouth. It was important to get over the hurdle, but not to push things too hard after that. Jews might be virtuous, useful, even distinguished, but there was still something unusual about them.
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No one expressed this oddity better than the Queen herself. She had been a personal friend of Moses Montefiore since 1835, two years before her accession, when her mother had rented a modest summer house next door to him at Ramsgate and been given the key to his spacious gardens. Yet despite this long friendship, she seemed to feel that City money, when made by a Jew, was somehow tainted. This, anyhow, is what she wrote to her Prime Minister Gladstone in 1869, when he kept insisting that the leading Rothschild be given a peerage:
The Queen really cannot make up her mind to it. It is not only the feeling of which she cannot divest herself against making a person of the Jewish religion a Peer; but she cannot think that one who owes his great wealth to contracts with Foreign Governments for Loans, or to successful speculation on the Stock Exchange can fairly claim a British Peerage.
Yet if the conviction persisted—even after the peerage hurdle finally fell in 1885—that Jews would always remain in some sense alien, this oddity, when fully acknowledged, seemed precisely the condition for the great social freedom that prevailed. Unlike the position in Germany at this time, where conversion to Christianity was an essential ticket to many “rights,” the British had no taste for it, and the Cousinhood rarely went in for it, except insofar as it fell “naturally” on some of their children or grand-children through intermarriage. A more subtle example lay in the fact that there was nothing in Anglo-Jewish life that corresponded to the role of Temple Emanu-El in New York. The Cousinhood never sought to express its superior social position in some aristocratic or “refined” kind of synagogue. A Reform synagogue was. it is true, founded in 1840 by some Cousinhood individuals anxious to break away from the rigidities of the existing Jewish establishment. But this remained an anomaly. The real Cousinhood leaders felt a responsibility to keep up a public adherence to the organization of traditional (conservative) synagogues; and one particular member, Lord Swaythling, went further by taking on the leadership, with great sincerity, of a totally Orthodox group of synagogues, known as “The Federation.”
There were perhaps two broad ways—one serious and the other frivolous—in which the special position of Jews, rather than their normal citizenship role, found expression in Cousinhood activities. The first was linked to the feeling, embedded deeply in British life, that Jews had a special religious significance for mankind. Their survival was a miracle; their concern for each other throughout the world was a natural echo of their singularity as the People of the Book and the heirs of the Holy Land. The Christian had to recognize this, and did. A remarkable example of British concern for Jews, for instance, was the national outcry, at the time of the Damascus Blood Libel in 1840. In Parliament, and at a mass meeting at the Mansion House, there was a demand that British power and prestige—very significant in those days—be used to secure the release of the Jews arrested on these false charges and facing execution. When Sir Moses Montefiore set out on a journey to the Near East to make these demands personally to the Pasha and the Sultan of Turkey, he was received by the Queen before he left, and again after his triumphant return.
Behind this—and the similar outcry at the time of the Russian pogroms in the 1880's—lay a streak of pro-Jewish sentiment that was to find expression momentously in the Balfour Declaration. The idea of the Jews having a “home” in Palestine had surfaced in English thought in a variety of different forms in the 19th century, so that when Herzl—and later Weizmann—began to try to give it practical reality, there was a ready soil for its nourishment. Ironically, the Cousinhood itself (with some exceptions) was by this time totally hostile to anything that might seem to impugn its status as “wholly” English. One member, indeed—Edwin Montagu, son of the Orthodox Lord Swaythling—almost wrecked the proposal as a member of the British Cabinet of 1917. Yet the Balfour Declaration bore, ultimately, a Cousinhood stamp. Behind all the negotiations there was an assumption of a special relationship: the British still “responsible” for the world, the Jews both useful politically, and available, in a romantic way, for the display of British benevolence. Balfour expressed this deeply English feeling perfectly. As Bermant explains, he “was a member of the Cecil clan which had formed an inner caste within the English ruling establishment since Elizabethan times.” He knew the rich Jews (including the exotic Sassoons) well, and was a close personal friend of the Rothschilds. It was to Lord Rothschild—in a calm assumption of all the indefinable realities of the Cousin-hood—that Balfour wrote on November 2, 1917, telling him, in eight historic lines, that the British government had decided to facilitate “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” “I should be grateful,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”
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If this serious side to the British involvement with Jewish experience had historic political results, the frivolous involvement with the Cousinhood at play is not to be underestimated as a significant part of the picture. From the very beginning—as we saw with George III and Nelson—the British establishment was very ready to enjoy the flamboyance with which these instant millionaires surrounded themselves. In terms of sheer size of operation, the style of the Cousinhood may not always have matched the exuberance of some members of Our Crowd, but it had its own cachet. Bermant describes a ball given by Baroness Lionel de Rothschild2 at their suburban estate at Gunnersbury in 1838, as part of the festivities for Queen Victoria's coronation. There was a banquet to start the affair in the evening for the five hundred guests:
The baroness sat between two dukes of the blood royal—Prince George of Cambridge and the Duke of Sussex. Also present were the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, the Duchess of Richmond, the Duke of Devonshire, the Marquis of Londonderry. There were two ex-Prime Ministers in the gathering—Wellington and Melbourne—and a pair of future Prime Ministers, Russell and Disraeli. Every glittering name in England seemed to be present, and not a few from Europe—Prince and Princess Schwarzenberg of Austria, Princess Esterhazy from Hungary, Marshall Soult from France, a sparkle of German princelings. . . .
The balls, the house-parties, the matchmaking, and the never-ending political intriguing that distinguished the Victorians increasingly absorbed the Cousinhood. A thoroughly raffish tone was added when the Prince of Wales established his own lordly set, with racing, gambling, and every kind of lavish adventurousness. The Prince had a real penchant for odd characters, and also needed financial support from wherever it could come. Rothschilds and Sassoons were included in the Court favorites, together with fabulously rich railroad and mining tycoons Baron de Hirsch, Sir Ernest Cassel, and others. Bermant tells this part of the story well, capturing the dazzle and bonhomie as well as the somewhat sinister dissoluteness that surrounded the Prince. Indeed, one of the merits of this book over Our Crowd is that he is able to bring in legitimately the story of these legendary millionaires, since they overlapped so frequently with the Cousinhood.
Nothing in Our Crowd, for example, can match the casual mention of the hunting party for Edward that Baron de Hirsch staged in 1891 at his estate in Hungary, where the guests (who included the Cassels and a Sassoon, as well as Lady Randolph Churchill) slaughtered more than eleven thousand head of game in a five-day battue. Yet though this all makes amusing reading, it would be misleading to think of it as a guide to the real character of the book, which concentrates far more—and often rather boringly—on the high moral purpose of the Cousinhood than on its colorful by-products.
For even the flamboyant characters, it must be remembered, had their serious side. Baron de Hirsch may have enjoyed spending a few millions in having fun with the Prince, but he gave away many more millions for the support of the Jewish poor, including great benefactions in Palestine and his enormous project for establishing Russian Jews as an agricultural community in the Argentine. No genuine Cousinhood members operated on this scale. Most of them went in for quiet propriety a la Forsyte. If, in early days, the romance of sudden huge fortunes set its own style (as in Disraeli's picture of the Jew “Sidonia”—a Rothschild-like character always on hand in Coningsby with his preternatural wisdom and munificence), the persona of the Cousinhood emerged in the present century with a distinction that has virtually nothing to do with wealth and exists solely in terms of intelligence and public service.
A Rothschild was, perhaps, a good symbol of the change—the Lord Rothschild of the Balfour Declaration, who made his mark not as a financier but as a great naturalist. In this new tradition, the present holder of the title has nothing to do with the bank but is head of the Prime Minister's “Think Tank” at No. 10. Of the Montefiore dynasty, Claude, who died in 1938, was an outstanding theologian. Hugh, descendant of a collateral branch, calls himself “a Christian Jew” (or perhaps it's “a Jewish Christian”), and has been made a Bishop of the Church of England. The family ruefully regard this as the cross they have to bear.
Dilution of the tradition is inevitable, yet the high purpose of those Victorian decades has left an inextinguishable mark. A minor hero of the book, for his saintly work in social welfare, is Sir Basil Henriques, linked in origin to almost every branch of the Cousin-hood, and drawing them all in—Montagus, Franklins, and of course Cohens of every hue—to support his work in the East End of London not only financially but through personal service to the poor and disadvantaged. The Cohen clan itself—a roll-call of extraordinary variety—has climaxed in the present generation in the person of Lord Cohen of Walmer, probably the most distinguished public servant of Britain today.
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In the end it is the Jewish interest one looks for. Unless one can relate the story of these rare birds to the body-politic of Jewry as a whole, it becomes anecdotage without a central theme. There are two special moments at which this litmus-test applies.
The first is over the sudden “invasion” of England by the helpless Yiddish-speaking masses of East European Jews that began in the 1880's. Until that time, the Cousin-hood had shown adequate responsibility—through a well-run Board of Guardians—in providing help for needy Jewish immigrants. But this had been small-scale. With a sharp increase now after the pogroms in Russia, the problem was not so much financial as political. While leaders like Gladstone denounced the atrocities at public meetings all over the country, there was also widespread agitation—similar in some ways to the Powellite agitation of today against black immigration—by those who said that the aliens were undercutting the wages of honest British working-men and destroying the character of British life. A newly-published study, The Alien Invasion by Bernard Gainer,3 helps us to understand how it was that Jewish leaders themselves began to panic. With no reliable statistics available, fantastically large numbers were being used by those who sought to bar all entry, and ultimately got a restrictive Aliens Act onto the Statute Book in 1905. The language used in the campaign conjured up a terrifying picture:
There is hardly an Englishman not in danger of being driven from his home, not by the natural increase of our population, but by the off-scum of Europe.
To some of the Jewish leaders, it was clearly essential—in the name of the position they had established—to stop or divert the flood. The Board, as Bermant shows, did its best:
It sent agents eastward to Germany, Poland, and Russia to try and stem the flow, and westwards to America and the colonies to direct it there. The Americans, who had their own problems, sent them home with fleas in their ears.
With little success, they turned to repatriation. “Between 1880 and 1914, the Board sent 50,000 men, women and children back to Europe.” Of course, said the Board, it was “mainly at their own request, and naturally never without their own consent”!
One learns a lot about Jewish life, as it was in pre-Hitler times, from this episode. Yet even then, it was not the whole picture. Jews in considerable numbers (for England) were in fact absorbed and helped. And there is a marvellous statement on record by one member of the Cousinhood—Frederic David Mocatta—expressing, at the height of the crisis, his total devotion to both England and Jewry. “It is not for us as Englishmen,” he wrote, “to try to close the entrance to our country to any of our fellow-creatures, especially such as are oppressed. It is not for us as Jews to try and bar our gates against other Jews, who are persecuted solely for their professing the same religion as ourselves.” But then Mocatta—as the book shows—was an exceptionally noble man.
The second test came over Zionism. When the Balfour Declaration was being prepared, the Cousin-hood—though with some exceptions—was not simply hostile but terrified. In a famous letter to the Times, a number of the magic-name-bearers sweated blood to prove that a national home for Jews in Palestine would stamp Jews like themselves “as strangers in their native lands.” They founded a League of British Jews, and intensified their campaign once the Declaration was issued. Lionel de Rothschild pleaded with the government to do nothing, in propaganda abroad, “to encourage the idea of a Jewish National Home.”
But reality gradually took over. Cousinhood industrialists (like Sir Bernard Waley-Cohen) helped to establish major enterprises in Palestine in the 1920's. Palestine as a refuge for German Jews had practical value in the 1930's. Israel, as a triumph of Jewish identity, began to inspire feelings, from 1948 on, that the timid British patriots of an earlier generation would never have recognized. In the drama before the Six-Day War of 1967, the English Rothschilds (never famed, unlike the French branch, for public benefactions on a large scale) calmly handed over a check for one million pounds. Perhaps the Cousinhood is so English now that it is no longer afraid of being Jewish.
1 The Cousinhood, by Chaim Bermant. Macmillan, 466 pp., $10.95.
2 Many of the Rothschilds had foreign “Baron” titles, but this really did not count for much in England.
3 Crane, Russak & Co., 302 pp., $12.75.
