Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild, the first Lord Rothschild (1840-1915), better known as Natty, was the leader of British Jewry and perhaps of Jewish communities across the globe. In 1885, he was raised to the peerage on Gladstone's recommendation, becoming the first Jewish peer, and participated fully in British imperial expansion. As the chief spokesman of the City of London, he was the principal protagonist in the major constitutional clash between the Commons and the Lords in 1909. He was also a friend of Disraeli, Arthur Balfour, Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes and Theodor Herzl. Yet after his death, his name faded from public memory. Why?
Part of the explanation must be that he ordered his correspondence and private papers to be destroyed on his death. Brought up under the hyper-critical gaze of a talented and accomplished mother, Charlotte de Rothschild, he learned as a young child to dissemble, to conceal his real feelings and, as he grew up, he became increasingly secretive.
Charlotte conceded that Natty was inept in company, lacking in frankness and "reserved and shy", the only one of his brothers and sisters to enjoy hoarding money for its own sake. Appointed as an executor to Disraeli's estate, he was a party to destroying papers containing some of his mentor's financial and sexual secrets to preserve the Prime Minister's reputation. Once again, when Edward VII, another friend, called on him to hand over family letters from Queen Victoria's correspondence with Disraeli, he agreed, even at the risk that these letters would be destroyed. From such fraught experiences as executor, it was little wonder that Natty was so willing to trash his own correspondence to hide the secrets of his own life.
Moreover, Natty towards the end of his life went through a turbulent and unhappy period, when at the behest of the City he helped to persuade the House of Lords to throw out the Budget in 1909 and was worsted by Lloyd George in a series of incendiary speeches which shredded his reputation.
Thoughts must have occurred to him that he had ended his career as a failure, being eclipsed as a Jewish leader by a new class of young professionals, journalists such as Herzl, Lucien Wolf and Paul Nathan, scientists such as Chaim Weizmann, and lawyers such as Louis Marshall. This was an additional and powerful reason for disposing of his private papers to make it difficult for others to subject his life to close scrutiny.
During the 19th century, when dire events such as pogroms and blood libels struck world Jewry, the houses of Rothschild in London, Vienna and Paris, and Bleichroder, their former agent, in Berlin, intervened with their own governments.
That is what happened when Natty took over as the leader of British Jewry, after the Russian pogroms of 1881-2. But without clear direction, as his father had died, Natty was unable to make up his mind as to whether to call a massive protest meeting in January 1882; and when he tried to present a memorandum privately to the Russian ambassador in London pleading for equal rights for his co-religionists, he was rebuffed.
In December 1890, he failed to attend a second protest rally, fearing that the Tsar would only listen to private entreaties and would ignore public clamour. Natty's older French cousin and brother-in-law, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild (1827-1905), took the lead in inaugurating a new policy of refusing to raise loans for Russia in 1882 and again in 1891, when the situation for Russian Jewry deteriorated. Natty followed the policy of his cousin and mentor.
During 1905-6 there was a second wave of pogroms with far higher casualties than 1881-2, no fewer than 880 Jews were killed in October 1905 and a further pogrom in Bialystok in June 1906 claimed the lives of another 70. Dr Paul Nathan of the Hilfsverein, a Jewish charity based in Berlin, called an international conference of philanthropists in London. It was presided over by Lord Rothschild, who was given the titular leadership of the movement, although the real organiser of this initiative was Nathan. The conference resolved to collect funds and to send a travelling commission to Russia to assess the scale of damage.
On the insistence of Dr Nathan, the question of equal rights was removed from the agenda of the conference because the German government would regard this as unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of another country.
The Commission travelled to St. Petersburg, where they met Baron Gintsburg, the Russian banker, and worked out the arrangements for the distribution of aid. It was decided to grant assistance to enable victims of the pogroms to resume their occupations, to provide financial relief for those unable to earn a living, and to make provision for orphans. Local committees would compile lists of persons eligible for relief. Once the claims were approved, the Rothschild Bank in London would be sent the names of the recipients for payment out of the international fund; and the bulk of these payments would be made by Samuel Montagu & Co.
A few years before the First World War, Natty was called upon by Lucien Wolf to intervene with the Papacy about Mendel Beilis, accused of ritual murder in Russia. Towards the end of the 19th century there were blood libel accusations against Jews. However, the European campaign on behalf of Beilis was once again led by Paul Nathan in Berlin, ably assisted by Lucien Wolf in London, while Natty and the new Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz played subsidiary roles.
Natty in old age became increasingly negative, refusing to approach the Lord Mayor to sign a petition and asking for a memorial that he was supposed to sign to be shelved. Instead, Wolf collected a testimony from the president of the forensic medicine section of an international congress in 1913 to undermine the evidence from two of the country's leading Christian Hebrew scholars refuting the claim that Judaism prescribed ritual murder. Wolf prepared a letter to the Pontifical Secretary of State asking him to declare the authenticity of previous Papal statements or Bulls denouncing the blood libel. Even though the declaration was not presented to the court in time through the deliberate obstruction of Tsarist officials, Wolf cultivated an excellent relationship with Reuters, so that all the relevant documentation was splashed across the European press, embarrassing the Tsar. While Beilis was found not guilty of murder, the jury implicated the Russian Jewish community with condoning ritual murder.
Natty came to realise that a new class of Jewish politicians from the professions was coming to replace the bankers, the intercessors of old. Because Natty wished to strengthen the British Empire, he attached little importance to Palestine as a Jewish colony.
Nevertheless, he was willing to support Theodor Herzl's plan for a colony in El-Arish and was one of the strongest supporters of the Uganda scheme, but any specifically Jewish outpost had to be kept small. Now, in February 1915, Herbert Samuel had approached him about a large Jewish centre being set up in Palestine. A month later, after a short illness, Natty was dead.
In the last year of his life, Natty's reputation not only recovered but soared. As chairman of the council of the British Red Cross, he successfully led a campaign to raise a million pounds for their general needs and for wounded servicemen.
As leader of City opinion, he helped Lloyd George and his advisers on the outbreak of the War to surmount the worst financial crisis in this country's history.
Had Natty known how a later generation would have evaluated his achievement, he might not have consigned his papers to oblivion.
