Lord Rothschild’s Legacies

 Our daily media diet of murder and massacre in the Middle East carries on the history of more than four thousand years. Readers with a regularly well-thumbed Bible will need no guidance to the scores of horrible examples set out in the Old Testament; others, perhaps able to retrieve a Bible from somewhere beneath the dust of a back shelf, may take (simply as a reference at random) the last two chapters (20 and 21) of the Book of Judges.

There the ethnic cleansing of the day is illustrated by “smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children”. And indeed this was promptly done, except that a hundred virgins were preserved for other purposes. In those backward Bronze Age times they lacked the refinements of guided missiles, rockets and high explosive. But they deserve full credit for the sweeping results obtained by simple old fire and sword, slingshot and club. Nevertheless, there was an uncanny foreshadowing of today’s “roadside explosive device”, when the Israelites were commanded to post “liers-in-wait”, to ambush travellers along the highway.

Let us, with the majestic stride of historians, step lightsomely across the gap of some four thousand years, till we make a halt in 1917.

The whole world is at war, and the Middle East is very much its accustomed surly self; ancient tribal hatreds continue to blaze or smoulder; the rivalries of new Arab kingdoms stir a breeze of diabolical intrigue through palace, bazaar and Bedouin desert camp. The British and the French—nominally wartime allies—are prospectively cutting each others’ throats for “spheres of influence” after the peace. Germany’s Muslim ally, the Turkish Ottoman empire, continues to fall apart. Beavering tirelessly away are the world’s oil companies—“Big Oil”. The enigmatic figure of Colonel T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) flits across the horizon.

The Jews long dreamed of their return as a people to the Palestine home of their sacred sites, and the Zionist movement was strong amongst Jewry throughout a world which had shown them aeons of cruel persecution. But what a moment to attempt the creation of the new nation-state of Israel! No genius was needed to foretell the difficult birth ahead. If the thing were to be done at all, it could succeed only with the armed protection of one of the Great Powers.

The French tried to horn in, seeking a joint mandate over Palestine with the British. Germany, with the support of its own numerous German Jewish Zionists, sought to sponsor an Israeli protectorate. (This, had it succeeded, might have set a curly question for Hitler only two decades later.) In the end, a mandate to Britain was negotiated in 1917, and ratified by the League of Nations in 1922.

The mandate was contrived by proceedings as bizarre and as obscure as any in the history of international relations: bizarre, because the effective dealing was achieved by private personal contact between two individuals, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour (hence the “Balfour Declaration”), and a leading British Jew, Walter Rothschild (Lord Rothschild); obscure, because by 1923, most of the relevant Foreign Office documentation had mysteriously disappeared, and the important papers had vanished from the Rothschild family archives.

Even today, in discussions of the intransigent Israel–Palestine horrors, the Balfour Declaration continues to be mentioned. Some commentators see it as the “ur-validation” of Israel’s being, as foundational as the American Constitution is for the USA. The great Zionist Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel, called it the “Magna Carta of Jewish Liberation”. But to that shrewd and gallant British soldier Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Chief Political Officer in Cairo (and himself a Zionist) it was “an ambiguous document … like so many other things issuing from Arthur Balfour”. Now, in 2010, we must take our pick. But two elements of the 1917 transactions remain fascinating curiosities: first, the actual scrap of paper on which the Declaration is inscribed; second, the human being who was one of the protagonists—Lord Rothschild, Walter himself.

The written Declaration, product of such arduous thought and such deep intrigue, is a visual anticlimax: no parchment; no spacious engrossments of “whereas” and “now therefore”; no pendant seals or flourishes of any kind. On a single sheet of plain small notepaper (not even Foreign Office letterhead) the substance of the Declaration is typed in nine lines comprising a mere sixty-seven words. They state that “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. (It is added that this fact is to be made known to the Zionist Federation.) The paper is addressed to “Dear Lord Rothschild”, but it gives Walter no designation or office. The scrawled signature is that of “Arthur Balfour”, but there is no hint of his ministerial standing. The envelope, in Balfour’s hand, is addressed simply: “By Hand”. The Lord Rothschild etc., etc., etc., 148 Piccadilly, W.1.”

Is it to such an insignificant-looking source that we should trace so much of the hate and bloodshed which have stained the Middle East since November 2, 1917?

But if the note bearing the text of the Balfour Declaration is a feeble, insubstantial thing, nothing could be less true of its recipient, Lord Rothschild. Walter was six feet three inches tall and weighed twenty-three stone, with an immense head that might have been carved for some heroic sculpture. He was the son of Nathaniel (“Natty”) Rothschild, the first Lord, a genial and immensely popular figure. In 1915, as the horses drew his coffin away from the house, crowds of Londoners jammed Piccadilly. Prime Minister Lloyd George called Natty “a great prince of Israel who never forgot the poor and wretched among his people”.

Strong though the basic kinship bond remained, Natty must have found Walter a puzzle, if not a problem. In the family bank, the seat at his roll-top desk in the partners’ room was often unoccupied; all right, then, if he doesn’t fancy banking, let’s get him a seat in parliament, which was done. Some time later Natty ventured to use the wonderful newly-invented telephone machine to contact his son in the Commons: “I’m sorry, my Lord. Mr Walter hasn’t been here for months.” (For all that, his voters returned him to parliament four times.)

But Walter was wasting neither his own time nor the family fortune in a playboy life. He was a passionate zoologist who, even in his teens, had published learned papers on the insects, and other natural creatures. He was no cold “lab and microscope” researcher; he loved his animals. When he went up to Cambridge from Tring Park, the family estate, his college was persuaded to accommodate also his brood of kiwis, from which he could not bear to be parted. Even at the bank, his attendance was sometimes curtailed by a loud clanking from outside: the two brown bears he had brought to work were rattling their chains, hungry and wanting to go home.

In the park at Tring roamed animals of every sort. There is a wonderful photograph of Walter, complete with top hat, riding on the back of a gigantic Galapagos tortoise. There were zebras, and Walter—ever practical—disproved the theory that such wild creatures could not be tamed; he himself broke some of them to harness, when they would contentedly draw him around in a buggy. His great specialty was butterflies, and millions of specimens from all over the world filled the Tring museum. The epitaph on his tomb was aptly chosen: “Ask of the beasts and they will tell thee and the birds of the air will declare it unto thee”.

Walter did not assume a leading Zionist role until after Natty’s death in 1915. After that he and Chaim Weizmann were at the forefront, and it was Walter who called the immense meeting of Jews in London to hear the Balfour announcement. The crowd at one point became fractious, and on the stage Walter sprang to his feet and bellowed, “Silence!” (There was no sign of the speech impediment which sometimes handicapped him.) Then, as this huge man resumed his seat, his weight smashed the chair to matchwood, and with widespread legs he sat heavily on the platform. Was it an omen?

What would I not give to have known this great and gracious man! We are all profoundly indebted to his niece, Miriam Rothschild, for her brilliant and moving biography (Dear Lord Rothschild: Birds, Butterflies and History, 1983) of her uncle. She was herself an eminent zoologist, author of hundreds of scholarly papers on the fleas. Though firmly a member of the Jewish community, she was an atheist. She said that, at one stage, she had inclined to believe that there was a designer of the world; that was when she first discovered that the male flea had a penis. She died in 2005, aged ninety-six. Perhaps size, alas, matters after all.