the world of private banking

JEwISH PRIVAtE BANKS 227
buying an estate was less a source of status or revenue than a source of leisure
used as an instrument of business and social networking. The banking community
being heterogeneous in matters of religion since the eighteenth century, this factor
did not hinder Jewish bankers’ ascension. Even though anti-Semitism was less
virulent than elsewhere and many Jewish financiers were close to King Edward
VII, before World War I only Lord Alfred Rothschild had been admitted to sit on
the board of the Bank of England.
In France, most of the members of the haute banque belonged to the Protestant
and Jewish minorities. In the second generation, the Jewish bankers assimilated
without leaving their religion, by adopting the upper classes’ education and way
of life and obtaining French nationality. However, Jewish bankers suffered anti-
Semitic prejudices, which worsened during the Dreyfus affair. The birth of the
Banque de l’Union Parisienne, founded in 1904 by six houses of the Protestant
haute banque and the Société Générale de Belgique, gives proof of the persistence
of religious solidarities and rivalries in the banking world.
Moreover, even in such a liberal country as Belgium, the Société Générale
had never had a Jew on its board. While the bank had for a long time to share the
Belgian market with the Rothschilds and was in relationship with Mendelssohn
since the 1870s for the Russian loans issues, it declined offers to do business from
both the Warburg and Bleichröder banks. After the mid-1850s, when the growth of
the Rothschilds’ industrial interests in Belgium and the project for a Crédit Mobilier
promoted by a group of the international haute banque brought strong opposition
in Parliament and public opinion, the Jewish private bankers or at least their sons
got used to asking for naturalization once they were well established in Belgium.
In this way, they increased their integration in the national capitalism while at the
same time stimulating the internationalization of the Brussels financial market.
Although a few of them were able to become members of Parliament or were
ennobled, the Jewish haute banque did not reach such a high degree of integration
as in Britain. As intermarriage inside the Jewish international community suffered
few exceptions, as religious practice and philanthropy towards the growing waves
of poor Jews migrating from Eastern Europe prevailed, assimilation was rather
difficult in high society before World War I, where Catholicism prevailed.
Jewish Private Bankers and Politics
The rise of Jewish bankers gave birth to new stereotypes in anti-Semitic propaganda
after the late nineteenth century. One of those was their supposed omnipotence in
world affairs. Without going into debate, we may point out some aspects of their
relationship to politics. In calling Siegmund Warburg ‘un homme d’influence’,
Jacques Attali stresses a significant feature of the role some prominent Jewish
private bankers have played in politics, be it at national or international level. Few
of them were directly active in politics in Parliament or government.