the world of private banking

PRIVAtE BANKERS AND PHILANtHROpy 251
Jewish Philanthropy
The great diaspora of Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire occurred just
as British Jews were experiencing the formal symbols of social acceptance. Only
from 1866 could observant Jews take the oath which would enable them to sit as
members of the House of Commons and only from 1871 could they enter Oxford
and Cambridge Universities. The wealthy sections of the established Jewish
population greatly, and with good reason, feared that their new and fragile social
acceptance would be destabilized by the inflow of impoverished immigrants.
Jews who fled to Britain congregated in a small number of urban centres.
The largest number settled in East London where the, previously small, Jewish
population probably stood at 120–140,000 by 1914. 18 The established Jewish
population felt not only fear but compassion for the misery of their co-religionists.
In consequence, Jewish financiers and others devoted a great deal of time and
effort to philanthropic activities designed to provide for the material needs of poor
Jews, and to prevent their becoming a burden on the British taxpayer; also to
socialize them into modes of behaviour which would make them acceptable to
the British – hard-working, law-abiding and English-speaking – whilst retaining a
Jewish identity. 19 They also encouraged and financed the onward movement of the
migrants to the United States or to less-crowded countries such as South Africa or
Argentina. 20
Jewish financiers, lawyers and businessmen funded and ran the Jewish Board
of Guardians, an alternative for impoverished Jews to the publicly funded Boards
of Poor Law Guardians. They financed and administered schools such as the Jews
Free School in East London, which provided an English Jewish education and to
which N.M. Rothschild, among others, was a generous benefactor. Another major
problem was housing. The Jews were accused of causing public health hazards as
they crammed into the already miserable housing of East London and Manchester,
unable to afford better. Rothschild again took the lead in setting up a semiphilanthropic
company to provide tenement housing for the poor. Perhaps in part he
was responding to the reported plea of his mother, Charlotte de Rothschild, on her
deathbed in 1884, that he should devote his energies to improving the housing of
Jewish workers. 21 At a meeting at the Rothschild banking house in 1885 Rothschild
planned with Samuel Montagu, F.D. Mocatta and other prominent members of the
Jewish community the establishment of the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings
Company. This was to raise capital for the building of homes for poor Jews.
18
D. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–
1914 (Yale, 1994), p. 172.
19
V.D. Lipman, A Century of Social Service, 1859–1959: The Jewish Board of
Guardians (London, 1959).
20
Feldman, Englishmen, pp. 299–306.
21
J. White, Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block, 1887–1920
(London, 1980), p. 19.