BARON MAURICE de HIRSCH
At
first, this reading was going to focus on the history of Moises Ville
and my research work on the genealogy of many families there, subject
to which I have devoted several years. But recently I read a lot about
the Baron Hirsch and I reminded him about the views that I have
received throughout this investigation, from various parts of the
world, and I found it interesting to share it with you.
Maurice de Hirsch was born in Munich in 1831. He was son of Joseph von
Hirsch and grandson of Baron Jacob von Hirsch, first to hold the
title. In 1855 he married Clara Bisoffsheim, daughter of a banker in
Brussels. With his inheritance and Clare dowry, he embarked on railway
companies in Austria, the Balkans and Russia, creating construction
companies and getting earnings from the railway operation. After much
effort won the right of the railway Vienna-Constantinople, so was the
builder of the Orient-Express and its success deserved him recognition
as an important personage of trade and finance.
Though, he
was a warm and simple man, despite its wealth and the need to show
that his activity required. Being a friend of the Prince of Wales,
among many other nobles who attended his dinner, he was not intended
to hide his Jewish particularities.
During his travels and his stay in Turkey had personal knowledge of
the miseries of the Russians, Romanians and Turks Jews, whose
condition was deplorable due largely to lack of practical education
and opportunities to earn a living. Aided by David Veneziani, who did
research for him and was his right hand in matters of charity, he was
connected with the Alliance Israelite Universelle, and placed large
sums at their disposal to extend its work to Turkey. He funded the
construction and maintenance of a large number of schools administered
by the Alliance throughout Europe and North Africa, and from 1878
until his death balanced the negative balance of that institution.
During the Russian-Turkish war of 1878 established and maintained
hospitals for both armies. But it was his contact with Russians Jews
what most troubled him, while they were systematically persecuted and
denied of the most elementary rights. In all his philanthropic
endeavors, Baroness Clara was his fervent support and guide.
In
1885 the Baron negotiated with the Russian government a donation of
50,000,000 francs (200 millions today's dollars) for a basic,
technical and agricultural education program, which benefit Jews from
the area of residence. He had to leave that plan because the Czar
power wanted to manage the fund. Hirsch finally reached the stark
conclusion that the only way left to the Russian Jewish was
emigration, and directed all its effort to investigate a plan of
colonization, looking for suitable sites for its establishment. He had
to discard successively Palestine, for the demands of the Turkish
government among other reasons, East Africa because inhospitable and
inadequate for agricultural labor, and the U.S. by the opposition of
the Jewish community established there.
In
early 1890 received through the Grand Rabbi of Paris-Zadok Kahn a
report from Dr. Wilhelm Loewenthal, a Romanian doctor, on
possibilities for agricultural colonization in Argentina. Loewenthal
had just returned from a trip hired by the Argentine government, where
he met a group of Jewish settlers who had recently founded an
agricultural colony called Moises Ville. In his report praised the
work of the new settlers and considered Argentina as a country
suitable to colonization because its size, low population (three
million inhabitants in 1890), climate, soil fertility, ease of
cultivation even for settlers more inexperienced, liberal political
regime, and the advantages offered by the country's laws to immigrants
interested in the farm works.
On
the other hand, Loewenthal argued that support for the persecuted Jews
should not be a gift but should give them an opportunity to devote
themselves to farm work, setting up agricultural colonies through a
Colonization Society, including surface to assign per household,
number of implements, the form of capitalization, credits, etc..
The
project attracted to Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who after studying it
gave its full support. "I lost my son, but not my heir. Mankind will
receive my inheritance," had said Hirsch in 1887, when lost his only
son Lucien. Jewish immigrants, who arrived to Argentina on Aug. 14,
1889 and finally settled in Moises Ville were the first beneficiaries
of the Jewish Colonization Association, the company created in 1890
with an initial capital of £ 2,500,000, which currently equals about
400 million dollars. The J.C.A. (known as “the Jewish” in Argentina)
established agricultural colonies in Argentina, Brazil, USA, Canada
and Israel. Several tens of thousands of families have benefited from
his actions over time, and gave birth to a Jewish community in
Argentina that has come to almost 500,000 souls.
For
various reasons the vast plan of Baron de Hirsch never materialized:
human factors, adaptation difficulties, uncertainties in climate, his
premature death in 1896, estimates may be too optimistic with respect
to the fertility of the land purchased and the ability to return by
the settlers of the amounts invested. Since the revolution of October,
when Russian Jews began to regain their rights and lose others,
emigration fell sharply, being replaced by immigrants from other
countries although to a lesser extent.
Other philanthropic commitments merit the memory of Baron de Hirsch. To
the settlement effort should be added the support to the Jews who
emigrated to the U.S. with a fund of USD 2,500,000 (today about 50
million USD), the fund for education and help for the Jews of Galicia
(another 50 million), the fund for assistance in Canada and his
donations to hospitals in London, results from the profits of his
horses races. He used to say that his horse “ran for charity". There
are not calculations on the amount destined by Hirsch, then
administered by the Baroness, to help their coreligionists. It should
not go below the U.S. $ 2,000 million today.
Except in Argentina and in some circles, the figure of Hirsch is
completely unknown and often information about him is distorted. In
wide circles Israelis and Americans is considered a bad Jew, a
"quasi-converted" that tried to influence that direction to the
settlers, an operator who was enriched at the expense of them, an
anti-Zionist.
I’ll try to reply to these views. Maurice de Hirsch was agnostic.
Despite having received by the influence of his mother a deep Jewish
education and to have complied with festivities and traditions,
dealing with personages from the scope of the nobility and the
finances of France, Britain, Austria and Hungary turned him a man of
the world that no worried at the thought of conversion and mixed
marriages. He was very refractory to Catholicism but had no problems
with Protestantism, his granddaughter, daughter of Lucien, was
converted. We must situate in the second half of the nineteenth
century with large segments of European Jewry in the process of
emancipation and enlightenment and subsequent assimilation to
understand this position. Theodor Herzl, before the Dreyfus affair,
was a belief that assimilation was the solution to anti-Semitism. Much
of the Jews around the world shared this idea until the Shoa.
Once, an American Jew visiting Moises Ville assured me that Baron
de Hirsch induced the future settlers to cut their beards before boarding
the ship. We were at the Historical Museum, and I showed him the photo
of my great-grandfather Isheber Rejovitzky on the wall, taken some
years before his death. He used a huge beard, and I said that he would
have preferred to be killed before allowing them to be cut.
What is undoubtedly true is that modern agriculture can not be subject
to the Jewish holidays calendar, much less in the southern hemisphere,
where the seasons are reversed. This fact naturally leaded to our
settlers, to adapt to their new life, they have had to abandon customs
and very old traditions, many of them originating in agricultural
events in the northern hemisphere. Seen it with layman eyes, it is not
difficult to surmise that the settlers were forced to abandon their
religion.
The
central idea of Maurice de Hirsch with respect to agricultural
colonization, was to rescue as many as possible (he spoke about
200,000) of the more than three million Russian Jews, whose conditions
were serious, starting with the lack of citizenship. He did not
consider agriculture as a goal but as a mean of salvation of his
coreligionists. He hoped that the success of the agricultural
colonization would be an ally in his plan, in several senses: those
already established would be the best propagandist for the project and
call their relatives and friends, and otherwise the same activity
would allow them to return the capital invested, renewing the fund
that would allow buying new lands. The contractual stipulation of the
payment in time of investments in land and tools obviously had no the
aim to enrich anyone, but the possibility of following in the task of
rescue. After all, four hundred million reach to end if the work is
very large. Furthermore, in founding the J.C.A. his goal was not only
remove their coreligionists of misery and repression they suffered in
Russia but to give them back their dignity through honest labor, not
as objects of charity, its purpose was never to give alms.
With regard to Zionism: between October 1894 and January 1895 was
carried out in France the trial to Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in
the French army. Theodor Herzl, at that time a correspondent for a
Viennese newspaper, was in Paris reporting the event, and the
condemnation and degradation of Dreyfus changed his personal vision of
Judaism. If a French officer, fully assimilated in a country of broad
freedoms and the cradle of human rights, was sentenced by the mere
fact of being Jewish, then Herzl concluded that assimilation would not
be the way to avoid anti-Semitism. That was the origin of his belief
in a Jewish state, and in that year of 1895 feverishly wrote his
Judenstaat, the founding manifesto of political Zionism, appeared in
April 1896.
During that period, in June 1895, there was a meeting between the
Baron de Hirsch and Theodor Herzl. The meeting could not have been more
disastrous. The passionate 35 years old Herzl criticized hardly Hirsch's
philanthropy, and outlined his plan to reform education with a view to
the Jewish emigration to the Holy Land without apparently knowing the
views of Hirsch and his works in practical education, and predicted
the realization of his plan for the next twenty years. "A flag and an
idea are needed to mobilize a people" he said. Baron de Hirsch was
already in its 65, and his plan of emigration and colonization was at
the stage that was beginning to work. His urgency to the plight of
Russian Jews - and his age - not allowed him to openly support a plan
with a view to a solution twenty years further. Moreover, during his
stay in Constantinople where he lived for several years, the Baron had
explored about the conditions of Palestine to receive settlers, and
the reports of his envoys were really dark. He wrote in 1891: "I am
not opposed definitively to that project, which can be considered at a
later stage. In the immediate future, given the emergency, I believe
that Argentina, with fertile land and depopulated and a government
favorable to immigration, is provides much better than Palestine,
where there is malaria and we must also grapple with the Turkish
government. "
Irritated with the verbosity of Herzl, Hirsch abruptly interrupted the
meeting without giving him time to develop his idea. Offended, Herzl
never sent him a copy of its Judenstaat. The Baron died nine months
later, without having read it and without having had the opportunity
to express his support or opposition to Zionism.
An
annotation to be interesting near ending: one year after his arrival
in Eretz Israel in 1906, a young man named David Green was established
in Sejera, called nowadays Ilaniya, near Mount Tabor. It was, like
many others, a settler belonging the J.C.A., Sejera was a colony of
J.C.A. founded in 1899. David Green in his memoirs recounts the
relationship of the community and his group with the "manager" (the
famous administrator of “the Jewish”), and how successfully imposed to
replace the Arabs hired to defend the colony.
David Green later changed his name to David Ben Gurion, and Sejera is
the birthplace of the Hashomer, the first Jewish defense organization
founded in 1907, forerunner of the Haganah later formed in 1920.
The
multiplier effect of the Hirsch philanthropic action is immeasurable,
and I think it is unjustified the reluctance to acknowledge him as a
primary benefactor of his people. He donated to their advantage all
his vast fortune and did so with a practical and generous canon: to
save the needy and persecuted without seeking thereby perpetuate his
name. In fact he did not do so and his direct or indirect
beneficiaries are who should deal with that mission.
Paper written by
Mario Jeifetz, Dec. 2004