James Armand de Rothschild, known to family and friends as Jimmy de Rothschild, was a sixty year old Anglo-French Liberal politician, philanthropist and racehorse owner at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was the eldest son of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the French branch of the Rothschild family that had funded the early Zionist settlement in Ottoman Palestine. He had been born in Paris, raised between France and England, and had served as a major in the British Army in the First World War, where he had been wounded twice on the western front. He had subsequently been Liberal Member of Parliament for the Isle of Ely from 1929 to 1945. He was a British citizen, a French citizen, a wealthy man, and a leading figure in the Anglo-Jewish community. The wartime work for which he is included in this section was on a different track from the diplomatic and undercover rescue work of the named Righteous, but was on a scale that brought thousands of Jewish refugees into Britain and across to Palestine.
The principal vehicle of his wartime work was the Central British Fund for German Jewry, of which he was a senior trustee, and the related family-funded operation that brought Jewish refugee children to Britain through the Kindertransport scheme of late 1938 and 1939. The Kindertransport, organised by the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany under the leadership of Dennis Cohen, Sir Wyndham Deedes and Sir Norman Bentwich, brought around ten thousand Jewish children to Britain between November 1938 and September 1939 from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The scheme required that the British government waive its normal visa requirements for the children, that British foster families be found for each child, and that a fifty pound bond be deposited with the Home Office for each child to cover the costs of eventual emigration to a third country if the war ended. The Rothschild family, including Jimmy de Rothschild personally and his cousin Anthony de Rothschild, provided substantial financial support to the bond fund and personally underwrote the placement of around two thousand individual children with British foster families.
Jimmy de Rothschild’s family also operated, through Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s earlier Palestine philanthropy, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, the PICA. The PICA had been founded in 1924 to consolidate the Rothschild Palestine settlements that Edmond had funded since the 1880s, and continued to operate during the war as a major channel for moving Jewish refugees from German-occupied Europe to British Mandate Palestine. The PICA’s wartime work included financial support for the Aliyah Bet, the illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine that the Mossad le-Aliyah Bet ran from 1939 onwards in defiance of the British White Paper of May 1939, which had limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to seventy five thousand over five years. The Rothschild contribution to the operation, channelled through the PICA, helped move several thousand Jewish refugees through Romanian and Bulgarian Black Sea ports to Palestine on the various boats of the Aliyah Bet operation between 1939 and 1944.
Jimmy de Rothschild’s wartime work also included a substantial direct financial contribution to the British government’s war effort, including the donation of his country house at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire as a centre for around one hundred Jewish refugee children evacuated from London during the Blitz. Waddesdon Manor housed the children for the duration of the war and was the largest single Jewish refugee children’s home in wartime Britain. Several of the children went on to prominent postwar careers; one of the older Waddesdon children, the future architect Sir Frederic Osborn, designed several of the postwar new towns. The estate was bequeathed to the National Trust on Rothschild’s death and is open to visitors today, with a small section of the visitor exhibition dedicated to the wartime children’s home.
The case is included in this section, despite Jimmy de Rothschild’s own Jewish identity which on the strict Yad Vashem rule disqualifies him from the Righteous designation, because his wartime philanthropy was on a scale that materially affected the survival of substantial numbers of Jewish refugees, because he was a public figure whose example was followed by other wealthy Anglo-Jewish families, and because the Anglo-Jewish community’s wartime contribution to the rescue of European Jewry, of which Rothschild’s work is the principal individual example, has been comparatively neglected in the literature in favour of the more dramatic individual rescue cases of the Continental rescuers.
Jimmy de Rothschild died at his London residence on 7 May 1957 at the age of seventy nine. He had served his last term as Liberal MP until 1945. The funeral was attended by around five hundred people including the elderly survivors of the wartime Waddesdon children’s home. His widow, Dorothy Pinto, who had been an active partner in the wartime philanthropy, continued the family’s Israeli philanthropic operations through the Yad Hanadiv foundation in Jerusalem until her death in 1988. The Yad Hanadiv foundation built the Knesset building in Jerusalem in 1966 and the Supreme Court of Israel building in 1992 and continues to fund Israeli civic and academic institutions today.
See also
Sources
- Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Volume 2: The World’s Banker, 1849, 1999, Penguin, 1998
- Bertha Leverton and Shmuel Lowensohn, eds., I Came Alone: Stories of the Kindertransports, Book Guild, 1990
- Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, Bloomsbury, 2000
- Naomi Shepherd, A Refuge from Darkness: Wilfrid Israel and the Rescue of the Jews, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984
- Yad Hanadiv Foundation, Jerusalem, archives
- Waddesdon Manor archive, National Trust, Buckinghamshire