Edmond de Rothschild

Summary

Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the assimilated French Jewish philanthropist who, in Zachary Lockman’s account, rescued the failing Hibbat Tziyon settlements in Palestine and assumed control of many of them (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 420-422).

Rothschild had little interest in Hibbat Tziyon’s romantic nationalism but was aroused by the plight of the east European Jewish masses and favoured their resettlement, preferably not in France, where an influx of poor eastern Jews might fan antisemitism and undermine the tenuous place of the Rothschilds and other assimilated Jews in French society (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 420-422).
Rothschild, and later other European Jewish philanthropists, provided the settlements with large-scale financial support, technical assistance and a large dose of paternalistic supervision (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 420-422).
By 1900 most of the twenty-two moshavot, with a total population of about 5,000, had come to be organised on the Algerian colonial model preferred by Rothschild and his agents, with European Jewish farmers employing local Arab peasants to cultivate their vineyards, citrus groves and fields (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 422-424).