The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century
By Matthias B. Lehmann (Stanford University Press)

Long before the world was focused on the wealth of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos or the activities of George Soros and Bill Gates, there was Baron Maurice de Hirsch. During his time, the German Jewish financier and entrepreneur’s name was synonymous with wealth, privilege and philanthropy. Today, however, his influence is less well-known than names like the Rothschilds or his non-Jewish counterpart, Andrew Carnegie.

Hirsch, who lived during the second half of the 19th century, a tumultuous time, was a charismatic and controversial character, a giant of the “gilded age of Jewish philanthropy,” historian Matthias B. Lehmann, Teller Family chair in Jewish History at the University of California, Irvine, writes in The Baron.

The exhaustive, and in some places too detailed, biography—there are more than 65 pages of footnotes—illuminates the legacy of the man who built rail lines; funded Jewish colonies in Argentina, the United States and pre-State Israel; and, at one point, suggested that the best way to eradicate antisemitism was through assimilation. The book also describes how Hirsch’s life helps us understand Jewish philanthropy and politics in Europe at a time when private benefactors played a major role in shaping the fate of Jewish communities worldwide.

“Philanthropy did not operate outside or beyond the realm of politics,” writes Lehmann. “It was the principal form of Jewish political action at the time.”

Hirsch was born into wealth. His grandfather was the first Jewish landowner in Bavaria and his father served as banker to Maximilian Joseph, king of Bavaria, who awarded the family a hereditary barony. Hirsch, who established his own banking firm at the age of 17, expanded the family fortune through sugar and copper speculation as well as by purchasing railway concessions in Austria, Turkey and the Balkans.

Indeed, he created the first rail line linking Western Europe with the Ottoman Empire at a time when transcontinental tracks were being laid in the United States and elsewhere. The rail line, Chemins de fer Orientaux, was a visionary project that took two decades to complete and spurred business development across the continent. It also became the rail line for the Orient Express.

One of the most influential men of his time, Hirsch had homes in France, England and Hungary as well as in what is now the Czech Republic. He and his wife, Clara de Hirsch, frequently entertained influential Jews and Christians at grand events on their estates, and invitations to his lavish hunting parties were much sought after.

Although he himself received a Jewish education, Hirsch shunned all religious practice, feeling that secularization would solve the problem of anti-Jewish discrimination. He even urged his son, Lucien, to find a wife among the Christian aristocracy of London. (Lucien died in 1887, before he could marry.) In January 1889, Hirsch gave an extraordinary interview to the New York Herald, reprinted in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. In it, he said, “The Jewish question can only be solved by the disappearance of the Jewish race, which will inevitably be accomplished by the amalgamation of Christians and Jews.”

Such a process, he explained, could start with “enabling oppressed Jews to deal with modernity.”

That universalist approach collided with the reality of antisemitism in his era, notes Lehmann. Even as he was building his railway, Hirsch became a popular target of conspiracy theories and was accused of swindling his investors, with one Austrian newspaper lamenting those caught in his “devilish Jewish net.”

Nevertheless, Hirsch remained a constant defender of Jewish causes. He donated funds to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an aid organization founded in France in 1860 for the creation of Jewish schools in Turkey and the Balkans. His greatest charitable undertaking, Lehmann explains, was his attempt to alleviate the suffering and poverty of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, a geographic area that included parts of Russia and much of Poland and Lithuania.

Hirsch created the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) in 1891. With a budget of $36 million, it was the greatest charitable trust in the world at that time. The JCA purchased large tracts of land for establishing Jewish colonies to resettle Jews from the Pale in North and South America as well as in Mandate Palestine. The JCA also managed a complex system for dealing with Jewish persecution, including emigration bureaus, technical schools and savings and loan banks.

Through the JCA, Hirsch set up a central committee to organize the immigration of Russian Jews to Argentina, giving them land in the Pampas to establish farms. Indeed, the towns of Moisés Ville, Clara and Mauricio in Argentina were all named for the Hirsches. Unfortunately, the plan to establish farming colonies fizzled, as, Lehmann writes, the Russian Jews “had never worked in agriculture and had no idea about farming,” and that they were struggling with “an entirely unfamiliar country and completely uprooted from their old habits.”

Nevertheless, the immigrants who settled there formed the seeds of the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Latin America.

After Hirsch’s death in 1896, Clara continued the family’s investment in charitable works, including in the JCA.

The Baron paints an image of Hirsch as a complex, audacious man who grappled with some of the same issues that plague Jewish leaders today—questions of privilege, assimilation, antisemitism and continuity. Hirsch thought of his immense wealth as “a sacred trust,” Lehmann writes, that he must use to ensure the survival of Jews worldwide. Today, over a century later, the charity he started still exists, under the name Jewish Charitable Association. Its accumulated funds are largely directed toward agricultural projects in Israel, supporting programs in the Negev and the Galilee.

In a letter to a friend after the too-early death of his son, Hirsch ruminates on his legacy. “My son I have lost, but not my heir,” he writes. “Humanity is my heir.”

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Stewart Kampel was a longtime editor at The New York Times.