A year ago at the Center for Jewish History, after a lecture by Niall Ferguson about "Jews & Money," a woman in the audience asked whether Jewish money had not played a part in the British Balfour Declaration of 1917, the commitment by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild to grant the Jews a "national home" in Palestine. Ferguson had no good answer for her.
But the question got me thinking, and I began reading about the role of Jewish financiers in affairs of state. The best books to be found were Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State and Gary Dean Best’s To Free a People. Ginsberg says that the rise of the modern nation-state only happened because of the Jewish genius for international finance. We helped build the European states up, then they expelled us… Best’s book is more specific: it documents the early days of the Jewish lobby in the late 1800s, when German-American financiers who were outraged by the Russian pogroms, privately went to the White House on the issue, and then stanched the flow of capital to the Russians during the Russo-Japanese war in 1903-1905– which was won by the Japanese in part because the Russians couldn’t float war bonds in London.
I never did get a definitive answer to that woman’s question. Accounts of the Balfour Declaration generally go into the political intrigue surrounding the British commitment, not the financial angle. Though Louis Brandeis’s letters suggest a lot of machinations before the declaration was made. I suspect–as that questioner at the Center for Jewish History did– that financial clout played a role. It would be foolish to think that it didn’t. Why, even Herzl, in the Jewish State, said that Jewish financiers would pay off European countries to compensate them for the loss of Jewish emigrants to a Zionist homeland.
This Thursday, November 15th, the Center for Jewish History will again be visiting the subject, holding extensive panels on "The History of the Jewish Involvement in Business and Finance." You and I can’t go, though. There is a "couvert" to attend the sessions, of $2000 a head. Here is the invitation to the event. You will see that the Center is treating a bunch of important subjects: "Jewish Commerce and Political Philosophy," "Jews and Money: Myths, Stereotypes, and Reality."
Who’s invited? This is a "Special Evening for Hedge Fund Managers, Investors, and Service Providers."
Called the "hedgeevent" in the web address, CJH says of the night: "Now in its third year, this annual event explores the unique
relationship between business and philanthropy and its role within the
Jewish community, not only in the 21st Century, but throughout modern
history."
The event is not listed on the CJH calendar. (I learned about it from the CJH home page, which includes a live stream of events that mentions the evening). Of course, institutions need to have private galas to raise money, that’s how the world works. Yet I wonder whether the CJH will publish the proceedings of the evening. Somehow I doubt it. I couldn’t find any reference on CJH’s site to the two previous hedgefunders ball.
The whole thing feels faintly like a miasma. Traditionally, Jews valued wealth and learning–and learning more than wealth (just read Isaac Bashevis Singer). Now learning is taking a back seat to wealth. The subject of CJH’s hedge-fund ball is an important one (and was flubbed by Ferguson a year ago). It’s a subject that is mystified and whispered about, especially in these days of the Israel lobby. For instance, the cravenness of the Democratic Party on the Israel question obviously has to do with the preponderance of Democratic money raised from Jewish givers–about half, the Washington Post once estimated. Lately Seymour Hersh said that plans to attack Iran only had political traction because of "Jewish money."
Such an important subject–but you have to be in the hedge fund club to find out about it. The CJH owes it to the public to publish these proceedings.
