The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [38]
The Ephrussi family certainly thought they belonged in Paris. Drumont certainly thought not: ‘Jews, vomited from all the ghettos of Europe, are now installed as the masters in historic houses that evoke the most glorious memories of ancient France . . . the Rothschilds everywhere: at Ferrières and at Les Vaux-de-Cernay . . . Ephrussi, at Fontainebleau, in the palace of Francis I . . .’ Drumont’s ridicule of the speed in which this family has moved from being ‘penniless adventurers’ to this ascent into society, their attempts at hunting, their recently commissioned coats of arms, became vicious anger when he thought of his patrimony soiled by the Ephrussi and their friends.
I force myself to read this stuff: Drumont’s books, newspaper, the endless pamphlets in numerous editions, the English versions. Someone has annotated a book on the Jews of Paris in my London library. Written very carefully and approvingly next to Ephrussi is the word venal pencilled in capitals.
There are quantities and quantities of this stuff, swinging wildly between hectoring generalities and splenetic detail. The Ephrussi family come up again and again. It is as if a vitrine is opened and each of them is taken out and held up for abuse. I knew in a very general way about French anti-Semitism, but it is this particularity that makes me feel nauseated. It is a daily anatomising of their lives.
Charles is pilloried as someone ‘who operates . . . in the world of literature and the arts’. He is abused as someone who has power in French art, but treats art as commerce. Everything Charles does comes back to gold, say the writers in La France Juive. Meltable, transportable, mutable gold to be carried, bought and sold by Jews who do not understand land or country. Even his book on Dürer is scrutinised for Semitic tendencies. How can Charles understand this great German artist, writes one angry art historian, for he is only a ‘Landesman aus dem Osten’, an oriental.
His brothers and uncles are excoriated and his aunts, now married into the French aristocracy, are savagely parodied. All the Jewish finance houses of France are anathematised by rote: ‘Les Rothschilds, Erlanger, Hirsch, Ephrussi, Bamberger, Camondo, Stern, Cahen d’Anvers . . . Membres de la finance internationale’. The complex intermarriage between the clans is repeated endlessly to build up a picture of one terrible spider’s web of intrigue, a web even more tightly bound when Maurice Ephrussi marries Beatrice, the daughter of the head of the French Rothschilds, Alphonse de Rothschild. These two families now count as one.
The anti-Semites need to pull these Jews back to where they came from, to strip them of their sophisticated Parisian life. One anti-Semitic pamphlet, Ce Bons Juifs, describes an imagined conversation between Maurice Ephrussi and a friend:
– Is it true that you soon have to leave for Russia?
– Within 2 or 3 days, said M. de K . . .
Well! Maurice Ephrussi replied, if you are going to Odessa, go to the stock exchange to tell my father some news of me.
M. de K promises, and after having finished his business work in Odessa, goes to the stock exchange and asks for Ephrussi the father.
– You know, he is told, if you want it to be done, it is the Jews you need.
Ephrussi the father arrives, an awful-looking Hebrew with long and dirty hair, wearing a pelisse which is completely covered with grease stains.
M. de K . . . delivers the message to the old man and wants to leave, when he suddenly feels pulled by his clothing, and hears the Ephrussi father who tells him:
– You forgot my small profits.
– What do you mean by your small profits? exclaimed M. de K . . .
You understood perfectly well, dear Sir, replies the father of Rothschild’s son in law, while bowing to the ground, I am one of the curiosities