“The Jewish question can only be solved by the disappearance of the Jewish race,” declared the prominent European Jewish financier and philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch in 1889 in the pages of The New York Herald, “which will inevitably be accomplished by the amalgamation of Christians and Jews.”
Hirsch’s proclamation reverberated throughout the Jewish world on both sides of the Atlantic, convulsing both traditional and liberal communities already struggling to stay grounded in tumultuous times. Indeed, in the decades before Zionism took hold of the Jewish imagination, with the winds of nationalism and imperialism blowing at gale force, devising a stable structure for Jewish longevity and thriving on the continent was no easy task.
Hirsch’s assimilationist posture reflected his own background: As a prosperous, aristocratic banker who had in many ways overcome his Jewishness to attain his high station among continental elites, he sought to elevate his co-religionists to the same plane of faithless cosmopolitans. The only catch? This approach stoked considerable antisemitism, leading Hirsch to take a different tack later in life, including by developing Jewish colonies in the Pampas of Argentina.
Matthias Lehmann, a history professor at UC Irvine, explores the story of Hirsch, “one of the most important yet understudied figures of modern Jewish history,” in “The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century,” his absorbing and well-researched biography. In Lehmann’s nuanced telling, Hirsch’s abundant generosity and supremely good intentions were eclipsed in part by his ambiguous, and ultimately unresolved, relationship with the universal and
