An Unlikely Zionist: A Look Back at Edmond de Rothschild

September 24, 2026 in Library Corner, Scroll

By Robin Jacobson

In 1954, an Israeli naval frigate sailed into the port of Haifa, conveying two coffins that were brought onshore with great pomp and ceremony, including a 19-gun salute. The coffins contained the remains of Edmond and Adelheid de Rothschild. Although the couple had died twenty years before and been buried in France, they were now to be re-interred in Israel. Prime Minister Ben Gurion wanted to formally recognize Edmond de Rothschild, known as Hanadiv Hayadua, “The Well-Known Benefactor,” as one of the pioneering founders of the Jewish state.

As James McAuley writes in his thoughtful new biography, Edmond De Rothschild: Finding Zion, Edmond was an unlikely founding father; he came to Zionism on an unexpected impulse. He decided to aid Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in the Czarist regime by supporting them in agricultural settlements in Ottoman Palestine.

Today, when Zionism is among the most fraught topics in the Jewish and non-Jewish world, it is enlightening to revisit what Zionism meant in its early years. Edmond lived in what McAuley calls the “before” time – before the Holocaust and before the establishment of Israel – a time when elite Jews like Rothschild strove to be accepted as citizens of their diaspora nations and tended to be hostile to the notion of Jewish national sovereignty.

A French Art Collector

Born in Paris to the French branch of the fabulously wealthy Rothschild family, Edmond de Rothschild (1845-1934) was only minimally involved in the family’s banking business. Instead, he collected art; he had a particular passion for Old Master drawings, amassing a collection of 40,000 works, now prized by the Louvre. But in the 1880s when brutal pogroms in Czarist Russia created a Jewish crisis, Edmond’s interests unexpectedly expanded.

Profoundly pained by the suffering of the persecuted Eastern European Jews, Edmond felt a “duty to try in every way I could to prevent these unfortunate people from giving in to despair,” according to his unpublished memoir. He began financing agricultural settlements in Ottoman Palestine, purchasing land and supporting Jewish refugees to build new lives there. Over time, Edmond’s philanthropy grew to encompass a network of some 30 colonies; the land he bought became the basis for the eventual establishment of the Jewish state.

Regenerating Judaism in its Ancestral Home

Edmond’s colonies proved that resettling Jews in Palestine was a viable project, but being one of Edmond’s colonists was not easy. He approached his colonies with the “mindset of a collector” McAuley writes, wanting to control and order them. He insisted that his colonists dress in uniforms, live in houses Edmond designed, apply to his administrators for permission to marry, and send their children to schools where classes were taught in Hebrew. Religiously observant himself, Edmond hoped that Jews in Palestine would regenerate traditional Judaism in their ancestral homeland. He hoped this would counter the rise in Reform Judaism and intermarriage, both of which he saw as a threat to Jewish survival.

Initially, Edmond did not promote the establishment of a Jewish state; he just wanted persecuted Jews who needed a safe refuge to be able to make their home in Palestine. French Jews of his social class were generally opposed to Jewish nationalism, afraid that it would endanger their status as French citizens. But by the time of his death, Edmond came to fully support Jewish national sovereignty. He remained a patriotic Frenchman, but his deepest commitment was to the well-being of his fellow Jews who had endured centuries of persecution and deserved to flourish, he believed, in their ancestral land.

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Historian James McAuley will discuss his book, Edmond De Rothschild: Finding Zion, in a virtual program on Sunday, December 13, at 11:00 am. Register here.

And don’t miss the October Book Chat at Beth El on Nicholas Lemann’s Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries on Sunday, October 18, at 11:00 am. Register here. You can read the Scroll review of “Returning” here.