The story is told of a Jewish tycoon who bought himself a yacht and a captain’s cap to go with it. He put the cap on his head and went to see his mother. “Look mother,” he said, I’m a captain!” “Bubbela”, his mother replied, “to you, you are a captain. To your mother you are a captain. To a captain do you think you are a captain?”
The Cousinhood, about whom I wrote last week, were determined to be captains, to be accepted as equals in 19th century, upper class English society. Like English aristocrats, they came from families with ancient pedigrees. They were wealthy and powerful and belonged to well-connected, influential networks that reached across Europe and into the New World. In all respects other than the fact of their Jewishness they occupied the same social stratum as their patrician English peers.
They lacked only one thing. They did not have full equality under the law. As Jews they suffered a host of statutory disabilities. They could not hold municipal office nor obtain university degrees. They were unable to enter the professions. Most famously, they could not be elected as Members of Parliament.
There were only two ways to shake off these impediments. One was to convert to Anglicanism, a route adopted by the Disraeli family. The other was to divest themselves of their disabilities by fighting for equal rights under the law. Emancipation was their passport into English society.
Imbued with a traditional Jewish sense of social justice the Cousinhood fought doggedly for emancipation. Not solely to be accepted by their social peers, they were not so naïve as to imagine that glittering prize was anything more than a bauble. They wanted to be emancipated so that they could contribute to the well-being of the nation by entering high office. And so that their less fortunate, impoverished brethren, whose numbers were growing all the time, could take full advantage of the benefits of life at the heart of the prosperous British Empire.
The Cousinhood campaigned for emancipation politically and socially. They lived lives befitting those at the very pinnacle of English society. They offered their hospitality to nobility and royalty and painfully put up with snide remarks made as often to their faces as behind their backs. They declared that they were not so much Jews as ‘Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion.’ They invested their money in industrial and infrastructure projects for the betterment of their pockets and the nation. They established banks and brokerages, playing a full part in financing the Industrial Revolution and making the City of London the financial capital of the world. They gave charity liberally and created philanthropic institutions. They tried, with limited success, to square the impossible circle of integrating into the host culture while retaining their own ethnic customs and identity. We are not much better at squaring that circle today.
Like our yacht owner with his captain’s cap they styled themselves as landed gentry. They built grand houses, bought estates and farms, some even rode with the hunts despite the prohibitions of Jewish law. They made sure that their children married well and they established dynasties. In 1849 Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid bought himself the Somerhill estate: a large Jacobean mansion set in 6,500 acres of countryside just outside Tonbridge in Kent. It was his second country estate, his first being the Hove estate that I wrote about last week. JMW Turner’s landscape of the estate hangs in the National Gallery in Edinburgh.
The Jacobean mansion, Somerhill House is now an independent school. But much of the surrounding estate still belongs to Sir Isaac’s descendants. For nearly 200 years it has been the seat of the D’Avigdor-Goldsmid dynasty.
When Sir Isaac’s male line died out the estate passed to the D’Avigdor-Goldsmid branch of the family, descended from his daughter Rachel and her scurrilous husband Count Henry d’Avigdor (see last week). The D’Avigdor-Goldsmids had been the poor relations of the family, but their name ensured that they were still counted among the Cousinhood. It was no great surprise to them or anyone else when the great wealth of the Goldsmid family eventually descended upon them.
Tragedy struck at Somerhill in 1963. Sarah, the 21 year old daughter of the latest heirs, Sir Henry and Lady Rosemary d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, drowned in a sailing accident in the English Channel. Sarah’s mother was not Jewish and when her distraught parents decided to commission a memorial to her they chose to place it in the small 7th century church where Rosemary and her daughters worshipped, in the nearby village of Tudeley.
Sarah had loved art and her parents wanted a memorial that would reflect her artistic tastes. She and her mother had recently visited the Louvre in Paris to see the “jewels of translucent fire” exhibition; the windows that the Jewish-Russian artist Marc Chagall had made for the synagogue of Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital. After Sarah’s death Rosemary travelled to Paris to meet Chagall. She asked him to design a new east window for the church, a memorial window which would reflect the mixed faith heritage of their daughter.
The window that Chagall designed is washed in the blue of the sea and sky, rich in biblical imagery like so many of his paintings. Sarah lies at the bottom of the sea, with her mother weeping on the shore. Above them is Jacob’s ladder stretching to heaven with Sarah’s figure ascending. At the top stands Jesus. His arms are outstretched as at the crucifixion but in this picture it is a gesture of welcome to Sarah’s newly arrived soul. On Jesus’s head is the small black box of his tefillin. There are angels, weeping figures and a rider on a red horse, an allusion perhaps to Pharaoh’s horses drowned in the Red Sea or the apocalypse.
Chagall was nearly eighty years old when he agreed to take on the commission. He did not visit the church before he commenced work. When the window was complete and he arrived for its dedication he looked around him and saw that the remaining windows in the church were all of plain glass. “C’est magnifique!” he said, “Je les ferai tous!” (“This is great! I will do them all”). The twelve windows of Tudeley church were the final major project that he worked on; the last of them was installed just before his death in 1985.
Chagall’s windows in Tudeley church do more than commemorate the tragic death of a young woman. They are a fitting emblem for the one of the formerly great families of the Cousinhood. The Cousinhood is no more but many of their family names survive. And those who have abandoned their Jewish faith tend to remain conscious of their roots. Fully accepted into English landowning society, the d’Avigdor-Goldsmids now have Christian and Jewish branches.
Chagall’s pictures in Tudeley church is not the sole acknowledgment of the Jewish origins of a prominent local family. Beneath Chagall’s striking East Window is a Communion Table. Embroidered on it in large Hebrew letters is the first line of the Shema. Spiralling around is its English translation together with the phrase from Leviticus 19: Love you neighbour as yourself. They are accompanied by Jesus’s declaration in Matthew that there is no commandment greater than these.
One might wonder how Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid would react, were he to wander into Tudeley church today.
Very interesting article. Thanks Harry.
Brighton and Kent were not the only places to experience the cousinhood.
Reading Synagogue, one of several provincial synagoues built to encourage Jews to leave the East End, is in Goldsmid Road (originally Junction Road and Westfield Grove). It was opened in 1900 on land owned by the Goldsmid family. Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid bought Whiteknights Park, now Reading University. His son, Sir Francis Goldsmid, was the first of three Jewish MPs for Reading (Rufus Isaacs and Ian Mikardo were two of his successors; a fourth MP was also rumoured to be Jewish).
The Shul was opened by Sir Samuel Montagu (Federation), with foundation and corner stones also laid by Osmond D'Avigdor-Goldsmid (Reform) and Claude Montefiore (Liberal), with the main benefactor, Mrs Lionel Lucas (nee Helen Goldsmid), all four of them cousins. It was consecrated by Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler and Rev Hermann Gollancz (United).
Viscount Bearsted of Maidstone (Nicholas Samuel) has his seat at Farley Hall, close to Reading. His cousin, Leonard HL Cohen, who died a few years ago, was High Sheriff Berkshire and a Berkshire County Councillor, and also lived at Farley Hall.