Maurice de Hirsch

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Maurice de Hirsch

Baron Maurice de Hirsch (born December 9, 1831 in Munich ; died April 21, 1896 near Ersek-Ujvar ( Hungary ); born Moritz Freiherr von Hirsch auf Gereuth ) was a German entrepreneur and philanthropist .

Origin and first entrepreneurial activity

On his father's side, Baron Hirsch came from an ennobled Jewish banking family from Bavaria , the Freiherren Hirsch auf Gereuth . His mother was born Wertheimer from Frankfurt am Main . In 1855 he married Clara Bischoffsheim from the Belgian Bischoffsheim family , and soon began to invest part of his considerable fortune in railroad business in the Balkans and Turkey . On April 17, 1869, he signed a contract with the Turkish government to build the first continuous railway line from Europe to Constantinople , the route that would later become the Orient Express . In 1870 he founded the Compagnie des Chemins de fer Orientaux (CO) as the operating company for the planned routes , and appointed Wilhelm Pressel as chief engineer . Hirsch and Pressel quickly got the railway company going, in 1872 the CO operated around 500 kilometers. Hirsch received 200,000 francs per kilometer in material and labor costs and hired a subcontractor to whom he paid 100,000 francs. Due to the small amount that Hirsch paid the subcontractor , the government declared the railway line to be unusable and of poor quality in 1875. This led to an extension of the work up to the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II. After completion, it was a huge economic success for Hirsch and showed his great entrepreneurial skills. He was also accused of corruption in the Ottoman government.

Until the 1880s, Hirsch, together with the Berlin banker Gerson Bleichröder, was the most important German investor in the Ottoman Empire at the time . Interestingly, Hirsch showed no interest in investing in Zionist projects in Palestine (see below). The two Jewish bankers were then ousted from the oriental business by Siemens and Deutsche Bank in the wake of the incipient state imperialist policy of the German Reich , especially in connection with the Baghdad Railway project , in which deer no longer played a role and the S. Bleichröder banking house only played a subordinate role.

Philanthropic and Political Activities

Under the influence of his wife Clara and through personal experiences during his business trips in the Balkans and in Turkey in connection with his railroad business, Hirsch soon became aware of the sad fate of the Jewish population in Southeast Europe and Asia Minor . The “ Alliance Israélite Universelle ” (AIU) seemed to him a suitable partner for his own humanitarian activities. In 1873 he donated a sum of one million francs to the organization for the construction of schools, and from 1880 he took over the annual budget deficit of the organization, which fled by thousands in Constantinople from anti-Jewish pogroms by the Russian “liberators” during the Balkan crisis Bulgarian Jews cared. Nonetheless, Hirsch was active on both sides during the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 because the Jews at that time “sat between the fronts” and on the one hand supported the young Slavic national movements and on the other hand were branded by nationalist fanatics as the “fifth column of Islam ”. From 1878 Hirsch financed a network of trading schools in the Balkans that were built up by the AIU. From 1885 he tried to become involved in humanitarian activities in Russia , where the lot of the Jewish population was even more depressing than in the Balkans.

Hirsch spent most of his life in what was then the Danube Monarchy, where he was also active in the humanitarian sector, especially in the areas with a high proportion of Jews in Galicia and Bukovina . He became a friend and sponsor of Crown Prince Rudolf and also supported his political efforts directed against the alliance with the German Empire and especially against Kaiser Wilhelm II , for example by financing the journal Schwarzgelb, which polemicized against the dual union, in 1888. This solved one Wave of German national and anti-Semitic agitation against Hirsch, but also against Crown Prince Rudolf.

Maurice de Hirsch died in Hungary in 1896, his widow continued his philanthropic work until her death in 1899. Both rest in a tomb in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris. The only son, Lucian de Hirsch (1857–1887), had died childless nine years before his father. The father responded with the words "I have lost my son, but not my heir, my inheritance is humanity". The estate then fell to the adopted son Maurice-Arnold de Forrest (1879–1968).

Hirsch donated all of the prize money his racehorses earned to charity. Including the over £ 35,000 that his mare La Fleche won between 1891 and 1894.

Promotion of the emigration of Russian Jews

After the project to invest 50 million francs in Russia for the improvement of Jewish educational institutions had failed due to the unwillingness of the Russian authorities to cooperate, Baron Hirsch saw the only solution to improve the situation of Russian Jews in their emigration. He systematically investigated ways of establishing Jewish colonies overseas, and to this end he created an international association, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), with seed capital of two million British pounds sterling. Hirsch particularly intensively supported the settlement of Jewish colonists in Argentina , as well as in Brazil , Mexico and Canada , where today a village, " Hirsch " in Saskatchewan, is named after him. In the USA, too, Hirsch supported the then very large number of Jewish immigrants; he founded the Baron de Hirsch Fund in New York with start-up capital of 2.5 million US dollars.

Hirsch, who himself came from the first Jewish family in Bavaria who was allowed to acquire larger lands, believed that the Jewish people had a natural talent for agriculture, and therefore promoted in Argentina (here he founded six farming villages for Jewish immigrants from Russia) and Canada mainly agricultural projects. In a conversation with Hirsch in May 1895, Theodor Herzl tried to win him over to the idea of ​​founding a Jewish state in Palestine . However, Herzl did not even have the opportunity to carry out in detail the ideas of Zionism he had developed , which he had also put down in writing in Der Judenstaat , and so this meeting ended completely unsuccessful. In the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire, the JCA instead operated projects in the greater Constantinople area and near Smyrna (today's Izmir), both of which were abandoned in favor of Palestine after the founding of the Republic of Turkey in the mid-twenties.

By the turn of the century, the conservative Catholic side raised the charge against Hirsch of having driven thousands of Christians to ruin by handing over so-called “Turks without”. In the diatribes that were written in this context, anti-Semitic ideas come to light that were later to play a role in the propaganda of National Socialism. Hirsch himself was nicknamed "Turkish deer" because of these activities in the press. The JCA was then active in Palestine and has its main field of activity in today's Israel .

literature

Web links

Commons : Maurice de Hirsch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Benno Bickel, Karl-Wilhelm Koch, Florian Schmidt: Steam under the half moon. The last few years of steam operation in Turkey . Verlag Röhr, Krefeld 1987, ISBN 3-88490-183-4 , p. 9
  2. ↑ Kadir Misiroglu: Bir Mazlum Padisah: Sultan Abdülaziz. Sebil Yayinevi Publishing House, Istanbul 2006, ISBN 978-975-580-026-4 , p. 317
  3. ^ Hannah Arendt : Elements and origins of total domination. Anti-Semitism, imperialism, totalitarianism . Piper Series, Volume 1032. 10th Edition. Piper, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-492-21032-5 , p. 311.
  4. ↑ Cf. Brigitte Hamann : Crown Prince Rudolf. The way to Mayerling. A biography . Goldmann-Taschenbuch, Volume 3961. Goldmann, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-442-03961-4 , p. 193 ff.
  5. ↑ for example in the conservative Berliner Kreuz-Zeitung of November 28, 1888
  6. ↑ http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=758&letter=H
  7. ↑ Papers Past - Otago Witness - 8 December 1892 - RACING IN ENGLAND . Paperspast.natlib.govt.nz. Retrieved December 1, 2011.
  8. ↑ Frank Wolff gives a comprehensive overview of this JCA project in his essay The promise of salvation of the arable soil. Spatial concepts and conflicts of interest in Jewish Argentina 1889–1939 , in: Jochen Oltmer (ed.): Migration regime on site and local negotiation of migration , Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 2018, ISBN 978-3-658-18944-0 , pp. 133– 164. The essay is available online at Academia.edu . Wolff also refers to the literary processing of the Jewish settlement system in Argentina by Alberto Gerchunoff and his novel Jüdische Gauchos , Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-942271-08-0 .
  9. ↑ Hildegard Stausberg : Argentina's Jews flee from the general misery to Israel . In: welt.de , January 12, 2002, accessed on March 18, 2011.
  10. ↑ Der Tiroler , edition of February 6, 1902, number 15, p. 1 ("Why are we anti-Semites?") [1]
  11. ^ Permalink The Library of Congress .
personal data
SURNAME Hirsch, Maurice de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Moritz Hirsch, Freiherr auf Gereuth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Jewish entrepreneur and philanthropist
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1831
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1896
Place of death Ersek-Ujvar