On The First floor of the home of Felix M. Warburg is a large, imposing chamber; the long heavy table surrounded by sturdy leather chairs seems to await the session of a council of state; the framed documents and photographs on the walls lend the room the atmosphere of an historical museum. This grave and tradition-weighted room would seem to provide excellent hospitality for the interview of a gentleman who lives in a seventeenth century house in Kent, who loves oak panelling, beamed ceilings, and paintings in the Dutch manner.
At that long, directorial table was seated a well-set man, with greying hair, a pepper-and-salt grey mustache, and the black eyebrows that are so startling against the background of grey hair. He was dressed in tweeds.
He was writing in a pocket notebook. He was quite absorbed in his writing; I had been sitting in the room for fully ten minutes before he became aware of my presence.
THE BRITISH SMILE
Osmond Elim d’Avigdor Goldsmid has that peculiarly British eye-smile, compounded of willingness, a slight amusement, and sportiveness found by interviewers in all English notables, whether they be novelists, boat-racing champions, or, as in this case, distinguished men of public affairs.
They listen, brightly attentive, to the most complicated of questions; invariably they make a slight nod at the end of the question, perhaps say, “that is a most extraordinary question,” and then plunge into reply. It is curious of their well-bred fair-mindedness that they always try to reply earnestly to the question in the terms in which it is asked, rather than in their own terms.
The traditional manner would be expected of d’Avigdor Goldsmid. Few Jewish families have a more certain heritage of tradition. Both Englishman and Jew are, in this case, defined by generations of fine connection and distinguished service.
Mr. Goldsmid is chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Inasmuch as he recently arrived from London to confer with leaders of the Jewish Agency on the Palestinian question, and with them and other American-Jewish leaders on the German-Jewish question, I wanted to know whether, in his opinion, the existence of Palestine as a Jewish national home affected the world attitude toward Jewry in the treatment of anti-Semitism in Germany.
PALESTINE AND WORLD ATTITUDE
For one of the strongest arguments about Palestine has always been that, however incomplete may be its material realization, its very existence as a center of Jewish life and thought creates a phychological reaction in the world, a general sense that the Jews exist as a people with a home. Does that change in the world’s attitude toward Jewry already exist, or is Palestine as yet too insufficiently identified as the Jewish home for that change in attitude to have taken place?
The crisis in Germany is, undoubtedly, the greatest that has arisen for the Jewish people since the expulsion from Spain. It is the first national “pogrom” since the modern Zionist movement. It is, then, the first chance to test whether Palestine has created any change in the world’s consciousness of the Jews.
“I do not believe,” Mr. Goldsmid said in answer to this lengthy query, ” that Palestine is, in that sense, an element in the public mind. People of course realize that some of the German Jews can go there, but there can be no question of a concentrated removal of German Jewry to Palestine—”
“Of course.”
“Of course.” That was not what was meant. But can one detect such a change in the world’s attitude? “I am not a Jewish nationalist,” Mr. Goldsmid asserts, “and never have been. I believe that in twenty or thirty years Palestine will develop as a moral center for the world, a center for the propagation of peace and knowledge. I believe it is our destiny to teach the world the truths of peace, and that Palestine will remain an island of enlightenment in the chaotic world, just as Belgium remains an island of neutrality in warring Europe. You know the passage in ‘Daniel Deronda’ that makes that comparison between Belgium and Palestine?” His smile is now the eager gentlemanly smile of the country gentleman, sharing his admiration for George Eliot. In essence, he explains, his views on Palestine are those so prophetically stated in “Daniel Deronda.”
BIBLE STRANGELY FULFILLED
“Isn’t the present movement a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, in its modern way?” He admits by his very English glance that it is a strange fulfillment; the return, with modernistic white buildings, chemical industries on the Dead Sea, tractors on the soil, is hardly the image called up by the prophets. But is it not so?
It differs only outwardly, as our sense of religion may differ but outwardly from that of our parents. For, says Mr. Goldsmid, with a touch of that universal nostalgia that all modern Jews have when they mention the rituals of orthodoxy, “My mother was very observant in her religion. I am not. But still I have my religion.”
It would be difficult, indeed, to imagine that the omission of ceremonies alone could kill so strong a tradition as that imbedded in such families. For Avigdors are spoken of in the twelfth century, when the scholar A. ben Elia ha-Cohen was known in Vienna and Rome. In the fourteenth century, Abraham Avigdor, logician, wrote in Provence; his son, Salomon Ben Abraham Avigdor, born in 1384, was an astronomer.
Of the immediately known family, Jules D’Avigdor, who died in 1856, was the first Jew in the parliament of Piedmont. His nephew, Isaak Samuel d’Avigdor, was the secretary of Napoleon’s Sanhedrin in 1860. Solomon Henry d’Avigdor, a friend of Napoleon III, was married in 1840 to Rachel Goldsmid, the Sir Isaak Goldsmid of London. Their son was Elim d’Avigdor, the celebrated English leader of the Chowewi Zion society for settlement in Palestine, a precursor of the present Zionist movement.
FATHER ENGINEER, EDITOR
Elim d’Avigdor, the father of the present Jewish leader, led a picturesque career. As an engineer, he built the railroads of Siebenburgen and the waterworks of Vienna. He then became the editor of a political journal, the “Examiner”, and of a sporting paper, “The Yachting Gazette”. He was an elder in the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue in London. Becoming interested in Palestine, he was active chiefly in association with East European Jewry, and succeeded in founding twenty-two branches of their Chowewi Zion society in England. He later became associated with the Herzlian movement. He personally carried through important land transactions in Palestine, and mapped out an ambitious plan for a Palestine-Syrian system of railroads, only part of which has been carried through. He died in 1895.
“You see,” his son says, “I really inherited my interest in Palestine.” From his mother’s side, he inherited that seventeenth century house in Kent, which he loves so well, and the name and shield of Goldsmid, which he combined with the name of d’Avigdor.
“I take a great deal of interest in the community of Kent,” he says, and much of his time is devoted to active communal work. He loves to live in the house with the “strap ceilings”, and to add to it, occasionally, paintings, pieces of furniture and harmonize with its period. He likes to golf.
HIS LIFE AS A JEW
But his life as a Jew is as much a part of himself as his life as an Englishman. Only recently he resigned the presidency of the London Board of Deputies of British Jews; he had busied himself with every detail of that organization, from seeing that Jewish students whose college examinations fell on a Jewish holiday might take them at another time, to appointing caretakers for “deserted” Jewish cemeteries. For there are a number of cemeteries in England in communities from which Jews have shifted, old cemeteries that might otherwise be neglected. He knows them by name, Plymouth, Sheerness, Penzance. And, of course, he took no small part in the greater tasks of the Board of Deputies.
In 1921 he went to Palestine and took part in the establishment of the Economic Board for Palestine, which is something like our Palestine Economic Committee. In 1926 he was again in Palestine.
“There is as yet,” he says, “no sense of cause and effect in the mind of the world, between what happens to Jews, and Palestine. That is, speaking in the most general sense. If something happens to the Jews of Germany, the world does not relate it to the problem of Palestine, except as that we look to Palestine to absorb some of the sufferers. Palestine must, of course, remain under the British mandate for a great many years, and I hope it will be so, I think that is very good.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
