Judengasse über alles

Perfidious Albion on a String

City on a Hill | Alexander Chase Doty

…

I give you the end of a golden string;

Only wind it into a ball:

It will lead you in at Heaven’s Gate,

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

— William Blake, Jerusalem

…

In Blake’s Jerusalem, Albion falls into selfish war and moral law but is ultimately redeemed through imaginative forgiveness, rebuilding a spiritual Jerusalem in England’s "green & pleasant land." …

To imagine that the events of 1914–45, their cataclysmic wars, and the final, bloody settling of accounts, were merely the accidental byproduct of market forces is to indulge in a comforting but literal-minded delusion. It is far more satisfying, and arguably more accurate, to view them as the ultimate culmination of a long-con game subterfuge orchestrated by the disinherited sons of the Frankfurt Judengasse, a project that required the gluttonous sponsorship of a lecherous king, the extraction of blood-gold from the South African veld, and the unlikely, drunken genius of Winston Churchill to bring it to its thunderous conclusion. One must appreciate the supreme irony that the very people whom the Germans had spent centuries confining to a stinking, walled alley, imposing special taxes and forbidding them from owning land or joining guilds, would eventually finance the army that would burn that system to the ground. The Judengasse was not merely a ghetto; it was, in retrospect, a crucible, a pressure cooker where the excluded learned the only language their oppressors would eventually understand: the universal, corrosive power of capital.

Consider the lineage, if you will, a sort of financial Bildungsroman written in ledger entries rather than biopic prose. It begins in that cramped, fetid lane in Frankfurt, where Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his contemporaries, including the Goldschmidt ancestors of the Bischoffsheim partners, perfected the art of moving money across borders that were otherwise sealed by prejudice and sword. They were the original contrabandists of value, smuggling trust where no trust was legally permitted. This was indispensable scaffolding. Without the networks forged in the shadow of the Judengasse, the later project of neutering the Germans would have lacked its nervous system. But a nervous system needs a body, and in this case, the body was the British Empire, specifically in the person of Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. Here the irony thickens to a farce. The British monarchy, bastion of Anglican tradition and rectitude, was kept solvent and stylish by a coterie of Jewish financiers whom the establishment viewed with a mixture of envy and visceral antisemitism. Edward, a man whose appetites for food, women, and gambling far outstripped his allowance, found himself rescued by the very men his class despised. Sir Ernest Cassel, a Rhinelander who arrived in England with nothing and died with everything, became the king’s shadow chancellor. Maurice de Hirsch, the railway king who built the lines to Constantinople while the Rothschilds sneered at his speculative methods, was a constant companion. They did not merely lend him money; they lent him credibility, transforming the Marlborough House set into a cosmopolitan court where the currency was as fluid as were the house rules.

But capital, however artfully maneuvered through the drawing rooms of London and Paris, requires a physical substrate, a heavy, tangible anchor. For this, the gaze of these financiers turned south, to the scorched earth of the Witwatersrand. It is a delicious historical joke that the gold which would eventually pay for the shells that pulverized the Krupp works and the panzer divisions was dug out of the South African ground by black laborers living in compounds, under the supervision of a system of racial segregation that the British perfected and later bequeathed to Boer apartheid. The Union Corporation, chaired by Henry Strakosch, was one of the great engines of this extraction. Strakosch, an Austrian Jew who had fled the very continent he would later help save, understood that gold was not just a metal; it was the lifeblood of the Sterling area, the guarantee that allowed Britain to punch above its weight class. He ensured that the flow of bullion to London remained uninterrupted. This was the fuel. Without the South African gold, the British war effort in 1914 would have sputtered and died within months, unable to purchase the munitions from America that kept the island fortress alive. The irony is palpable: the wealth of the African subcontinent, extracted through a system of brutal enslavement, was funneled through Jewish financiers to save a British aristocracy that would have happily deported them all had they not been captive.

And then, center stage, we have Winston Churchill. The man is a monument to contradictions, a Victorian imperialist who saved the world from a modern hyperstate, a drunkard who possessed the sobriety of a saint when it came to the threat from the continent. For all his bluster and genius, the displaced heir to the Duke of Marlborough was incapable of holding onto his inheritance. He was a man who could lose a fortune on financial speculation with the same enthusiasm he brought to leading his lead toy soldiers in a cavalry charge. By 1938, he was insolvent, facing the humiliation of having to sell Chartwell, his beloved home, and thus potentially removing himself from the political stage just as the curtain was rising on the final act. It was Henry Strakosch, the man from the Union Corporation, the man who understood the flow of South African gold, who stepped in. Strakosch paid off Churchill’s debts, not as a bribe, for there is no evidence of a quid pro quo, but as an investment in the survival of civilization. The idea that one should have to bribe Churchill to oppose Hitler is patently absurd. Later, when Churchill became Prime Minister, Strakosch provided emergency funds again. Cassel’s earlier role, managing Churchill’s investments and, indeed, introducing him to the aforementioned circles of power, was of inestimable value to the beloved figure who came to be cast as the quintessential British bulldog. These men, the products of the Judengasse diaspora, effectively underwrote the British war effort by underwriting its leader. They kept the lion tamer in the ring.

The narrative that emerges is one of supreme historical irony. The project to tame Germany, one that began in the years leading to 1914, to break the back of feared Prussian militarism and energetic German dynamism, was not solely a military victory. It was a financial encirclement. It began with the exclusion of Jews in Frankfurt, which forced them to become masters of international finance. It was nurtured by the profligacy of an English king who preferred their company to that of his own blue-blooded relatives. It was fueled by the gold stolen from the earth of South Africa, a continent away. And it was executed by a half-British alcoholic who happened to be the only man with the will to use it. The Nazis, with their not altogether mistaken propaganda about Jewish gold and international finance capital, saw a conspiracy where there was actually a convergence of interests. The conspiracy was simply that the victims of German persecution had accumulated enough resources to ensure that Germany would never be allowed to persecute them again.

In the end, the Judengasse produced the very poison that brewed in the German soul as well as its antidote. The Rothschilds, the Goldschmidts, the Cassels, the Strakosches — they were the reluctant architects of Germany’s humiliation and, paradoxically, its eventual redemption. They provided the means for the total defeat of a Deutschland that threatened Albion as well as the new one that did not. One can almost hear an imagined dry, sardonic chuckle of Jerusalem’s author at the thought: that the supposed salvation of the West depended on a chain of events linking a medieval ghetto, a debauched monarch, a South African mine, and a drunken orator. It is a story too rich, too layered with contradiction and unexpected alliances, to be anything but true. The literal mind demands a simple cause and effect, a battle of armies. But the ironic mind sees the ledger, the hidden transfers, the long game played by the outcasts who eventually held the mortgage on the executioner’s house. And if that isn’t a joke worth telling, then history is nothing but a list of dates and dead men. Heaven forbid!