Maurice de Hirsch

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

Origin and first entrepreneurial activity

Baron Hirsch came from a paternal ennobled Jewish banking family in Bavaria, the Barons deer on Gereuth. His mother 's maiden name was Wertheimer in Frankfurt. In 1855 he married Clara Bischoff home, the daughter of a Belgian banking family, and soon began parts of his considerable assets to invest in railway shops in the Balkans and in Turkey. He acquired by the Turkish government the concession to build the first continuous railroad from Europe to Constantinople Opel, the route of the later Orient Express ( Khairallah, 1991). The company called the Compagnie des Chemins de fer Orientaux (CO) and, after completion of a huge commercial success for Hirsch, who had great entrepreneurial skills. Until the 1880s Hirsch was with the Berlin banker Gerson of the most important German investor in the former Ottoman Empire (interestingly showed deer but no interest to invest in Zionist project in Palestine (see below ), the two Jewish bankers were but then in the course of the incipient state imperialist policy of the German Empire from Siemens and Deutsche Bank, displaced from the Middle East business, especially in the context of the Baghdad railway project in which deer is no longer relevant and the bank S. Bleichröder played only 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 its railroad shops Hirsch soon became aware of the sad fate of the Jewish people in southeastern Europe and Asia Minor. The " Alliance Israelite Universelle" ( AIU ) seemed a suitable partner for their own humanitarian activities. He founded the organization in 1873, a sum of one million francs for the construction of schools, and in 1880 he took over the annual budget deficit of the organization, among other things, in Constantinople Opel to thousands before anti- Jewish pogroms of the Russian " liberators" during the Balkan crisis had fled Bulgarian Jews cared. Nevertheless, Hirsch was a humanitarian act during the Russo- Turkish War of 1878 on both sides, because the Jews at that time were, " between the fronts sat " and one hand supported the young Slavic national movements and other hand were branded by nationalist fanatics as "fifth column of Islam." From 1878, funded Hirsch, a network of business schools in the Balkans, which were built by the AIU. Beginning in 1885 he was trying to be a humanitarian also active in Russia, where the fate of the Jewish population was even more depressing than the Balkans.

Hirsch spent most of his life in the former Habsburg monarchy and was there a humanitarian act, especially in the areas of high Jewish population of Galicia and Bukovina. He became a friend and supporter of the Crown Prince Rudolf and also supported its political, directed against the alliance with the German Empire and specifically against Wilhelm II efforts, such as the financing of the polemical against the Dual Alliance magazine Black Yellow in 1888. This sparked a wave of German national and anti-Semitic agitation against deer but also against the Crown Prince.

Maurice de Hirsch died in 1896 in Hungary, his widow continued his philanthropic work until her death in 1899. Both rest in the cemetery of Montmartre in Paris in a tomb.

Promote the emigration of Russian Jews

After the plan to invest 50 million francs for the improvement of Jewish education in Russia, had failed due to the lack of cooperation by the Russian authorities, Baron Hirsch saw the only solution to improve the situation of the Russian Jews, in their emigration. He systematically studied ways to establish Jewish colonies overseas, and created for this purpose, an international association, the " Jewish Colonization Association " (JCA ), with a starting capital of two million pounds sterling. Particularly intensively supported the settlement of Jewish colonists deer in Argentina, besides also in Brazil, Mexico and Canada, where a village, " deer " in Saskatchewan, is named after him today. In the United States supported the deer at that time very numerous Jewish immigrants, he founded in New York the Baron de Hirsch Fund with an initial capital of 2.5 million U.S. dollars.

Hirsch, in Bavaria came himself the first Jewish family that was allowed to acquire more land, believed that the Jewish people had a natural talent for agriculture, and therefore promoted to Argentina (where he founded six farming villages for Jewish immigrants from Russia) and Canada mainly agricultural projects. In a conversation with Hirsch May 1895 Theodor Herzl tried to win this for the idea of ​​a Jewish state was founded in Palestine. Herzl, however, was not even given the opportunity to carry out the he developed ideas of Zionism, which he had laid down at the same time writing in The Jewish State in detail, and so the meeting ended completely unsuccessful. In the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire, the JCA operation projects in the Greater Konstantin Opel and near Smyrna ( today's Izmir ), both mid twenties in favor of Palestine were abandoned after the founding of the Republic of Turkey instead. From conservative Catholic side has already been filed against deer around the turn of the century the charge of having driven through the issue of so-called " Turks lots " of thousands of Christians to ruin. In the pamphlets that were written in this context, Nazi ideas occurs already on undisguised days. Hirsch himself was anxious because of these activities in the press with the nickname of the "Turkish Deer". The JCA was then active in Palestine but in Israel today and has its main field of activity.