Robert de Rothschild

Origins and early life

Robert de Rothschild was born in the eighth arrondissement of Paris on 19 January 1880 and died at Lausanne on 25 December 1946.

Work and career

A banker and art collector, he sat on the boards of the great French railway companies, but his lasting work was communal: he was president of the Israelite Consistory of Paris from 1936, succeeding Edmond de Rothschild, and had led its charitable committee before that. In 1933, within months of Hitler's coming to power, he founded the Comité national de secours aux réfugiés allemands victimes de l'antisémitisme, which received, housed and fed the Jews arriving from Germany at a moment when the French state was closing its doors and much of French opinion, including some of French Jewry, wished the refugees would go elsewhere.

He also set up a committee of documentation and vigilance against antisemitism and Nazism, an attempt to answer the propaganda with facts. Driven out by the war, he took part on 6 December 1941, at Édouard de Rothschild's house in New York, in the meeting that launched the association for the restoration of Jewish institutions and works in France, planning from exile the rebuilding of what was then being destroyed. He did not live to see much of it: he died a year and a half after the liberation. His daughter was the golfer and collector Cécile de Rothschild.