Sir Henry Strakosch “a Jew”?

Strakosch was not Considered a Jew

Strakosch died near London on Saturday Oct. 30, 1943, and The Times (London) published a long obituary on Nov. 1, eulogies on Nov. 2, and on Nov. 4 a report of a memorial service for Strakosch. It was clearly a Christian service, held at St. Michael's, Chester Square. Thus Strakosch died a nominal Christian.

From several routine sources we learn the following about Strakosch.[4] He was born May 9, 1871, in Hohenau, Austria, son of Eduard Strakosch and Mathilde Winterberg.[5] Hohenau is on the Austria-Moravia border, and Eduard Strakosch was a pioneer in the Austrian beet sugar industry. Henry was educated at the Wasa Gymnasium in Vienna and then privately in England. He joined the Anglo-Austrian bank in London in 1891, rising quickly to become foreign exchange manager. He then became interested in gold mining and finance and emigrated to South Africa in 1895, joining the gold mining enterprise Goerz and Co. in 1896 as assistant managing director.

The founder of the company, Adolf Goerz (1857-1900), was an immigrant from Germany and not a Jew.[6] Although the company had maintained close relations with Germany and in particular the Deutsche Bank in Berlin, Goerz had incorporated it in England. On the outbreak of war in 1914 five of the eight directors were German subjects. The British forced them off the board and by 1918 both the name of the company (now Union Corp.) and the character of the board had changed.[7] The British would not have distinguished in this purge between Germans and German Jews, and Austrians would have been considered Germans, but Strakosch had become a British citizen in 1907 and survived,[8] rising to chairman in 1924, a position he held until his death. Strakosch was known as “keen on polo, an inveterate motorist, and a bachelor.”

He was adviser to the government in the drafting of the South African Currency and Banking Act of 1920, which led to the establishment of the South African Reserve Bank. From 1925 on, India retained him for similar purposes. He was knighted in 1921, and became K.B.E. in 1924, G.B.E. in 1927.

He got married late in life, in 1941, to the widow Mrs. Mabel Elizabeth Vincent Temperley, in a Christian ceremony at St. Andrew's in Kingswood, Gloucester. His wife and Churchill were not the only beneficiaries of his will when he died two years later, as there were bequests to several others,[9] e.g. Field Marshall Smuts and Brendan Bracken, and also an interesting trust fund that he set up to be[10]

The Boer War (1899-1902) had no doubt left a lasting impression on Strakosch.

None of the sources on which the above summary is based, except for Arnbom who is cited only in the matter of Strakosch's British citizenship, gives any indication of a Jewish connection for Strakosch.

The Jüdisches Biographisches Archiv, 1994, a massive database available on microfiche, cites two sources that suggest he was a Jew. The first is a book or pamphlet entitled The Jews' who's who. Israelite finance. Its sinister influence., Judaic Publishing Co., London, 1920. It seems very unreliable because its accusations are based on the character and name of Strakosch's company in 1914, before the changes forced by the British (I have not been able to get a copy of this publication but the Jüdisches Biographisches Archiv quotes from it).

The second source mentioned by the Jüdisches Biographisches Archiv is more credible. In a 1949 article Albert M. Hyamson, a leading Jewish biographer, listed about 2,500 prominent “Anglo-Jewish” people, each getting one or two lines in his 69 pages. One of them was[11]

The first two references are to Strakosch's obituaries, already cited here, which do not say he was a Jew. The third is to the book Randlords, by Paul H. Emden, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1935. The Emden book merely gives some biographical information about Strakosch and mentions his relation to Adolf Goerz thus:[12]

Emden does not say that Strakosch was a Jew.[13]

Two more observations should be made on Hyamson's listing of Strakosch. In his introduction to his list Hyamson writes:

That is, a person need not have been “Jewish” to appear in the list. Second, Hyamson also published a general (not specifically about Jews) reference work, Dictionary of Universal Biography, issued in 1915, 1950 and (in the USA) 1951. His entry for Strakosch in the last is:

The “S” signifies that his obituary is to be found in the Annual Register. In accord with his general objectives in this work, Hyamson does not declare Strakosch to be Jewish, but he does declare him to be Hungarian-English. None of the other sources indicates he was Hungarian and to so classify him is wrong.

Hyamson seems not well informed about Strakosch and his rule of classification begs the question in any case.

Two books that ought to have much about an important man such as Strakosch, if he had been Jewish, do not list him in their indices. They are Jewish Roots in the South African Economy, by Mendel Kaplan, C. Struik Publishers, Cape Town, 1986, and The Jews in South Africa. A History, editors Gustav Saron and Louis Hotz, Oxford Univ. Press, London, 1955.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971) mentions two Jewish Strakosches, but not Sir Henry. The death and obituary notices in the four issues of the London weekly (Fridays) Jewish Chronicle for November 1943 do not mention Strakosch.

I conclude that Strakosch did not consider Strakosch a Jew, and neither have the Jews.

The Arnbom Book

In the absence of the Arnbom book, I saw no significant grounds for classifying Strakosch as a Jew. The book establishes that Strakosch was at least half Jewish in terms of ancestry, but does not show that he should be considered “Jewish” or “a Jew” according to my understanding of the meanings of such terms.

The general aim of the Arnbom book is to demonstrate the great business and professional accomplishments of the five named Austrian families. At the outset, the author is evasive or unclear on whether these families should be considered “Jewish”, presenting them as having been strongly committed to assimilation, many members sincerely converting to Christianity.[14] Assimilation and religious conversion were commonplace in Germany in the 19^th century, and about 60,000 German Jews out of a community of less than 200,000 converted.[15] Arnbom suggests a similar trend in Austria.

Arnbom's history of Sir Henry's line of the Strakosches starts with his grandfather, Salomon Strakosch (1795-1867), and ends with the rise of the National Socialists in the 1930s. The Strakosch family members in Austria, long assimilated and religiously converted, did not initially see any threat to their position but were forced to leave the country after the National Socialist Anschluß of 1938. Sir Henry helped some of them move to England.[16]

The emphasis of the Arnbom book is on the business and professional achievements of the five families treated and not on social history, though the latter seems more interesting and even tantalizing, in view of the remarks about their progressive assimilation. Specifically, assimilating Jews interact with gentile society at all levels (otherwise they wouldn't be assimilating), and yet we are told little of these interactions.

Most important, intermarriage with gentiles is inadequately treated for the Strakosches. For example Arnbom remarks, very briefly, that the opera impresario Karl Strakosch was “manager of, and in 1887 married, one of his singers: Clara Louise Kellogg of the later distinguished American industrial dynasty.”[17] In fact Kellogg (1842-1916) was a famous singer in her own day, and Arnbom does not tell us she was not Jewish.[18]

Another example is that of Moritz Strakosch, who managed the even more famous singer Adelina Patti and married her sister Amalia.[19] Arnbom notes these facts but does not tell us that the Patti family was not Jewish.[20]

Sir Henry was born Heinrich in 1871, son of Eduard Strakosch and Mathilde Winterberg.[21] Eduard was 100% Jewish in ancestry but of Mathilde Winterberg I know nothing. The various biographical indices list both Jewish and gentile Winterbergs.

Under the circumstances the problem of whether Sir Henry was “a Jew” or “Jewish” depends on definition. Jews are always quarreling among themselves on this problem of definition, and I am not inclined to try to settle the issue for them, or gainsay them where they agree.

Rabbinic law is clear that failure to practice the Jewish religion has no impact on the Jewish status of a person; a non-observant Jew is still a Jew. A principle Jews traditionally use in their definitions is matrilineal descent: a Jew is somebody with a Jewish mother. That breaks the rules of definition by defining the noun in terms of the corresponding adjective, but is useful anyway. If Mathilde Winterberg was not Jewish (which may or may not be the case), and if Sir Henry was not raised in a Jewish environment (which seems indicated by the Arnbom book) then I do not think anybody should consider him a Jew.

Sir Henry Strakosch

If Mathilde Winterberg was Jewish, then either Eduard and Mathilde converted and raised Heinrich as a Christian, or Heinrich or Sir Henry converted later in life. Under generally accepted rabbinic standards, a Jew who voluntarily converts to Christianity ceases being a Jew.[22] By this standard Sir Henry would not have been considered a Jew by the Jews, and the sources I cited imply that the Jews have not in fact considered him a Jew and neither did he.

That the Jews do not consider him a Jew is a weighty consideration, but it does not quite settle it for me because I am not inclined to accept that a person can stop being Jewish via a religious conversion. It takes more. For example, I consider the French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger to be still a Jew, and evidently so does he.[23] I doubt that the Jews agree.

Then What Was he up to, and Why?

The only significance of the question of Sir Henry Strakosch's Jewish status is in assessing the forces that were at work, during the Thirties, in organizing a war against Germany. While this status remains to be definitively established, it is not correct to designate Strakosch, simplistically, as “a Jew”, and Arnbom's book clearly presents his relatives as long assimilated Austrians. Such designation in this context would imply Jewish motivations in his campaign against Hitler.

If he was not acting from Jewish motivations, then what were his motivations? Why was he out to get Hitler? An answer is given in a booklet he published in 1935, in which the gold miner argued for the restoration of an international gold standard for currency.[24] He considered that the cooperation of Britain and other “Sterling countries” was attainable, but it was not possible to[25]

It is well known that this judgment of the efficacy of Hitler's economic policies was wrong. The National Socialist economic policies were notoriously successful, and have been called “The Nazi Miracle” which Hitler performed knowing at the outset that “The international financial world would stand on its head and attack our currency with all the means at its command.”[26]

The important point is that we see the motivations that Strakosch brought to the campaign against Germany. Hitler was on the way to proving him wrong. Thus to describe Strakosch as “a Jew” in this context is to do more than make a mistake about ethnicity. It is to camouflage a very important dimension of the background to, and causes of, the Second World War. Strakosch should, rather, have been described as “a South African gold miner campaigning for restoration of the international gold standard”. If he had been a full Jew, then I still would not have described him as Irving did. I would have written “a Jewish South African gold miner campaigning for restoration of the international gold standard”.

Notes