Col. A. E. W. Goldsmid
1846—1904.
ONE more is added to the roll of the great dead, for whom a shrill sharp note would have sounded in the Judean hills of old. Dr. David Kaufmann asks in his study of the "Future of Judaism," as he reviews the figures of our history from Ezra to Jehuda Halvey, "Shall we some day be able to say 'and so on?'" Amongst the men who clutched at the skirts of the future and almost became of the band that is to be of the "so on" of Israel's great host, was Col. A. E. W. Goldsmid. Soldier and Jew, idealist and officer, the praise that is showered upon him is well expressed in this line: "There was hardly a Jew of this generation whose sincerity and honesty was more unquestioned and absolute. His manliness and greatness of heart raised him high above the little passions and rivalries, which sometimes throw the subterranean life of our people into unseen turmoils, just as they fret and rack the inner councils of other communities; and his charm of manner, his generosity, his blunt directness of speech and his true lack of false pride endeared him to all with whom he came into contact." Of few can such clear and concise words be written.
He was born at Poonah. India, "in the lines," during a thunder storm. He was the son of a Jew who was no Jew, but who had achieved in his own time a reputation as an Indian civil servant of considerable capacity, and who did much to ease the life of Indian agriculturists. On his mother's side he was of the Goldsmids, who were truer to their Judaism, and who were descended from the Baal
Shem. He was educated in England by the tutor of a Russian Emperor, passed through Sandhurst, the royal military college, entered the British army, and graduated at the staff college. He met his future wife under romantic circumstances, reverted to Judaism and became a Jew. For a decade and a half his life was that of a soldier, who reached out from strength to strength, rising gradually but not wonderfully in his profession; but with his military career which practically ended at Paardeburg, and which really only came to an end officially last year, when he was presented by the King with the Victorian Order, we have little to do.
For this Jewish soldier was a Jew who came back not only to his faith but to his people, and used his military knowledge to invigorate, strengthen and support a national Jewish consciousness. It is said that his strange youth suggested George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda"; and perhaps he thought himself such an one. For of all the Jews of English birth and of much less estrangement, he was the first to recognize and feel that only a national destiny made Jewish life worth all the pricks and pins of existence. There was very little of the complex in his acter, and as little of the complex in his utterance. He saw and thought clearly. As an Englishman, England was his motherland; as a Jew Palestine was his fatherland, and if he had to march with the "thin red line," he was equally willing and perhaps more anxious to point the guns from the crags of Modin, and bar the passage of any enemy of Israel.