LINCOLN, TREBITSCH

LINCOLN, TREBITSCH (1879–1943), adventurer and politician. The extraordinary career of Trebitsch Lincoln, born Ignacz Trebitsch in Budapest, the son of a Jewish merchant, has become well known through Bernard *Wasserstein's biography, The Secret Life of Trebitsch Lincoln (rev. ed. 1989). In his career, he worked as a Presbyterian, later Anglican conversionist minister to the Jews, and as an assistant to pioneering British social investigator Seebohm Rowntree. Then, remarkably, he was elected to the British Parliament as a Liberal from January to December 1910, immediately after changing his name to "Lincoln" and acquiring British citizenship. Defeated at the general election of December 1910, in quick succession he pursued a career as a failed company promoter in London and as a German spy during World War i, followed by a three-year stretch in a British prison for fraud. In 1920, even more remarkably, he served as press secretary to the right-wing militarist government of Wolfgang Kapp in Germany, where he met the then unknown Adolf *Hitler. From 1921 Lincoln lived in China, becoming a Buddhist priest under the name of Chao Kung. During World War ii he worked for Japanese and, remarkably, German intelligence; it is believed, however, that he may have been murdered by the Gestapo in 1943. He wrote an Autobiography of an Adventurer in 1932. Some historians have seen his life as emblematic of the marginality of many Central European Jews of his time.

bibliography:

odnb online.

[William D. Rubinstein (2^nd ed.)]