All in the Family

Some years ago, a British journalist surveyed the descendants of the Jews who had been granted hereditary peerages since the middle of the 19th century. He found that the overwhelming majority of these titles belonged to grandchildren and great-grandchildren who had converted to Christianity. The Rothschilds were the important and striking exception. To be sure, a number had left the faith. Many of the women had married Gentiles, and they had followed their husbands into the church; some of the men had married out without asking their wives to convert to Judaism. But the mainstream of the Rothschilds has insisted, generation after generation, on remaining Jewish. Very often it was an act of defiance, and always it was an act of pride.

The Rothschilds were not the only powerful Jewish financiers to appear on the international scene during the last two centuries. The Bleichroders were dominant in Prussia, and in America, Jacob Schiff was as wealthy and as powerful as John Pierpont Morgan. The next generation of Bleichroders, however, did not play a central role in their national economy, nor did they remain in the Jewish community, and the influence of the Schiff family did not last much beyond the next generation.

The Rothschilds were different. They persisted as a major economic force well into the 20th century, and they remained, in the mythology of both admirers and detractors, the archetypal and hereditary leaders of the Jewish people. Even today, while they are no longer the richest financiers in the world or the dominant force in the affairs of the Jewish community, a special cachet still adheres to the family. Jacob, the present Lord Rothschild, is a familiar and active figure in the organized Jewish community in England, and his French counterparts, the several contemporary Barons de Rothschild, remain prominent in all the major endeavors of the French Jewish community.

What makes the Rothschilds unique? The essence of the answer is that as a family, the Rothschilds negotiated their transition into the modern era on their own terms. The vast majority of successful Jews in Europe and America paid for their success by assimilating, by playing down their otherness. In the middle of the 19th century, the slogan of the assimilating bourgeoisie in France was faites vous oublier--make yourself inconspicuous so that you will be forgotten.

The Rothschilds refused to pay for their success by assimilating. The founder of the family fortune, Amschel Rothschild, sent four of his five sons from their native Frankfurt to the major centers of Europe not to pretend to be Englishmen or Frenchmen or Austrians or Italians but to represent the family’s business interests. Amschel knew that the part of the family that would remain in Frankfurt could not pretend as many Jews did at the time that they were Germans clinging to some vague form of Judaism called “the Mosaic persuasion.”

The Rothschilds forced society to yield. When anti-Semites, of the right and the left, denounced them as masters of a Jewish cabal to dominate the world, the family responded by continuing to go about the business of making money, and helping Jews in trouble or in need. Amschel and his children and most of his grandchildren thought of themselves as descendants of the ancient line of Jewish parnassim, lay leaders of the Jews who were responsible for the welfare of their brethren. It was their task, and duty, to protect them from their enemies. But the Rothschilds considered themselves much grander; they were perhaps the descendants, if not literally then in spirit, of the Exilarchs, who led the Babylonian Jewish community 1,000 years before; and of such medieval figures as Don Isaac Abarbanel, treasurer of the kingdom of Portugal in the 1480s and tax farmer of Ferdinand and Isabella later that decade and who led the Jews into exile when they were expelled from Spain in 1492.

Throughout the ages, the Jewish parnas had often lived in splendor, and they even reveled in the fact that they outdid many of their highborn Christian contemporaries in the opulence of their lives. The Rothschilds certainly took great pleasure in the homes they acquired, but they clung to their task as parnassim to break down barriers against Jews. In England in the mid-19th century, Baron Lionel Rothschild fought an unrelenting battle for many years to be elected and re-elected to a seat in Parliament from London but would refuse each time to take the oath of office “on the true faith of the Christian.” He took his seat only when Parliament relented and allowed him to swear on a Hebrew Bible. In France, the aristocratic Jockey Club kept blackballing Rothschilds from membership in the club until the Rothschilds had become much too prominent, and their horses had won too many races, so the silly exclusion had to stop.

The Rothschilds have survived because they have always had a constituency, and they do to this day: the Jewish community. Other remarkable families that came out of the ghettos at the end of the 18th century did not survive, because, by assimilating into the majority, they lost their own constituency. They no longer derived any special energy from their connection to their ancient community; all they had on their side was whatever goodwill they could garner from the majority. At their most fortunate, they secured their personal safety in the centuries that followed by vanishing from the Jewish communities; at their unhappiest, they wound up as victims of pogroms and the Holocaust, which persecuted people of Jewish origin almost as vehemently as it murdered affirming Jews.

These reflections are evoked by Niall Ferguson’s “The House of Rothschild,” the first part of an account of the Rothschilds that has already appeared in England. (The other half is to be published in the United States this fall.) Ferguson had unparalleled access to the business archives of N.M. Rothschild and Co., the firm founded in London by Nathan Meyer Rothschild in the early years of the 19th century.

This family, one generation out from the ghetto in Frankfurt, had indeed become one of the most powerful and richest families and factors controlling the economy of Europe. Ferguson answers the anti-Semites who kept attacking the Rothschilds with a series of questions: So what? Why are Jews to be barred from the opportunities that the new age of the Industrial Revolution made possible? If there was a new international market in government bonds, why are the Rothschilds blamed for being particularly adept in playing that game?

But the Rothschilds did more than simply make money. They legitimized money in a way that it had never before been thought to be legitimate. The feudal system of earlier centuries had been based on the notion that robber barons with the strength to conquer lands and to keep them for their descendants were to be respected, for land was then held to be the ultimate value. The Rothschilds were the preeminent representatives of the idea that the ultimate source of power was neither the control of land nor of armies. It was not even in gold. Power in the emerging modern economy was in paper, in debt instruments and shares of stock, all of which could easily be traded across international frontiers. It was possible, the Rothschilds insisted, to claim the rights of nobility without having to pretend that one’s ancestors had been generals or feudal landowners. The Rothschilds gave birth to a new, modern order of nobility, the princes of the marketplace.

Ferguson’s first volume on the Rothschilds is a tour de force by a brilliant and industrious young scholar. He has gone beyond the archives to read widely in the public press, which commented on every move the Rothschilds made. Ferguson is essentially an economic historian, but he has great understanding for the characters who appear in his pages. The individual vignettes are vivid and compelling. On beginning this book, the reader might expect an unrelieved, and even dreary account, of a hugely successful economic enterprise. One will find, instead, a many-faceted account of the first 50 years, the founding time, of the Rothschilds as a fabled, even mythic, power in the modern age.