Until the eighteenth century Jews were allowed out of the Judengasse only if they wore garments with two yellow rings on their jackets, while the women had to be veiled. If a Gentile passed by, the Jew had to take off his cap, avert his eyes and stand with his back to the nearest wall. Near the entrance to the Rothschild home was a graffito called “The Jew’s Sow” that showed two rabbis sucking at a cow’s teat while the third copulated with the dumb animal. At the top was depicted a small boy covered with stab wounds, supposedly Simeon, aged two, who was “killed by the Jews,” a reference to the popular belief that Jews needed the blood of innocent Gentile children to make their unleavened bread.
The more I read, the more chastened I felt. Miriam’s anger was well founded: I had taken my family’s history for granted, never bothering to investigate their earlier struggle. What made their achievements still more staggering was reading about the lane that the Rothschilds had come from—a place of such indescribable squalor that Europeans, including George Eliot, made it a “must-see” attraction as part of their grand tour. Goethe wrote, “The lack of space, the dirt, the throng of people, the disagreeable accents of the voice, altogether it made the most unpleasant impression, even upon the passer-by who merely looked through the gate.” Apparently when Goethe finally summoned up the courage to enter Judengasse, he was surprised to find that the inhabitants were “human beings after all, industrious and obliging, and one could not help but admire even the obstinacy with which they adhered to their traditional ways.” Another traveller who witnessed this hell-hole was less complimentary: “Even those who are in the blooming years of their life, look like the walking dead. Their deathly pale appearance sets them apart from all other inhabitants in the most depressing way.” It is hardly surprising that the life expectancy of a Jew in the ghetto was 58 per cent lower than that of a Gentile living a mere street away.
The first House of Rothschild, Jews Lane, Frankfurt (Photographic Credit 5.1)
The five sons of Mayer Amschel were sent to five capitals of Europe in the late eighteenth century. (Photographic Credit 5.2)
The original patriarch, Mayer Amschel, was orphaned in 1756 aged twelve when a plague swept through Jews Lane. He married well, to Gutle Schnapper, the daughter of a court agent to the Prince of Saxe-Meiningen, and he used his wife’s dowry to set up a small coin business. By his mid-forties Mayer Amschel had become the eleventh richest man in the Judengasse, able to buy a comparatively grand house, all of fourteen feet wide but six floors high. The couple had nineteen children, ten of whom survived childhood. Their name Rothschild, or “zum Rotten schild”—“At the Red Shield”—was derived from the house-name of a sixteenth-century ancestor.
While Gutle and Mayer Amschel were still on Jews Lane and trying to raise a family, the German poet Ludwig Börne wrote the following description of the place:
Long dark prison, into which the highly celebrated light of the eighteenth century has not yet been able to penetrate … stretching ahead of us lay an immeasurably long street, near us just enough room to reassure us that we could not turn around as soon as the wish overcame us. Over us no longer sky, which the sun needs in order to expand in his breadth; one doesn’t see the sky, one sees only sunlight. An evil smell rises everywhere around us, and the cloth that is supposed to shield us from infections serves also to catch the tear of compassion or to hide the smile of malice from the gaze of the watching Jews.
Gutle Schnapper, born in 1753, Nica’s great-great-great-grandmother (Photographic Credit 5.3)
I wondered whether Gutle and Mayer Amschel were watching Börne as he made his way through their midst. Were they perhaps speculating whether there was any way out, and whether their children had any chance of a life beyond these narrow confines? It must have seemed like a hopeless dream, given the lives of those earlier generations, other desperate and talented Jews had been unable to escape. Perhaps it was some Rothschild offspring that the poet writes about next, maybe even Nathan Mayer, who went on to found the London branch of the Rothschild bank:
Trumping laboriously through the filth slows our pace down enough to permit us the leisure for observation. We set our feet down skittishly and carefully so that we don’t step on any children. These swim about in the gutter, creep about in the filth innumerable as vermin hatched by the sun from the dung heap. Who would not indulge those little boys in their small desires? If one were to consider play in childhood as the model for the reality of life, then the existence of these children must be the grave of every encouragement, every exuberance, every friendship, and every joy of life. Are you afraid that these towering houses will collapse over us? O fear nothing! They are thoroughly reinforced, the cages of clipped birds, resting on the cornerstone of ill will.
“If you had been born there, you would want to escape,” Miriam observed phlegmatically.
I took out our family tree and laid it on the floor. Nine generations separate the founding father from the youngest family member today. I am seven generations away from life in the Judengasse, Nica only five. She was born a century after Mayer Amschel but had a direct link to that time via her grandmother Emma, who was born in Frankfurt in 1844 and often visited her great-grandmother Gutle, who lived in Jews Lane until her death in 1849. I could imagine young Nica sitting at Emma’s feet, listening to the stories, and, in turn, imagine Emma listening to Gutle’s. Generation after generation handed down memories, making sure that no one forgot.
Gutle Rothschild, strong and proud, refused to move away from that cramped ghetto even after her husband, sons and grandsons had made a fortune. Another cousin, Ferdinand, wrote about visiting the old lady, who received them in a “small dingy dwelling” where she rested “on a couch in her dark little sitting room, folded in a thick white shawl, her deeply lined face enclosed in a full and heavily ribboned white cap.” Gutle outlived her husband by thirty-seven years but despite her longevity and independence, like many Rothschild women after her, her life was governed by the terms of her husband’s will.
A highly superstitious woman, Gutle believed that if she left Jews Lane, the memory of where the family had come from would recede. She understood that the fear of returning to the Judengasse created the best incentive for her children to succeed and it was fear that underscored the family’s ambitions. Only money and power would protect them from anti-Semitism and a return to that early life of misery. Centuries of persecution had made the Rothschilds secretive and inward facing; they were unable to trust outsiders and did not expect others to understand what they had endured. Their talent for making money, combined with a mania for secrecy, made them the perfect bankers. They offered their clients a unique service: great financial acumen and total discretion.
It wasn’t until the 1790s—when the French shelled Frankfurt and Jews Lane was destroyed, leaving two thousand homeless—that the Rothschilds were finally allowed to leave the confines of that one narrow street and mix with outsiders. By then, the family business had expanded from coins into cotton and grain. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, plus advances in both travel and technology, the Rothschilds started to import cheaper and better cotton from the mills of northern England. Mayer Amschel understood that the most valuable asset for any business was a skilled, informed and trustworthy network of employees. He didn’t have to go out and find them; he bred them. Of his ten surviving children, five were boys. Amschel, Nathan Mayer, Karl, Salomon and James shared a room in their modest family home and remained close for the rest of their lives.
Liberation from the Judengasse and a modicum of success gave Mayer Amschel the courage to take the next step. He sent his five sons to the five major capitals of Europe to set up the first international partnership of its kind. Between the 1820s and the 1860s they established themselves in Europe. In Frankfurt, the business was run after Mayer Amschel’s death by his eldest son, Amschel; the Paris office was set up by the youngest, James; Carl took Naples, Salomon ran Vienna and Nathan Mayer (known thereafter as NM) founded the
London branch.
Nathan Mayer (NM), Nica’s great-great-grandfather, founder of the British branch of the Rothschild bank (Photographic Credit 5.4)
“What they did, you see,” Miriam explained to me, “was to set up the first form of a European Union. Though there were quarrels, as there are in any family, [the brothers] spread out and worked together towards a common purpose.” The historian Niall Ferguson, in his definitive biography of the Rothschilds, attests that “Between 1815 and 1914, it was easily the biggest bank in the world. The twentieth century has no equivalent, not even the biggest of today’s international banking corporations enjoys the relative supremacy enjoyed by the Rothschilds in their heyday.” The largest part of their colossal fortune, he explains, was made by lending and speculating in government bonds.
Their first major breakthrough was a contract to supply cash to Wellington’s army in 1814. Using a risky combination of deals in exchangerate transactions, bond-price speculations and commissions, the family made huge profits. Records show that in 1818 they commanded capital of £500,000; by 1828 the value of their stock had risen to £4,330,333, about fourteen times greater than their nearest competitor, Baring Brothers. Unlike many of their fellow bankers, the Rothschilds reinvested their profits back into their own businesses. For regimes seeking stable financing and secure loans, the Rothschilds were the one-stop shop. Leaving anti-Semitism at the door, kings and rulers expediently visited the bank in St. Swithin’s Lane.
The Rothschilds invented a web of credits and debits that freed both individuals and states from traditional forms of income. Previously all transactions had relied on ownership—of goods, land, metals, property and so forth—but a bond doesn’t have to be shackled to a physical possession; it can be linked to a mere promise of repayment. “Not only,” Ferguson writes, “had the Rothschilds replaced the old aristocracy; they also represented a new materialistic religion.”
Thus five young Jewish men, treated for most of their lives as pariahs, were able to establish themselves in foreign countries, without contacts or language, and win the trust of world leaders. My grandfather Victor believed that it came down to character and determination, and that of them all, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, in particular, was possessed of these vital attributes.
NM towers over the history of English Rothschilds to this day. His portrait hangs in our hallways and his name is still invoked with awe and respect. He was the fourth child of Gutle and Mayer Amschel to be born in Jews Lane. When in 1799, at the age of twenty-two, he arrived in Manchester, NM had no formal education and spoke no English. He did, however, have a scheme. Realising that none of the cloth merchants talked to one another, he persuaded them to join forces in order to negotiate better prices. His brothers replicated this business model across Europe.
Like his relations, NM had a talent for discretion. When a journalist asked him, “How did you become so successful?” NM replied acerbically, “By minding my own business.” On one occasion he left his portmanteau on the Manchester stagecoach and was very keen to get his clothing returned but the only description he was prepared to give to identify his possessions was “dark hat and coat.”
On October 22, 1806, he married Hannah Barent Cohen, the sister-in-law of Moses Montefiore, a leading London financier, and immediately NM was linked by marriage to the leading Jewry, the Montefiores, Salomons and Goldschmidts. Nica’s love of music was not inherited from her distinguished ancestor; when asked if he liked that particular art form, NM put his hand in his pocket, jingled some coins and replied, “This is the only music I like.”
The family’s meteoric rise fuelled speculation. From where had these people suddenly sprung? What was their secret? What tricks and skulduggery were involved? It seemed inexplicable that in one generation a family from nowhere had begun advising and financing governments. They even wrote to each other in an indecipherable language, Judendeutsch, an idiosyncratic hybrid of Hebrew and German.
Although they were now free, the Rothschilds still faced animosity. In 1891 the pamphleteer Max Bauer wrote: “The house of Rothschild is a structureless, parasitical something or other that proliferates across the earth from Frankfurt to Paris to London like a twisted telephone wire.” Edouard Drumont’s anti-Semitic rant La France juive, published in 1886, was so popular that it was reprinted more than two hundred times. “The Rothschilds, despite their billions, have the air of second-hand clothes dealers,” he wrote. Later he added, “The God Rothschild has none of the responsibilities of power and all of the advantages; he disposes over all the government forces, all the resources of France for his private purposes.” William Makepeace Thackeray, a guest at Tring and Waddesdon, added that “NM Rothschild Esq. play[ed] with new kings as young misses with dolls.”
The retrospective reporting of NM’s conduct following the British victory at Waterloo in 1815 perfectly illustrates the wild rumours and conspiracy theories surrounding the family’s modus operandi. Some said the banker went onto the battlefield with a pair of racing pigeons that he released when the outcome was sure. The birds flew straight back to his agents at the Stock Exchange, carrying in their pouches the message “Buy British stocks, sell everything French.”
The French journalist Georges Mathieu-Dairnvaell had another story: that NM was in London when the pigeons arrived. Coming on to the floor of the London Stock Exchange, he pretended to be ruined and put on a bravura performance as a broken-hearted bankrupt. Watching the erstwhile omnipotent King of the Jews prostrate himself caused such a vicarious crisis of confidence that everyone sold their stock; meanwhile crafty old NM snuck round the back and bought it all back at knock-down prices. Others accused him of bribing generals and stirring up massive speculation in the bank’s favour.
The real story of NM at Waterloo was researched and published by Victor, who proved that NM was in London at the time and that he received news of the British victory from his brother’s employees. Once NM had informed the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, he went to the Stock Exchange and bought depressed stock. His profit was £1 million, the equivalent today of well over £200 million.
The British government was soon relying on the family for credit. When Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wanted to finance the building of the Suez Canal, he approached his friend Lionel Rothschild, NM’s son.
“How much?” asked Lord Rothschild.
“Four million pounds,” answered Disraeli.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“What is your security?”
“The British government.”
“You shall have it.”
Some Jewish families changed their faith to avoid bigotry. The Rothschilds remained Jews and were proud and respectful of their religion, although few British Rothschilds actually practised their faith. Nica was never instructed in its laws. I wondered whether she found it confusing to be called Rothschild, to be assumed to be Jewish, to endure anti-Semitism, but without any real knowledge of the customs and culture that go with it. The four children of Charles and Rozsika were adrift between the two worlds, understanding neither the Christian nor the Jewish faith. They were caught in a no-man’s-land, between non-Jews who assumed Nica was one thing, and Jews who quickly worked out that a Rothschild was not one of them either.
Previous Rothschild generations had created perfectly self-contained worlds for their children built on the principles of their religion, as well as the importance of family and ambition. As these imperatives faded, there was increasingly little to keep the various branches together and, in Nica’s generation, the family began to disperse.
In Nica’s grandparents’ generation, fourteen out of a total of nineteen Rothschild marriages were between cousins. Nica’s great-grandfather Lionel married his first cousin Charlotte, while her grandfather Natty married another relation, the aforementioned Emma. There were other unions between uncles and nieces. Some commentators assume this intermarriage was to keep the Rothschild fortune intact; others argue that finding suitabl
y eligible Jews was hard. It also seems likely that none of those hard-working men could be bothered or had much time to introduce their daughters to potential suitors outside the family. They worked together and lived together. How else would they meet anyone?
Furthermore, what non-Rothschild could be trusted and who else could possibly understand the shame of their recent past? Rothschild women shared that past as well as their husbands’ determination to create a better life for their children, a life free from persecution and penury. Like herds of deer fleeing from predators, they knew that sticking together in packs was the best defence; those who separated made themselves vulnerable. Creating those tight, incestuous communities was an essential part of the recipe for success, but the family units were also building a genetic time bomb.
In the Christian faith, marriage between close cousins had been banned since the sixth century for good reason. Research confirms that inbreeding increases the chances of certain types of mental disorders. Miriam called it the family “blues”; others put it more bluntly and called it schizophrenia. Past generations’ medical records were destroyed; present ones are private, so informed diagnoses are impossible. It is known that there is a biological disposition to disorders of mood and some believe they are hereditary. In the case of schizophrenia, for example, one in a hundred people is likely to develop this illness but the odds shorten to one in ten if a close relation has been affected. Contrary to popular belief, schizophrenia does not mean a split personality. The symptoms include disordered thoughts and delusional thinking, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations. It can be triggered by an event, by stress or by drugs. Each case is different and there is no universal panacea. It was an illness that would haunt Nica’s life in unexpected ways.
The Baroness Page 5