There was more to this persistent and systematic discrimination than mere ancestral prejudice, however. An important factor was that the Gentile business community genuinely feared the economic challenge which they believed would be posed by an emancipated Jewish population. The fact that a slum like the Judengasse could produce mathematics teachers and doctors in itself tells us something important about its culture: it was not as closed as it seemed. As Goethe himself discovered, when he plucked up the courage to enter the ghetto, the Jews 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.” Despite—perhaps partly because of—the grim conditions in which they lived, the Frankfurt Jews were anything but an underclass in cultural terms.
Of course, the culture of the Judengasse was an unfamiliar one to a Gentile like Goethe. It was an intensely religious culture, with the rhythm of life still dictated by the religious laws of the Halakha. Every morning and evening, men were summoned to worship at synagogue by the Schul-Klopper knocking on their doors with a hammer. The Sabbath was, as an English visitor recalled, “in the picturesque phrase of their prayer-book, ‘a bride,’ and her welcome, week by week, was of a right bridal sort. White cloths were spread and lamps lit in her honour. The shabbiest dwellings put on something of a festive air.” Education at the lane’s three primary schools (heder) and the rabbinical college (yeshivah) was, by the standards of the time, conservative, with children learning to read the Torah, the foundation of Mosaic teaching law, then moving on to Rashi’s commentaries and finally the Talmud, the compilation of rabbinical commentaries and debates on rules of observance. The community had its own fire brigade and hospitals, its own cemetery and its own voluntary associations to provide for the poor.
Yet, despite the high walls which surrounded it, and despite the relatively limited impact of the Jewish Enlightenment on the community (as compared with that of Berlin), the culture of the Judengasse was far from insular. Although Gentiles sometimes sneered at their manner of speech, Heinrich Heine later insisted that the Frankfurt Jews spoke “nothing but the proper language of Frankfurt [which is] spoken with equal excellence by the circumcised as well as by the non-circumcised population.” This was a slight, though pardonable, exaggeration. Those Jews who did manage to secure for themselves a secular as well as a religious education—like the doctor mentioned above—would have spoken, read and written Hochdeutsch. The surviving letters of Mayer3 Amschel Rothschild, however, confirm that his was a rough and often ungrammatical German, with an admixture of Hebrew; and when he wrote to his sons he used Hebrew characters, as did they when they wrote to one another. Nevertheless, the Judendeutsch of the Judengasse was not the Yiddish of the Polish and Russian stetl; and in all probability many Gentile merchants in Frankfurt wrote ungrammatical letters too. When Frankfurt Jews left the Judengasse to do business—the avenue of activity most accessible to them—there was no insuperable language barrier between them and the Gentile merchants they encountered.
More than most German towns in the eighteenth century, Frankfurt was a businessman’s town. At the junction of several major trade routes linking the towns of South Germany (Strasbourg, Ulm, Augsburg and Nuremberg) to the Hanseatic ports of the North (Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck), and linking Germany as a whole to the economies of the Atlantic seaboard, the Baltic and the Near East, its prosperity was bound up with the two annual fairs in the autumn and the spring which had been held in the town since the Middle Ages. And because of the enormous variety of coinage circulating in Europe up until the late nineteenth century, the town’s commerce necessarily went hand in hand with banking: in particular, money-changing and bill-broking (buying and selling the IOUs generated by more complex transactions). In addition—and in some ways more importantly—Frankfurt acted as a financial centre for the princes, archdukes and electors who governed the numerous petty territories of the region. The revenues from their lands and subjects (rents, taxes and so on) and the expenditures of their courts (on grand residences, gardens and entertainments) made these rulers the biggest customers of the pre-industrial German economy, even if most of them were considerably less well off than their counterparts in the English aristocracy. In particular, the fact that the majority generally spent more than they earned created lucrative if sometimes risky opportunities for German bankers.
Perhaps the most successful firm in this field prior to 1800 was that of Simon Moritz and Johann Philipp Bethmann, who imported from Amsterdam to Germany the system of “sub-bonds” (Partialobligationen) whereby a large loan could be subdivided into more manageable portions and sold on to a wide clientele of investors. A typical transaction was the Bethmann Brothers’ loan to the Holy Roman Emperor of 20,000 gulden (around £2,000) in 1778, which they sold on to investors in the form of twenty 1,000-gulden bonds, handing over the cash thus raised—minus their substantial commission—to the imperial Treasury in Vienna, and subsequently ensuring the prompt payment of interest from Vienna to the bondholders. Between 1754 and 1778 the Bethmanns floated loans totalling nearly 2 million gulden, and no fewer than fifty-four separate loans totalling nearly 30 million gulden in the following five years. Other Frankfurt bankers became involved in the same kind of business, notably Jakob Friedrich Gontard.
Neither Bethmann nor Gontard was Jewish. Yet there is no question that, by the later eighteenth century, it was Jews who had come to be seen as the most enterprising operators when it came to money-changing and all kinds of lending. After more than a century of scholarly reflection on the subject, it is still hard to say quite why this was. Any advantage Jews enjoyed over Gentile financiers can have been only an indirect result of their system of education: Mayer Amschel Rothschild once recalled that “in my youth I was . . . a very active merchant, but I was disorganised, because I had been a student [of the Talmud] and learnt nothing [about business].” Probably membership of a tightly knit “outsider” group helped when it came to constructing credit networks. And perhaps there was a kind of business ethic derived from Judaism. But these points can be made with equal force about other religious minorities, as they were by Max Weber, who unconvincingly contrasted “the Protestant ethic” with the Jewish ethos of “politically and speculatively oriented . . . pariah capitalism.” The least unsatisfactory answer is that, at a time when most fields of economic activity were closed to them, Jews had little alternative but to concentrate on commerce and finance. At the same time, their Gentile rivals in these fields probably tended to exaggerate the extent of the “Jewish threat” to their business. The non-Jewish bankers of Frankfurt were complaining as early as 1685 that “the Jews had torn the bills trade from their hands”—a claim which led to a ban on Jews entering the stock exchange. Twelve years later the Council was trying, not for the last time, to prevent Jews from renting warehouses in the Fahrgasse, the town’s main street.
Perhaps the most notorious conflict of this sort centred around the role of Joseph Süss-Oppenheimer, who rose from being Hoffaktor (court agent) to Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg to the much more political posts of privy councillor and, in 1733, envoy in Frankfurt, where his privileged position allowed him to live outside the Judengasse in the comfort of the Golden Swan Inn. Four years later Oppenheimer was executed, having been found guilty of wielding excessive political power and undermining the position of the Württemberg estates (Stände). Oppenheimer—the Jud Süss of later anti-Semitic legend—was only the most notorious of the Jewish court agents, however. By the mid-eighteenth century Frankfurt Jews were acting as agents for the Palatinate, the Electorate of Mainz, the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, the Kingdom of Prussia, the imperial court in Vienna, as well as Hesse-Kassel and Saxe-Weimar. Löw Beer Isaak, for example, was court agent to the Prince of Nassau-Saarbrücken in 1755, while David Meyer Kupl challenged the dominance of the Kann family when he became imperial court agent at around the same time. Such men formed a rich and privileged elite within the Judengasse.<
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Mayer Amschel
It was into this partly, but not wholly, segregated world that Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born in either 1743 or 1744. About his parents, grandparents and more remote ancestors we know little. Benjamin Franklin once observed that in life only death and taxes are inevitable; they are also virtually the only things about which records survive for the earliest Rothschilds. It is worth noting at once that the family might never have been called “Rothschild”—literally “red shield”—at all. We know that Isak, son of Elchanan, built a house in the 1560s known as “zum roten Schild” (“the red shield”), presumably after some kind of shield of the sort often hung at the front of houses. It was common enough for residents of the Judengasse to become known by their addresses. However, Isak’s grandson Naftali Herz (who died in 1685) left the house with the red shield and moved to another house, “zur Hinterpfann” (“the warming pan”). The Rothschilds could thus conceivably have become known as the “Hinterpfanns.” As it was, although Naftali Herz’s son, grandson and great-grandson continued to use the name “Rothschild,” they also used the name “Bauer.” It was probably only in the next generation—Mayer Amschel’s—that the name Rothschild stuck firmly as a surname, though even he might possibly have changed it again when he moved to another house known as “zum grünen Schild” (“the green shield”).
The most we can say about the early Rothschilds is that they were pious and relatively successful small businessmen dealing in, among other things, cloth. Five years before his death in 1585, Isak zum roten Schild had a taxable income of 2,700 gulden, and when he died he was remembered on his gravestone for his “virtue,” “righteousness” and “honesty.” A century later his great-grandson Kalman, a money-changer who also dealt in wool and silk, had a taxable income more than twice as large; and it seems that his son—Mayer Amschel’s grandfather Moses—successfully developed his father’s business, continuing the process of steady social ascent by marrying, successively, the daughters of a tax collector and of a doctor. Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about the economic achievements of Mayer Amschel’s father, Amschel Moses—though the fact that the family continued to live in the modest house at the Hinterpfann, with its ground-floor office, its first-floor kitchen and cramped bedrooms above, suggests at best consolidation, at worst stagnation. To judge by the lengthy and fulsome praise on his gravestone inscription, the family had done no more than attain solid respectability within the ghetto by the time he died.
Amschel Moses was evidently a studious man—he was, according to his gravestone, “a man who observed the prescribed time for the study of the Torah.” This may possibly explain why he sent his son Mayer Amschel away to the rabbinical school at Fürth when he had completed his primary education in Frankfurt. Whatever his reasons, it is not the case (as some historians have erroneously inferred) that Mayer Amschel was intended for the rabbinate; Cohen, who wrote a brief and laudatory biography shortly after Mayer Amschel’s death and probably knew him, states that he only “studied his religion in order . . . to be a good Jew.” However, Mayer Amschel’s studies at Fürth were cut short by the untimely death of his parents in 1755 and 1756, victims of one of the epidemics which still periodically swept through German towns. He was just twelve years old.
At this point, he might well have returned to rejoin his elder sister, Gutelche, and two brothers, Moses and Kalman. Instead, he was sent to Hanover to learn the rudiments of business in the firm of Wolf Jakob Oppenheim (presumably a business associate of his father’s). This was a formative experience, because it brought him for the first time into direct contact with the privileged world of the court agents. Of course, Mayer Amschel almost certainly knew something of this world already. Süss-Oppenheimer, after all, had been executed just six years before he was born. Moreover, we know that Süss had been involved in at least one bills transaction with Mayer Amschel’s grandfather. But now the boy could see at closer quarters what it meant to be a “court Jew,” since Oppenheim’s grandfather Samuel had been court agent to the Austrian Emperor, and his uncle was agent to the Bishop of Cologne. It was in Hanover that Mayer Amschel began to acquire an expertise which was calculated to help him acquire the status of court agent for himself. He became a dealer in rare coins and medals, a line of business in which clients were almost invariably aristocratic collectors, and in which a knowledge of Samuel Maddai’s complex system of numismatic classification was indispensable.
When he returned to Frankfurt—as he was obliged by residence laws to do when his apprenticeship ended—in around 1764, Mayer Amschel was quick to put this expertise to good use. Within a year of his return, he had succeeded in selling rare medals to a well-born client whose future importance to the Rothschilds was to be considerable. Admittedly, Mayer Amschel’s first transaction with William, Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Kassel, was small beer. Assuming that he was the “Jew Meyer” referred to in William’s Privy Purse accounts for June 1765, it involved nothing more than 38 gulden and 30 kreuzers—a trifling sum, and one of many such small purchases the Prince made from various dealers in the years after 1763, as he built up his fashionable collection of medals and coins.4 Nevertheless, this—along with “various deliveries” of which no record survives—was enough to justify a request in 1769 that Mayer Amschel be granted the title of court agent, a request which was duly granted in September of that year. A year later he consolidated this new status. In August 1770 (at the age of twenty-six) he married Gutle, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Wolf Salomon Schnapper, court agent to the Prince of Saxe-Meiningen. In addition to the benefits of association with her father, the match brought Mayer Amschel vital new capital, in the form of a dowry of 2,400 gulden. It was to prove the first of a succession of carefully calculated Rothschild marriages, laying a foundation of prosperous kinship every bit as important as the foundation of royal patronage represented by the title of court agent.
In the years which followed, Mayer Amschel—initially in partnership with his brother Kalman, before the latter’s death in 1782—successfully established himself as Frankfurt’s leading dealer not only in coins and medals, but also in all kinds of antiques. We can see how he operated from the meticulous catalogues he circulated to his widening circle of aristocratic customers. By the 1780s the items listed included ancient Greek and Roman as well as German coins, and also a variety of other antiques and “curiosities” of the sort a wealthy collector might display alongside his coin collection: carved figures, precious stones and the like. The total value of the goods for sale in each catalogue varied from around 2,500 gulden to 5,000 gulden; however, if an item interested a client, Mayer Amschel would send it for inspection and then, if the customer wished to make a purchase, negotiate a selling price, often some way below the guide price in the catalogue. According to the surviving Privy Purse accounts, Prince William did not become a regular customer until 1790, after which date he made purchases almost every year. Other clients included Goethe’s patron, the Duke of Weimar.
That the basis of the Rothschilds’ fortune was mail-order antique sales to aristocratic numismatists may seem surprising; but there is no question that without the capital Mayer Amschel was able to accumulate by buying and selling “curiosities,” he would never have had the resources to move into banking. It is not immediately obvious how successful he was as an antique dealer: his property tax assessment remained a constant 2,000 gulden between 1773 and 1794. However, the Maaserbuch or Zehentbuch in which he punctiliously recorded his charitable donations (a tenth of his annual income, according to Jewish law) suggested to his later biographer Berghoeffer that Mayer Amschel’s annual income in the 1770s must have been in the region of 2,400 gulden—roughly the same as that of the Goethe family, and rather more than was earned at the time by a local official like a tax assessor (Schultheiss). On the basis of these and other available figures, Berghoeffer estimated Mayer Amschel’s total wealth in the mid-1780s at around 150,000 gulden (around £15,000).
We also know that
Mayer Amschel was rich enough to move house in 1787. Shortly after returning to Frankfurt, he and and his two brothers had acquired complete ownership of the Hinterpfann house, buying out the distant relations with whom their parents had shared it. Now, some twenty years later, Mayer Amschel sold his three-eighths share of the Hinterpfann to his brother Moses (for 3,300 gulden) and, beginning in 1783, bought a substantially larger house, “zum grünen Schild” (“the green shield”), for more than 11,000 gulden.5 By the standards of a Gentile family like the Goethes, this was still a wretchedly cramped place to live: just fourteen feet wide, with rooms so narrow that beds could be placed only along the side-walls at right angles to the street. It was wretched by the standards of the next generation of Rothschilds too: Mayer Amschel’s sons would look back without nostalgia on the days “when we all slept in one little attic room.” But by the standards of the Judengasse it was a desirable residence. Located in the middle of the street—roughly opposite the middle, western gate—it had been rebuilt after the 1711 fire and, unusually, had its own waterpump. On each of the three upper storeys of the main building there was a narrow room looking over the street—each with three small windows, a stove and wall cupboard—and a similar room looking inwards over the yard. Through the back door, there was a little courtyard with a small two-storey building, part of which housed the single lavatory. Unusually (and usefully) the house had two cellars, one of which was reached through an obvious enough trapdoor in the entrance hall, and the other—a larger cellar which the house shared with its next-door neighbour—which was accessible only through a concealed opening underneath the stairs, and was unconnected to the other cellar.6 The new space above the ground, limited though it may have been, was needed; for Mayer Amschel and his wife were proving to be a remarkably procreative couple, even by late-eighteenth-century standards. It appears that Gutle Rothschild gave birth virtually every year between 1771, the year after her marriage, and 1792. Of these nineteen or so children, ten lived: Schönche (1771), Amschel Mayer (1773), Salomon Mayer (1774), Nathan Mayer (1777), Isabella or Betty (1781), Breunle or Babette (1784), Kalman or Carl (1788), Gotton or Julie (1790), Jettchen or Henrietta (1791) and Jakob or James (1792).7
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