6.ii: Anon., “To make a shambles of the parliament house—Shakespeare,” the Looking Glass No. 3 (1830).
In a contemporaneous cartoon entitled The Wise Men of the East and the Marquiss of West, Nathan himself is depicted in conversation with Grant (see illustration 6.iii). “I did all I could to procure you the power of legislating for a religion you mock at,” Grant says, “but the narrow-minded House threw out the Bill.” Nathan replies, “Ah well, never mind: have you any Spanish to sell, I’ll give you 48 for it.” A more stereotyped Jew behind Nathan whispers, “Dat’s right, we can easily run it up to 50”; while another exclaims, “Mine Cot, Beards will not be de fashion yet, den!” In both cases a pun is intended on the word “bill”: the implication is that the Jews were more interested in the financial variety and that the proponents of a parliamentary bill for emancipation were ingenuous.
Tory opposition continued to thwart emancipation even when the Whigs returned to power after the Reform crisis. A second bill passed its third reading in the Commons in 1833, only to founder in the Lords in the face of opposition led by Wellington and the majority of bishops; a pattern repeated the following year. During Peel’s brief ministry of 1834-5, Nathan was one of the signatories of a letter to the Prime Minister—known to be more pragmatic in his views—suggesting that the government at least back a bill for Jewish enfranchisement. But Peel declined; and the measure was taken up only when the Whigs came back in the following month. A year later, in 1836, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Thomas Spring Rice introduced yet another emancipation bill, it too failed to get past the Lords.
6.iii: Anon., The Wise Men of the East and the Marquiss of West, McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Caricatures, No. 55 (1830).
It is hard to believe that the Tories’ opposition to emancipation had no influence on Nathan’s political views. As we shall see, his attitudes to the Reform Bill crisis underwent a sea-change between 1830 and 1832, and it seems likely that this was linked to disappointment with Wellington over emancipation. Certainly, when his sons took up the cudgels in the one major battle their father had failed to win, they did so as avowed Whigs, and even Liberals. Amschel’s garden had been saved in Frankfurt; but the next symbol of the Rothschild role in Jewish emancipation—Lionel’s seat in the House of Commons—would not be secured until twenty-two years after his father’s death. And it would be another three decades more before the Rothschilds and the Tories were reunited.
“The Exceptional Family”
Yet for all their commitment to Judaism and to the interests of their “co-religionists,” there was one important respect in which the Rothschilds sought to distance themselves from the wider Jewish community. By the 1820s they were unquestionably exceptional in financial terms. They were also exceptional in the privileged status they enjoyed relative to other Jews: this was what Heine was specifically alluding to when he used the phrase “exceptional family.” But they were also exceptional in the way they operated as a family.
Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century family firms had a limited life-span. The idea that successive generations would lose the economic motivation—the “work ethic”—which had driven their fathers and grandfathers was far from being an invention of Thomas Mann, whose Buddenbrooks immortalised the phenomenon. It was all too obvious to Francis Baring. As he wrote ruefully in 1803, conscious already of his progeny’s lack of business acumen, “Families founded on the acquirements of an individual do not last above sixty years one with another . . . [T]he posterity of a Merchant, Banker etc., particularly when they are young, abandon the pursuit of their predecessor as beneath them, or they follow it by agents without interfering themselves, which is only a more rapid road to ruin.” In fact, the Barings survived relatively well as a financial dynasty, relinquishing control over their own bank only in the 1990s. Innumerable other nineteenth-century family businesses had far shorter lives, lasting just one or two generations. The Rothschilds took exceptional precautions to avoid this decadence.
The necessary first step towards perpetuating the firm was, of course, to produce “posterity”; and, given the terms of Mayer Amschel’s will (as well, needless to say, as the social conventions of the period), that meant sons. While Amschel failed to produce any children whatsoever, his brothers produced heirs aplenty—thirteen in all. Salomon had the first, Anselm, born in 1803; Nathan had four sons, Lionel (b. 1808), Anthony (b. 1810), Nathaniel (b. 1812) and Mayer (b. 1818); Carl also had four, Mayer Carl (b. 1820), Adolph (b. 1823), Wilhelm Carl (b. 1828) and Anselm Alexander (b. 1835); and so did James: Alphonse (b. 1827), Gustave (b. 1829), Salomon (b. 1835) and Edmond (b. 1845).
When this generation duly married, male children continued to be at a premium. Indeed, the pressure to produce sons was if anything rather greater. “What do you think of my new little girl?” Anselm asked Anthony, following the birth of his second daughter Hannah Mathilde in 1832. “A boy would have been more acceptable.” (His wife Charlotte’s first child had been a boy, but he had died in infancy in 1828.) When Lionel too was presented with a daughter, Leonora, one of the senior clerks in Paris wrote to console him: “I actually compliment you that it is a daughter which our dear lady has given you—for you know it is necessary that the first child in our family is of that sex . . . it is a superstition, but that’s the way it is.” “You may have wished for a son,” he added, “but he will come—in two years you will announce him.” But when, at the appointed date, another girl was born, Anthony could not disguise his disappointment: “Congratulations to you & your good lady. In these affairs one must take what one can get.” He too had to rest content with two daughters; his brother Mayer with just one. Carl’s sons Mayer Carl and Wilhelm Carl had no fewer than ten girls between them, but no sons. It was not until 1840 that the third generation produced a boy (Lionel’s son Nathaniel, followed by Alfred two years later); and when news broke that Nat’s wife was pregnant, there was hope of a winning streak. “Nat has determined not to be outdone by the Rest of the family & intends next year to present you to his son & heir—that is the great news of the day,” enthused Anthony. “It is quite [certain] & if he intends keeping par with his eldest brother a pretty lot of little ones will be in the family & the more the happier.” It was another girl, and she died before her first birthday.
It would be wrong to infer from such remarks a crude “sexism,” however. They were more indicative of an anxiety—which lasted for some years—that the third generation would fail to produce male heirs altogether. In the eyes of Nathan’s wife Hannah, as she put it in 1832, it was “of no consequence to our gratification whether a boy or a girl, so [I] have no pity for any who choose to grumble.” Nor was this just the female point of view. Once his wife had produced a son, Anselm lost his preference for male children, as he revealed when she became pregnant again:
If Carlo Dolee [apparently a nickname for Nat, whose wife was also pregnant] has fabricated a little girl or boy my offspring will . . . be very acceptable as for a husband or for a wife . . . The Public will not say the Rothschild family has been idle that year. I hope Billy will soon follow the good example, if he goes to [the spa at] Ems, he may be sure of success.
So far, so conventional. But Anselm’s light-hearted letter also touches on what was perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Rothschilds’ history as a family. For the principal reason daughters were not regarded as much less desirable than sons was that the family practised a remarkably sustained strategy of endogamy.
Before 1824 Rothschilds had tended to marry members of other, similar Jewish families, often those with whom they did business. That was true of the wives of all but one of Mayer Amschel’s sons—who married, respectively, Eva Hanau, Caroline Stern, Hannah Cohen and Adelheid Herz—as well as of his daughters’ husbands—Messrs Worms, Sichel, Montefiore and the two Beyfuses. This was not unusual by nineteenth-century standards. As we have seen, the Stättigkeit imposed on the Frankfurt Jews had more or less made intermarriage within the small community of the J
udengasse compulsory. Even without that compulsion, however, most people—and not only Jews—tended to marry within their own religious community, seeking out an equivalent community (as Nathan did in London) if they happened to leave their home town. After 1824, however, Rothschilds tended to marry Rothschilds. Of twenty-one marriages involving descendants of Mayer Amschel between 1824 and 1877, no fewer than fifteen were between his direct descendants. Although marriage between cousins was far from uncommon in the nineteenth century—especially among German-Jewish business dynasties—this was an extraordinary amount of intermarriage. “These Rothschilds harmonise with one another in the most remarkable fashion,” declared Heine. “Strangely enough, they even choose marriage partners from among themselves and the strands of relationship between them form complicated knots which future historians will find difficult to unravel.” It is only too true; not even the royal families of Europe were as closely inbred, though self-conscious references to “our royal family” suggest that the Rothschilds regarded them as a kind of model. This was one of the other things the Rothschilds had in common with the Saxe-Coburgs.
It began in July 1824 when James married his own niece, his brother Salomon’s daughter Betty. (Because he was so much younger than Salomon, the gap in age was not impossibly large: he was thirty-two, she nineteen.) Two years later Salomon’s son Anselm married Nathan’s eldest daughter Charlotte. There was then a ten-year lull, until the marriage of Nathan’s eldest son Lionel to Carl’s eldest daughter Charlotte—at a decisive turning point in the history of the family, as we shall see. Six years after that, Nat married James’s daughter Charlotte (the limited range of names adds to the genealogical complexity); and Carl’s son Mayer Carl married Nathan’s third daughter Louise. Although their wives did not have the surname “Rothschild,” Nathan’s other sons Anthony and Mayer also married first cousins: Louisa Montefiore (in 1840) and Juliana Cohen (in 1850). (The former was also a descendant of Mayer Amschel as her mother was Nathan’s sister Henrietta; the latter was Hannah’s niece.) And so it went on, into the fourth generation. In 1849 Carl’s third son Wilhelm Carl married Hannah Mathilde, Anselm’s second daughter; a year later his brother Adolph married her sister Caroline Julie. In 1857 James’s son Alphonse married Lionel’s daughter Leonora; in 1862 his brother Salomon James married Adèle, Mayer Carl’s daughter; and in 1877 James’s youngest son Edmond married Adelheid, Wilhelm Carl’s second daughter. Anselm’s sons Ferdinand and Salomon both married fellow Rothschilds: Lionel’s second daughter Evelina (in 1865) and Alphonse’s first daughter Bettina (in 1876). Finally, Lionel’s eldest son Nathaniel—usually known as “Natty”—married Mayer Carl’s daughter Emma Louise (in 1867); and Nat’s son James Edouard married her sister Laura Thérèse (in 1871).
Why did they do it? Romantic love, the conventional modern rationale for marriage, was plainly a minor consideration in the eyes of the older generation, who drew a distinction between a “marriage of convenience” and a “marriage of affection”—Carl’s typology when scouring Germany for a suitable wife for himself. “I am not in love,” he assured his brothers, when justifying his choice of Adelheid Herz. “On the contrary. If I knew [of] another, I would marry her.” Nor did Amschel marry Eva Hanau for love; according to one contemporary account, he openly acknowledged that “the one creature that I ever really loved I have never been able to call mine”; and his nephew Anselm regarded their golden wedding anniversary as marking “fifty years of matrimonial struggle.” Caroline and Salomon were less ill suited to one another; but we have already seen how little time they spent together in the years 1812-15, when he was constantly on the move as business—or rather as Nathan—dictated. Five years later not much had changed: Caroline (in Frankfurt) was urging Salomon (in Vienna) not to go to St Petersburg merely because “your Nathan wants you to”:
That is really incomprehensible; is there anywhere you aren’t expected to go? Please, dear Salomon, do not let yourself be talked into it, [resist it] with all your strength and your considerable intelligence. Moreover, I do not understand your letter very clearly. For there are places in it which seem to suggest that you are going to have to go to Paris or even London. I am usually willing to accept your Nathan’s arguments for the above-mentioned business. But I cannot see the justification for this . . . Your Nathan cannot simply ignore the views of all of you . . . In any event, dear Salomon, you are not going to London without my knowing the reason why. Understood, my dear husband? You are not doing it.9
If there ever had been a romantic relationship between these two, there was not much left of it by the time Salomon finally ended his years of nomadism and settled in Vienna. She never joined him there, and the son of one of Salomon’s senior clerks recalled that by the 1840s he had developed a somewhat reckless enthusiasm for young girls.
To be sure, love could and did develop within such marriages. Nathan’s relationship with Hannah illustrates this well: her letters to her “dear Rothschild” suggest a genuine affinity, albeit one based in large part on a shared enthusiasm for making money.10 But such affinities were supposed to follow rather than precede marriage; they were not elective. As for James, he evidently treated his niece and wife, beautiful and intelligent though she was, primarily as a useful social asset. “To deprive oneself of one’s wife is difficult,” he confided in Nathan after just months of marriage. “I could not deprive myself of mine. She is an essential piece of furniture.” The James fictionalised as Nucingen by Balzac was respectful of his wife—indeed, treated her as an equal—but went to a succession of mistresses to satisfy his sexual needs and fell in love only once: with a courtesan.
The next generation might have been expected to be less hard-nosed in their attitudes towards marriage, following the trend we associate with the reign of Victoria (who successfully converted her own arranged marriage into a passionate romance). There is some evidence to suggest such a softening. Lionel’s letters from Paris to his cousin Charlotte, before their wedding in Frankfurt in 1836, seem to indicate a genuine passion. “Now that I am separated,” he effused on January 7, “I only know the meaning of the word and am only able to judge of my love, of my entirely and devoted love for you Dear Charlotte, & wish I were able to express it in words. But I cannot, even in endeavouring to do so my pen has fallen from my hand and more than an hour has passed thinking of you, without taking it up—” Her reply spurred him on:
I had passed several long days anxiously and tediously without hearing one word from you Dearest Charlotte, when I received your few lines and was then, for the first time since I have left, rendered happy for a few minutes, but I am now again in my melancholy state, your letter I have read over and over, and each time have regretted more and more the great distance that now separates us. I was also grieved to see that you still have such an indifferent opinion of me; you talk of Amusements, Occupations etc. Do you think I can have any that I do not enjoy with you Dear Charlotte? I have been invited everywhere, been entreated to join in some parties of amusement with old friends, but have declined. The only manner of passing my time without being annoyed is when I am alone at my Hotel, thinking and only thinking of you Dearest Charlotte . . .
A week later, his tone was was even more desperately romantic:
It is a little gratification in obliging you to occupy yourself with and to think of, if only for a few minutes, an absent friend, whose thoughts have never strayed for you, since his departure. Is it the case with others or am I different to the world in large? I have so much to say to you and feel so much the want of conversing with you Dearest Charlotte, that my ideas are confused. I begin with the same and end with the same, and then find myself in the same place; if I cannot have the happiness of telling you so verbally within a short time, I shall go mad.
Yet Lionel rather spoiled the effect of his love-letters when he added: “How happy [my parents] are to see me so attached to you and so fortunate as to have obtained the favours of a person of whom every person speaks in such high terms, and
whose acquaintance they are so anxious to make.” And only months before, while still on business in Madrid, he had expressed altogether less passionate sentiments in a letter to his brother Anthony:
I will do whatever my parents and uncles think best about staying or returning. If Uncle Charles [Carl] is gone to Naples, it will not be necessary for me to go soon to Frankfurt. Everything will therefore depend upon the family plans, as I think it makes very little difference for me to go to Frankfurt a few months earlier or later as I have no particular fancy to get married just immediately, a few weeks earlier or later makes no difference without our good parents’ wish to go to Frankfurt.
Moreover, it seems that Charlotte (as Lionel evidently realised) was still less excited at the prospect of marrying her cousin. His letters to her in fact suggest a combination of cribbing from fashionable novels and determined auto-suggestion—which, to give Lionel his due, seems to have achieved its object. By the time they were married, as his brothers discerned with some surprise, he really did seem to love her, even if the feeling was not yet reciprocated.
In truth, then, Rothschild-to-Rothschild marriages of the third generation were no more the products of spontaneous attraction than their parents’ had been, even if one or both partners managed to summon up more than affection for their chosen spouse. “They want to make some arrangement with Aunt Henrietta about Billy [Anthony] and Louisa [Montefiore],” reported Lionel to his brothers on the eve of his own wedding, rather as if reporting the performance of stocks on the Frankfurt bourse. “Joe [Joseph Montefiore] does not find much favour in H[annah] M[ayer]’s good graces. He runs after Louise who takes no notice of him. Of young Charles [Mayer Carl] and Lou [Louise] there is nothing going on; they have only spoken but a few words with each other.” Immediately after the wedding, he was able to provide an update: “H[annah] M[ayer] and J[oseph Montefiore] do not take much notice of each other. The latter runs after L[ouise] who is also courted by another cousin [Mayer Carl] who has taken a fancy to her. Please God, it will be a match and he will be doubly my Brother in Law.” His mother was watching the marriage market equally closely. Mayer Carl, she reported, “is more agreeable & communicative than I expected and very capable if he pleases to make an impression on a young lady’s heart. I fancy him now to be more manly than our other young beau; there is no alteration in Mayer, no flirtation between him and the other Charlotte Rothschild, therefore whoever is to be the happy man at a future period, will have no cause for jealousy.” Six years later she married her daughter Louise off to the said Mayer Carl, while the “other Charlotte”—who had been barely eleven years old when she first discussed her prospects—married her son Nat.
The House of Rothschild, Volume 1 Page 32