SIX
Oh what joy to be in the open airand draw breath easily!Here alone, here alone there’s life.. . . Speak softly! Restrain yourselves!There are ears and eyes upon us.
—FIDELIO, ACT 1, FINALE
The Jew, who may have no rights in the smallest German states, decides the fate of Europe.
—BRUNO BAUER
Nothing symbolised the Rothschilds’ escape from the gloomy confines of the Frankfurt ghetto better than their acquisition of real estate outside it. In 1815 virtually all the family’s wealth was held in the form of paper—bonds and other securities—and precious metal. Such “immovable property” as they possessed was all in Frankfurt; everywhere else, the brothers still lived in rented accommodation. Inside the old Judengasse, there was of course the old Stammhaus “zum grünen Schild” where the brothers had grown up. It was a matter of public curiosity that their mother Gutle continued to live there until the end of her life; her sons, however, felt no such attachment. By 1817 Carl had had enough of his old room on the third floor of his mother’s house: “Of course, you will say that in the ghetto we slept on the fourth floor. Yes, but one is getting old. Also [it is galling] that one should make much money and live a dog’s life while others who have not a tenth of our fortune live like princes.” By this time the first steps out of the Judengasse had already been taken. Although the plot they had acquired in 1809-10 for their new offices was technically in the Judengasse, the sandstone neo-classical building they built there had its entrance in the Fahrgasse, the main thoroughfare off which the Judengasse ran. (In the absence of its old gates, the Judengasse itself was now increasingly referred to as the Bornheimer Strasse.) Salomon had already been given permission to move his residence to a house in the Schäfergasse in 1807; but the real escape came when Amschel bought a house in the suburbs on the road to Bockenheim in 1811 (10 Bockenheimer Landstrasse). For the first time, he found himself living in fresh air.
Almost as soon as he had acquired the house, Amschel became consumed with the desire to buy the garden next to it. It should be stressed that the object of his desire was no country estate, merely a small suburban plot of at most a few acres, similar to those owned by Gentile banking families like the Bethmanns and the Gontards. Nor was Amschel merely bidding for social status. He seems genuinely to have fallen in love with the garden. After all, he had spent virtually all of his forty-two years cooped up in the ghetto, working, eating and sleeping in its cramped and dingy rooms, walking up and down its crowded and pungent thoroughfare. It is not easy for a modern reader to imagine how intoxicating fresh air and vegetation were to him. On a spring night in 1815—in an act as pregnant with emancipatory symbolism as the prisoners’ release into the “free air” in Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805)—he decided to sleep there. He described the experience in an excited and moving postscript to his brother Carl: “Dear Carl, I am sleeping in the garden. If God allows that the accounts work out as you and I want them to, I will buy it . . . There is so much space that you, God willing, and the whole family can comfortably live in it.” As that implied, Amschel regarded his purchase of the garden as dependent on the outcome of the brothers’ business activities, which Napoleon’s return from Elba just weeks before had thrown into turmoil. He was also torn between his love of open space and his brother Carl’s preference for a large and respectable town house in which visiting dignitaries could be entertained. Fortunately for Amschel, Nathan categorically rejected Carl’s arguments as “a lot of nonsense,” but accepted the need for a garden for the sake of Amschel’s health. By April 1816 part of the garden had been bought and Amschel was bidding to add a further two-thirds of an acre to it. Now when he slept outside—in a garden he could call his own—it was “like paradise.” Finally, more than a year after his first night under the stars, he bought the remainder. “From today onwards the garden belongs to me and to my dear brothers,” he wrote exultantly. “There is therefore no need to remind you of what you could contribute to make it more beautiful. I would not be in the least surprised if Salomon were to buy all sorts of seeds and plants at the very first opportunity, as this garden will be inherited by the family Rothschild.”
As this illustrates, Amschel insisted that he had bought the garden for the family as a whole, a sense of collective experiment which his brothers were happy to encourage, sending him the seeds and plants he asked for (including African seeds from Alexander von Humboldt) and agreeing to his plans to enlarge the plot or build greenhouses. Their mother Gutle also made frequent visits there. But there was little doubt that it was really Amschel’s garden—a place where he could potter, study and sleep, in peace and in fresh air. Revealingly, he could not help regarding it as a personal indulgence—hence his need to seek his brothers’ approval for what were often quite trivial expenditures, and his almost apologetic promises to earn the money back in business. After much agonising about the cost, he added a greenhouse and a winter garden and, during the 1820s, had the house substantially enlarged and improved in the neo-classical style by the architect Friedrich Rumpf. Later it acquired a pond, a fountain and even a medieval folly—an early (and rare) Rothschild venture into the romantic genre.
Amschel’s garden was the first of many Rothschild gardens; and its story does much to illuminate the family’s enduring passion for horticulture. Its significance was partly religious: now the Tabernacles feast could be celebrated properly in a tent amid the greenery. But the full meaning of Amschel’s passion for what was, by later Rothschild standards, a tiny patch of land becomes manifest when his purchase is set in its political context. For, as we shall see, the period after 1814 saw a concerted effort by the re-established Frankfurt authorities once again to remove the civil rights which had been won by the Jewish community from Napoleon’s Prince-Primate Dalberg. Under the terms of the old statute governing the position of Jews, not only had the ownership of property outside the Judengasse been forbidden; Jews had even been barred from walking in public gardens. Amschel therefore fretted that the Senate would either prevent his purchase of the garden altogether, or compel him to relinquish it if the purchase went ahead—anxieties which were only exacerbated by the appearance of abusive crowds outside the garden at the time of the “Hep” riots. When he was allowed to keep it, he still suspected “a kind of bribe” to keep him from leaving Frankfurt, or even a sop to avoid more general concessions to the Jewish community as a whole. It became, in short, a symbol of the much bigger question of Jewish emancipation. Something of its significance in this regard can be inferred from a guidebook description from the mid-1830s, which described the garden in semi-satirical terms:
The flowers are glittering in gold and the beds are fertilised with crown thalers, the summer houses are well papered with Rothschild bonds . . . A magnificent wealth of foreign flora spreads across the garden and each flower twinkles with ducats from Kremnitz rather than with leaves; golden figures glow from within the buds . . . To my mind, in his garden Amschel von Rothschild resembles a lord in his seraglio.
“Good Jews”
It would, of course, have been a good deal easier for Amschel to have acquired his garden if he and his brothers had converted to Christianity. The fact that they did not is of the greatest significance for the history of both the family and the firm. As Ludwig Börne observed with grudging admiration, they had
chosen the surest means of avoiding the ridicule that attaches to so many baronised millionaire families of the Old Testament: they have declined the holy water of Christianity. Baptism is now the order of the day among rich Jews, and the gospel that was preached in vain to the poor of Judaea now flourishes among the wealthy.
The Rothschilds, however, remained resolutely Jewish—a fact which also impressed Disraeli, himself (like Börne) born a Jew. Disraeli’s Younger Sidonia in Coningsby—a character partly inspired by Lionel—is “as firm in his adherence to the code of the great Legislator as if the trumpet still sounded on Sinai . . . proud of his origin, and confident in the future of his kind.” Eva (a character based in part on Carl’s daughter Charlotte) declares in Tancred: “I will never become a Christian!”
Such a defiant repudiation of conversion could well have come from a real Rothschild. “I am a Jew in the depths in my heart,” wrote Carl in 1814, commenting on the extent to which Jewish families in Hamburg were converting to Christianity. When he encountered the same thing in Berlin two years later, he was scornful: “I could marry the richest and most beautiful girl in Berlin; but I am not going to marry her for all the world because, here in Berlin, if [one is] not converted [then] one has a converted brother or sister-in-law . . . We have made our fortune as Jews and we want nothing to do with such people . . . I prefer not to mix with the meshumed [converted] families.” The brothers regarded the Bavarian banker Adolph d’Eichthal with considerable suspicion precisely because he was a convert (a mere “goy” would have been less objectionable). As James put it, “It is a bad thing when one has to deal with an apostate.” When the Hamburg banker Oppenheim had his children baptised in 1818, the Rothschilds were scandalised. “The only reason I find these people contemptible,” Carl sneered, “is that when they convert to Christianity they adopt only what is bad but nothing that is good in it.” By converting, Oppenheim had “brought about a revolution in Hamburg”: “He is sorry about it. He was weeping when I left . . . after speaking to him about it . . . However, I foresee that Oppenheim’s lead will be followed. Well, we are no custodians of others’ souls. I will remain what I am, and my children too . . .”
The brothers saw themselves as “role models” in this regard. The more they could achieve socially without converting, the weaker the arguments for conversion would seem, given that the majority of conversions were a response to continuing legal discrimination against Jews. “I am quite ready to believe that we have enough money to last us all our life,” wrote James in 1816. “But we are still young and we want to work. And [as] much for the sake of our prestige as Jews as for any other reason.” This was the way Amschel saw Nathan’s appointment as Austrian consul in London. “Though it may mean nothing to you,” he wrote, “it serves the Jewish interest. You will prevent the apostasy of quite a few Vienna Jews.” When a newspaper reported that Salomon himself had been baptised, he hastened to publish a denial. When the allegation was repeated in a French encyclopaedia fourteen years later, he insisted it be corrected in all subsequent editions.
However, while their adherence to Judaism was unbending, the brothers were far from uniformly strict in their religious observance. In Frankfurt, Amschel retained his “old-Hebrew customs and habits,” invariably eschewing work on the Sabbath, keeping kosher strictly and fasting and feasting on the appropriate holy days. At banquets, noted a contemporary journal, he sat “in true penance, as he never touches any viands or dishes that have not been cleansed or prepared in the Jewish fashion. This strict and unaffected observance of the religious injunctions of his faith is greatly to his honour; he is regarded as the most religious Jew in Frankfurt.” By the 1840s he had built a synagogue in his own house. Salomon always ate his own specially prepared kosher food, even when he invited Austrian grandees like the Metternichs to dine with him; and refused to write letters on the Sabbath and holy days.
Their brother Nathan too was mindful of his religious duties. We know that even when he was in Manchester, where the majority of Jews were relatively poor shop-keepers and pedlars, Nathan “conformed to all the rites and ceremonies of our faith, his dinner being cooked by a Jewess and taken to him at his warehouse every day” and the shamas “bringing him the palm branch and citron daily during the Tabernacle festival.”1 When Prince Pückler tried to engage him in a religious argument, he found Nathan unexpectedly well informed, reflecting afterwards that he and “his co religionists are of older religious nobility than we Christians; they are the true aristocrats in this sphere.” Nathan’s wife Hannah later subscribed to the Holy Society of the House of Learning of the Ashkenazim in London (Hevrah Kadisha Beit Ha-Midrash Ashkenazim Be-London), a thoroughly Orthodox institution, and kept a close watch on her children’s religious conduct. When he went up to Cambridge in 1837 Mayer was warned to “avoid everything possible in infringing upon our religious duties,” specifically, to “abstain from these indulgencies such as riding on Horseback on Saturdays” and to refuse to attend chapel services in college; while his brother Nat felt the need to apologise profusely to her for missing the Day of Atonement during a trip to Switzerland four years later. James too always kept a mahzor (prayer book for the holidays) in his office. When a new baby boy was circumcised, James “thank[ed] God . . . we have one more good Jew in the family.”
However, the younger brothers were regarded by Amschel as lapsing dangerously in a number of respects. When the need arose, Nathan, Carl and James all read and wrote business letters on the Sabbath—covertly if they happened to be with Amschel. And one by one they abandoned the strict kosher diet (though not completely: the English family still avoided pork). When Carl was trying to find himself a wife in 1814, Amschel and Salomon objected to his choice of Adelheid Herz on the ground that her family did not keep kosher. The issue was the source of constant arguments. “As to piety,” wrote Carl in response to yet another complaint on the subject from Amschel, “when I am old I will be pious too. In my heart I am nothing but a Jew. I don’t wish to take care of your soul, but you wrote me once that I should find means to enable you to come occasionally to my house to eat there. That [the lack of kosher food] does not mean that I am not pious.” In 1814 James complained bitterly from Berlin: “I am really fed up with the food here, I think it is the worst one could possibly have anywhere. [Amschel] is still concerned about eating only kosher food, as he is still pious and he knows that I am not; yet he will insist that I eat with him.” Some years later Heine joked that although James had “not gone over to the Christian Church,” he had “gone over to Christian cooking.” The younger brothers also abandoned all sartorial vestiges of the ghetto.
The religious differences between—and within—branches of the family grew more acute in the next generation. In London, Nathan’s elder children continued to worship more or less as their parents had done. Although not deeply spiritual, they were fundamentally conservative in their habits of worship. Indeed, they found their uncle’s family in Paris rather too lax. Lionel pointedly refused to work when he was in Paris for Passover in 1829, though James continued to write letters as usual. Nat too, despite sharing his uncle’s aversion to kosher food,2 found it surprising that during Passover “although we go to shul and eat matzot, in Paris it is impossible to shut up shop.” The ascendancy of the Reform movement in Frankfurt (which essentially sought to remodel the rabbinate and Jewish forms of worship along Protestant lines) perturbed them too, accustomed as they were to Amschel’s old-fashioned ways. “They have a new Rabbi here who preaches uncommonly well,” reported Anthony ambivalently in 1844. “He preached on Friday for the first time, I did not like anything that he said—but perhaps it was the fault of the Reformers here. They go a good deal further than they do in England. I should like to hear a man who could preach as well in England . . . I was very disquieted with the whole service.”
The influence of Reform on Carl’s daughter Charlotte was strong, judging by the way she later critically compared Jewish practices in England with those of some Christian denominations. Yet when her brother Wilhelm Carl went to the other extreme, outdoing even Amschel in his Orthodoxy, the English Rothschilds were even more disconcerted. His aunt Hannah reported to Lionel on his condition rather as if “his enthusiasm in observing all the stricter duties of the Jewish religion” were a sign of possible mental imbalance:
I have seen him twice, he came to his Brother one Evening and remained an hour, and as much as propriety allowed I remarked his manner &c. which is very rational and not in any way different from others of his age and situation, tranquil and civil, plain in his dress[,] not conspicuous either for much attention to it . . . There is nothing in my opinion to fear, that this religious devotion will be followed by fanaticism. I saw him again at Baron A. de Rothschild[’s] . . . he accompanied us to look at the same things and took as much interest in all as any of us . . . [H]e said, I am determined to be firm and will always be so. Should he be fortunate to find proper and sensible Instructors, no ill can be anticipated from his present good principles.3
When Amschel withdrew a substantial donation (150,000 gulden) intended to finance the building of a new synagogue because “they [the Jewish community’s board] have chosen a new [deputy] Rabbi for the synagogue who is not an Orthodox one,” Anthony could only shake his head: “You have no idea what a parcel of Donkeys . . . the Jews are here.”
To most members of the family, the conflicts between Reformers and Orthodox Jews—which had only a muted echo in England—were an unwelcome nuisance. Internecine theological and liturgical controversies held little interest for them; and any weakening of Jewish unity struck them as self-defeating in a hostile world. Thus Mayer Amschel’s sons and grandsons followed his example in accepting lay offices within their communities, but rarely intervened in religious disputes, save to appeal for harmony. Nathan wasParnass (warden) of the Great Synagogue in Duke Place, and was almost certainly behind a scheme for “an organisation of Jewish charity” to combine the efforts of the three major Ashkenazi synagogues of the metropolis (the Great, the Hambro’ and the New)—a move foreshadowing the later emergence of the United Synagogue. For the Rothschilds, religious activism was primarily about giving practical, material assistance to a stable Jewish community—not defining the community, much less the nature of its faith, which they tended to regard as an immutable given.
Of course, the relationship between the Rothschilds and the wider, poorer Jewish community has long been the subject of myths and jokes. In the classic anecdotes on the subject a stereotyped “Rothschild” is the target for a range of ingenious bids for alms fromSchnorrer—those distinctively unabashed scroungers and spongers of the folkloric Jewish community. “Rothschild” is their long-suffering but ultimately indulgent victim, sometimes even entering into the spirit of the game—as when a begging letter thrown through a window onto the dinner table is thrown back with a coin. (“Placiert”—“sold”—mutters Rothschild to himself, as if selling a bond to an investor, when he sees the Schnorrer catch the coin.)4 Such stories—which continue to be republished in anthologies of Jewish humour today—are not entirely fanciful: they are echoes of the era when the Rothschilds, because of their great wealth and apparent political power, had a mythic, talismanic status in the eyes of other Jews: not only “the Jews of the Kings” but also the “Kings of the Jews”—at once exalted by their wealth,5 and yet mindful of their own lowly origins. As such, they were the focus of all kinds of aspiration, ranging from the mercenary to the visionary. The Rothschild archives contain numerous unsolicited letters requesting assistance from Jews and Jewish communities all over the world: the Dublin Hebrew Congregation; the friends of a Jewish doctor in reduced circumstances; the St Alban’s Place Synagogue; the New Hebrew Congregation at Liverpool. These were the realSchnorrer—rarely the cocky figures of legend, more often humble supplicants.
Because copies of outgoing correspondence were either not kept or subsequently destroyed at New Court, it is far from easy to tell which of these pleas were heeded, and therefore even harder to detect a pattern in Rothschild charitability. We know that Nathan subscribed to a number of charities for the poor and sick: the Bread, Meat and Coal Society (Meshebat Naphesh); the Jews’ Hospital (Nevé Zedek) at Mile End, of which he was vice-president and later president; the Holy Society for the Assistance of the Poor for the Needs of the Sabbath in London; the charitable fund of the Great Synagogue, and the Bethnal Green Society for the Relief of the Sick Poor. He also became a Governor of the London Hospital, which had a tradition of providing for Jewish patients, in 1826. But education seems to have been his main charitable interest. He subscribed to the Talmud Torah in London Society in 1820 and a year later donated 1,000 guilders to a society for the education of poor Dutch Jews. In particular, he supported the Jews’ Free School, donating 10 guineas to the building fund in 1817 and helping to pay for the new schoolhouse in Bell Lane, Spitalfields. The school was “a charity he took so decided an interest in” that his widow made a further substantial donation to mark the third anniversary of his death. It has been calculated that the firm of N. M. Rothschild & Sons gave the school an average of £9,500 a year throughout the nineteenth century, a figure which is more than doubled when individual family members’ benefactions are added.
In all this, Nathan may have been consciously following his father’s example; but he was also falling in with the priorities of his Cohen and Montefiore relations. It was one of his sisters-in-law who made him “promise . . . to give to the poor” in 1814; and it was probably his brother-in-law Joseph Cohen who involved him in the Jews’ Free School, of which Hannah herself became a Life Governor in 1821. When Lionel became a trustee of the Bread, Meat and Coal Society, the board was already dominated by Cohens; indeed, his mother was later described as “a zealous advocate of its prosperity & a munificent Contributor to its funds”—not surprisingly, as her father had been one of its founders. Another of Hannah’s pet charities was the Jewish Lying-in Charity. By the later 1830s her sons were actively involved in the Jews’ Hospital, of which Lionel was president and Mayer later steward, and the Jews’ Free School. At the same time, they continued to disburse small amounts to societies like the (Jewish) Society for Relieving the Aged Needy and, through the Great Synagogue, to unfortunate individuals like a mother whose child had a club-foot.
In Frankfurt, Mayer Amschel’s legacy still made itself felt. Like his father, Amschel routinely gave 10 per cent of the Frankfurt house’s running costs (not its income) to the poor. And in 1825 Amschel and his brothers donated 100,000 gulden to the two Jewish insurance funds in Frankfurt to build a new hospital for the community in the Reichneigrabenstrasse, “in accordance with the wishes of their late father . . . [and] as a memorial to filial respect and fraternal harmony.” Curiously, James preferred to keep a much lower profile within the Paris Jewish community, channelling his contributions indirectly through Salomon Alkan, president of Société de Secours, and Albert Cohn, his sons’ tutor (and later a leading light of French Jewry). In 1836 he even stipulated that his donations to the new synagogue in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth should be kept secret.
At least one contemporary cartoonist suggested that, having made their millions, the Rothschilds were indifferent to the plight of their “poorer co-religionists” (a favourite phrase). In A King bestowing favors on a Great Man’s Friends (1824) (illustration 6.i), a group of ragged Jews—labelled “The Old Stock Reduced”—can be seen to the right of Nathan as he prepares to ascend in a balloon “to receive my Dividends.” One exclaims: “The Lord will surely hear the Cries of the poor.” Another pleads, “O! Look down from heaven and behold that we are become a mockery and derision to be buffeted and reproached.” A third cries: “O Lord, have mercy on us for we are overwhelmed with contempt; overwhelmed is [sic] our Souls with the Scorn of those who are at ease and with the contempt of the proud.” This accusation was unfounded.
Yet it is important to stress that the Rothschilds did not confine their charitable activities exclusively to the Jewish community. At times of economic hardship—1814 in Germany, 1830 in France, 1842 in Hamburg, 1846 in Ireland—they donated money to the poor without religious distinction. Nathan contributed to a number of apparently non-denominational establishments, including the Society of Friends of Foreigners in Distress (though it is likely that some of the “foreigners” in question were poor Jewish immigrants). His children also lent their support to the London Orphan Asylum, the London Philanthropic Society and the Buckinghamshire General Infirmary. Especially unexpected is the fact that in 1837 either Hannah or Charlotte—more probably the latter—was “one of the most liberal contributors” to a new Church of England school at Ealing and Old Brentford. It was not only Jews who applied for assistance to the Rothschilds: the Schnorrer even included the early socialist Robert Owen and a congregation of the secessionist Scottish Free Church!
6.i: T. Jones, A King bestowing favors on a Great Man’s Friends—Scene near the Bank (1824).
“A Heavenly Good Deed”: Emancipation
Although their wealth and influence allowed them to achieve what was in many respects a privileged social status, the Rothschilds never lost sight of the fact that they and their co-religionists remained subject to a wide range of discriminatory laws and regulations after 1815. They remembered Mayer Amschel’s injunctions to “bring to an end all the work” which he had begun “in the interest of our people.” As a result, the history of the Rothschilds is inseparable from the history of what is somewhat anachronistically called Jewish “emancipation”: to be precise, the gradual process whereby Jews (with the assistance of some sympathetic Gentiles) sought to achieve full legal equality in the various European states. Though self-interest undoubtedly was part of the reason for the family’s sustained involvement in this, the principal motivation was a sense of moral obligation to other Jews: a point neatly made by Amschel when he ended a letter to his brothers in 1815: “I remain your brother, who wishes you, and me, and all Jews, all the best, Amschel Rothschild.” Those who assumed that Amschel was concerned to protect his own position misunderstood him. In 1814 he urged Nathan to maintain his “influence at the English court . . . for two reasons: firstly, in the interests of the Jewish people, secondly, in the interests of the prestige of the House of Rothschild.” “It is . . . good that we own so much money,” he wrote to Nathan and Salomon three years later. “Thus we can lend help to the whole of Jewry.”
What were the handicaps under which Jews continued to labour in Restoration Europe? The situation was perhaps best in France, where the restored Bourbons, despite their devotion to Catholicism, not only preserved the legal emancipation of Jews achieved by the Revolution, but also failed to renew the so-called décret infâme passed by Napoleon in 1808, which had reimposed various economic restrictions. All that formally remained was a special oath which Jews had to take in court, though in practice they were also largely excluded from political life before 1830. In Britain, although native-born Jews were automatically British subjects, they—along with Catholics and Non-Conformists before 1828-9—were excluded from parliament (whether as voters or members), local government and the ancient universities. On the other hand, there were few economic and social barriers.
The position in Germany varied from state to state. Prussia had the most liberal legislation following the emancipation edict of 1812, which granted Jews equal legal rights, though in practice they continued to be excluded from the bureaucracy and the officer corps, and after 1822 were also excluded from schoolteaching and municipal government. In Austria, by contrast, little had changed since the Tolerance Edict of 1782 (which had reduced economic restrictions somewhat): Jews continued to be denied the right to own land in the Empire, had to pay a special poll tax, were subject to marriage restrictions and, if born outside the Empire, required a special “toleration permit” to reside there, renewable every three years. They were also excluded from the civil service, though they could and did serve in the army and some had even become officers during the Napoleonic Wars. When Lionel went on his tour through Germany in 1827, it was only in Vienna that he found the position of Jews so bad as to be noteworthy: “Jews are very much oppressed, they can hold no situation under Government nor possess any land property, not even a house in the town, they are obliged to pay a heavy tolerance tax, and must have a permission to hire lodgings.” All these restrictions directly affected his Uncle Salomon. He had to seek permission from Metternich in 1823, when his cousin Anton Schnapper wanted to move to Vienna to marry a relative of his senior clerk Leopold von Wertheimstein. Ten years later he had to apply for renewal of “toleration” for another senior clerk, Moritz Goldschmidt (who had also been born in Frankfurt). Salomon himself could only rent accommodation in Vienna, and his request in 1831 that he and his brothers be allowed “to convert part of the wealth with which a kind providence has blessed us into a form in which it will be remunerative whatever vicissitudes may befall us” was turned down—despite Salomon’s ingenious argument that this would be “not wholly inconsistent with [the government’s] own advantage, since it cannot regard with indifference the possibility of attracting considerable capital sums to the country which will become subject to taxation.” If such exceptions could not be made even for the state’s most powerful and loyal banker, efforts to improve the collective position of the Austrian Jews were foredoomed to failure before the 1840s.
In western Germany, matters were left in a state of flux by the end of French control in 1814. Dalberg’s 1811 decree giving Jews full rights of citizenship in Frankfurt was effectively suspended shortly after his abdication as Grand Duke. In March 1814 the special Jewish oath was reintroduced in the courts and Jews were dismissed from public sector posts. Later the same year, membership of the citizens’ assembly was once again restricted to Christians. The situation in neighbouring Hesse-Kassel was similar. As we have seen, this reaction partly reflected popular anti-Jewish feeling, which in Frankfurt was distinctly threatening. Amschel’s letters of this period are full of lurid images of impending violence: the Gentiles “could drink Jews’ blood” or even “eat a grilled Jew.” There was, however, a chance to stem this reaction at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), where the constitutional form of the new German Confederation was to be determined, raising the possibility of a general emancipation applicable to Germany as a whole. Although the Rothschilds were mainly preoccupied with the financial aspects of the post-war settlement, which were largely decided in Paris, they nevertheless took a close interest in this aspect of events in the Austrian capital, where a delegation had been sent by the Frankfurt Jewish community to press the Jewish case. It would appear that the first member of the family to see the need for such lobbying was Salomon’s wife Caroline. On July 21, 1814, she wrote to her husband, who was then in London:
It does not look rosy for us as regards our citizenship . . . As far as I can see from a distance, we still have a long struggle before us. This matter interests me so much that, if I catch a simple word about it, I listen eagerly to what is said . . . I am very curious to know what the result is going to be. Can’t you, my dearest Salomon, contribute to this through your acquaintances over there? This would be a heavenly good deed, which cannot be bought even with very much money. Perhaps a minister there would give you an introduction to Austria, Russia or whomso ever has a say in this matter. You may ask what has a woman to do with public affairs? Better she should write about soap and needles. However, I see what I am doing as necessary. Nobody is doing anything about this matter. Time is passing slowly and we will reproach ourselves for not having done more . . . This matter is now most pressing; and here in Frankfurt nobody is doing anything.
Amschel and Carl needed no such prompting. In August and September the former was in Berlin on business, from whence he relayed news of the likely Russian and Prussian positions on the subject to Isaac Gumprecht, one of the leaders of the Frankfurt Jews in Vienna (the other key figures were Ludwig Börne’s father Jacob Baruch and the lawyer August Jassoy). Carl meanwhile wrote to Nathan asking him whether an “English Lord” then on his way to Vienna—probably Castlereagh—“could possibly help in the question of the civil rights with regard to the Jews.”
From an early stage, the brothers pinned considerable hopes on the Prussian Chancellor Hardenberg, one of the architects of the Prussian emancipation. According to Amschel, he had “a very friendly attitude towards the Jews . . . [H]e obtained citizenship rights for the Danzig Jews. And he did this despite the anti-Jewish representations which the Danzig Gentile merchants made to the King.” He also urged Nathan to “send a few small presents for the Minister’s [probably the Prussian Finance Minister Bülow’s] wife. [He] is most certainly in a position to help the Jews.” The Prussian diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt received similar blandishments: though he scrupulously refused a gift of three emerald rings from the Jewish delegation at Vienna in 1814, two years later Amschel offered to purchase some caskets from him at what he considered an excessive price “if by it something could be achieved.” Their other great hope was Metternich, though his apparently sympathetic attitude was known not to be shared by other senior Austrian ministers. A letter from Salomon in October 1815 asked Nathan to make a speculative purchase of British stocks worth £20,000 for “the great man who does everything for [the] Jews.” This could refer to either Hardenberg or Metternich, whom Salomon had seen the previous day. Buderus—who had been restored to power by the Elector in Hesse-Kassel—was also seen as a possible source of support, though the fact that the Jewish community owed him money was expected to complicate his attitude.
At first, it seemed as if a compromise could be reached in Vienna. In December 1814, for example, Carl heard that citizenship could (once again) be secured for the Frankfurt Jews in return for a cash payment of 50,000 gulden; following his father’s example, he offered to contribute 5,000, in addition to the 3,000 the community already owed the firm. But there was a serious setback when, at the suggestion of the Bremen Bürgermeister Smidt, article 16 of the German Bundesakte—the loose confederal constitution signed by the member states in June 1815—referred only to rights previously granted to Jews “by” (as opposed to the original “in”) the German states, effectively invalidating all the Napoleonic measures, and leaving future arrangements in the hands of the individual states. Nevertheless, after the interruption of Napoleon’s Hundred Days, the brothers continued their efforts in the hope of bringing pressure to bear directly on the Frankfurt authorities. In September Amschel sent the latest details of the situation in Frankfurt to Paris, urging his brothers to show them to Metternich and to “Bülow who is a good friend of Hardenberg and promised me in Berlin that he would help . . . If you can help you will be blessed, for Baruch is in Vienna but will be back soon. But with such things you must strike while the iron is hot.” Salomon should tell Bülow what Amschel had told Hardenberg: “That we should not be regarded as aliens. In critical times, we [Jews] served [in the army] as well as any native. I believe you will be doing good if you do this, as we have many enemies and otherwise you won’t get anything; we just have far too many enemies, and I will be very sorry if we end up with nothing.”
Salomon was soon able to report a promise of support from Metternich as well as Hardenberg, which led to letters being sent to the Frankfurt authorities by both Austria and Prussia, urging that the agreement between Dalberg and the Jewish community of 1811 be upheld—or, as Salomon rather optimistically put it, telling them “that the devil may take all non-Jews in Frankfurt and that the Jews in Frankfurt will keep their citizenship.”6 James meanwhile urged Nathan to get a letter from a senior British figure in the same sense. When Hardenberg came to Frankfurt at the end of November, Carl pressed him to receive a deputation from the community, among them Amschel, and was further encouraged to hear him speak “very graciously about our Jewish matters.” “You cannot do too much on acount of the Jewish matters,” he exhorted his brothers. Caroline even wrote to congratulate her husband on his efforts on December 7.
Such congratulations were premature. Amschel sensed the coming disappointment as early as September, when he heard that Baron vom Stein might be given a decisive say in the matter, as Stein was regarded as having “turned against the Jews.” By November the messages he was receiving from Baruch in Vienna were gloomy, while the Frankfurt authorities were unmoved by the Austrian and Prussian letters. Nor was help to be had from outside Germany: according to Nathan, the British representative sent to Frankfurt, the Earl of Clancarty, was “no friend of our people.” Worse, the Austrian delegate to the Confederation’s Diet in Frankfurt, Count Buol-Schauenstein, turned out to share the Frankfurt authorities’ view that “this nation, which never integrates with any other, but always hangs together to pursue its own ends, will soon overshadow Christian firms, and with their terribly rapid increase of population they will soon spread over the whole city, so that a Jewish trading city will gradually arise beside our venerable cathedral.”
Although Amschel and Carl continued to lobby the representatives of the various German states and to receive encouragement from Hardenberg and Humboldt, as well as from the Russian envoy in Frankfurt, they were increasingly pessimistic. Indeed, Amschel began to talk of leaving Frankfurt altogether—though this may have been intended partly as a threat to embarrass the Frankfurt authorities. It was at this time that he and Carl made their first concerted efforts to overcome their social isolation in Frankfurt: the first dinners they gave were in fact primarily designed to lobby influential figures in diplomatic and financial circles “in the interests of the Jewish people.” They attached particular significance to winning over the banker Bethmann, whose utterances on the subject appear to have varied considerably according to the company he was in. At the same time (November 1816), Amschel, Baruch and Jonas Rothschild sent a memorandum to the Federal Diet challenging the legality of the Frankfurt Senate’s action.
Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that the legislative settlements reached in the various states would fall far short of what had been achieved in 1811. In Kassel, although the Jews were given citizenship (in return for the inevitable payment), it was hedged around with economic restrictions preventing Jews from unrestricted ownership of real estate and prohibiting street-hawking. To Buderus’s wife, Carl was fulsome in his flattery of the Elector: “I said, the Prince knows that he alone began the reform, it was his own initiative, and that the world now saw how liberally-minded he had been all along.” Indeed, he pressed William to give the same rights to the Jews in his other territory of Hanau. But he and his brothers knew full well that, while the conditions attached to Jewish citizenship seemed “trivial things in principle,” they were “big things for those affected.” Moreover, as Carl privately remarked, the Elector was “an expert when it comes to going back on his word”—a verdict which seemed to be vindicated in 1820, when it was rumoured that new residence restrictions were going to be imposed on Jews in Kassel. The new law was in fact typical of the kind of qualified “emancipation contract” which German states wanted to make with Jews—offering rights only in return for social “regeneration” and assimilation; it was better than nothing, but it did not satisfy the Rothschilds.
In Frankfurt, despite the example of Electoral Hesse, the debate appeared to end in an even more complete defeat in October 1816, when a revised constitution confirmed the equality of Christian citizens only, leaving Jews as second-class Schutzgenossen (literally “protected comrades”). It was especially galling that, even as they revoked the decree of 1811, the authorities specifically cited Amschel’s garden as evidence of their enlightened attitude towards the Jewish community. If this was intended to buy off the Rothschilds, however, it failed; it merely made Amschel the target for antagonism on the part of those in the town who wished even stricter measures against the Jews—namely a wholesale return to the ghetto. As we have seen, anti-Jewish feeling in Frankfurt grew more and more overt in this period, with the performance of plays like Unser Verkehr and the publication of numerous anti-Jewish pamphlets. During the debates on the Jewish question, some members of the Senate had even been heard to propose as a “solution” that the Jews should be expelled from Frankfurt altogether “as the endeavour of these money-grabbing nomads is solely directed at the ruin of [us] Christians, so that within a few years a large part of the Christian burghers and residents will have been deprived of all happiness and prosperity.” In September 1816 a group of anxious representatives of the Jewish community wrote to the Rothschild brothers, noting “how tirelessly and eagerly you are working for us, how strong your solidarity with us is,” but admitting: “[T]he good results which we were justified in hoping for have not been achieved . . . We fear that the fortress will not capitulate before very decisive measures are taken.”
What form could such measures take? In the wake of the Frankfurt defeat, Amschel angrily talked of “hurting” the Gentile bankers in Frankfurt “by doing business, even if it entails losses.” More plausibly, the Rothschilds might make use of their rapidly increasing wealth in a more positive way. Some German Jews looked to Nathan—the richest and most influential of the brothers at this time—to provide some kind of English deus ex machina. “I hope in days to come the British who conquered Napoleon,” wrote one of the Frankfurt community’s leaders, “are going to call the Frankfurt Senate to set free Jewish slaves here as they have freed Christian slaves elsewhere.” Amschel himself urged Nathan to “have the British Minister [in Bavaria, Frederick] Lamb egged on again” to support the Jewish case. According to the brothers’ correspondence, Nathan did what he could. A number of letters credit him with securing support on the issue from the Dutch King, as well as acting to protect the interests of other Jewish communities in British jurisdiction, notably in Corfu and Hanover. “I think it might be easy to improve our lot should you approach the Prince Regent,” a Hamburg Jew named Meyerstein wrote to Nathan in 1819. “Why should the Hanoverian Jews, living in an English province, not be given the same laws conceded to their brethren in England? The barbarity of the past century has got to be stopped and it is from your direction that we expect the sun to rise also for us.” In the case of Frankfurt, of course, British influence was minimal: the best tactic still seemed to be to apply pressure in Berlin and Vienna, in the hope that the larger German states would finally force Frankfurt to soften its attitude. But here too Nathan could make a contribution. In what was to become the pattern for much of their later activities of this sort, the brothers sought to win stronger Prussian support for the Jewish case in the course of the negotiations for the 1818 sterling loan. The brothers also endeavoured to raise the issue at the Congress of Aix; indeed, Amschel argued that Salomon should go there “not for business reasons but in the interest of the whole Jewry.” It was in fact this issue which brought them into contact with Friedrich Gentz for the first time, as he and Metternich passed through Frankfurt on their way to the Congress.
Such pulling on the purse strings in Berlin and Vienna could not prevent popular antagonism in Frankfurt finally boiling over into the violence of the “Hep” riots of August 1819. On the other hand, the unrest served to strengthen the case against the town authorities, and the Rothschilds sought to press home the point by reiterating Amschel’s threat to leave Frankfurt for good. A letter by James to the Vienna banker David Parish, which was evidently intended for Metternich’s eyes, illustrates the way the brothers were now explicitly using their financial leverage on behalf of their “nation” (a phrase they often used):
What can be the result of such disturbances? Surely they can only have the effect of causing all the rich people of our nation to leave Germany and transfer their property to France and England; I myself have advised my brother to shut up house and come here. If we make a start, I am convinced all well-to-do people will follow our example and I question whether the sovereigns of Germany will be pleased with a development which will make it necessary for them to apply to France or England when they are in need of funds. Who buys state bonds in Germany and who has endeavoured to raise the rate of exchange if it be not our nation? Has not our example engendered a certain confidence in the state loans so that Christian firms have also taken heart and invested part of their money in all kinds of securities? . . . The object of the agitators at Frankfurt seems to have been . . . to collect all the Israelites into a single street; if they had been successful in doing this, might it not have led to a general massacre? I need not point out how undesirable such an occurrence would be, especially at a time when our house might be holding large sums for the account of the Austrian or Prussian Court. It seems to me to be really necessary that Austria and Prussia should devise measures to be applied by the Senate at Frankfurt for energetically dealing with occurrences such as those of the 10th of this month, and thus making each man secure in his possessions.
In the view of their avowed adversary, the Bremen delegate to the Frankfurt Diet, the Rothschilds were making full use of their financial leverage. Besides Austria and Prussia, “several minor states have also had recourse to this financial Power in their difficulties, which puts it in a strong position to ask for favours, especially for a favour of such an apparently trivial nature as the protection of a few dozen Jews in a small state.”
The brothers kept up the pressure in 1820, pressing Metternich to lean on Buol, who continued to support the Frankfurt authorities. They also lobbied the Bade nese government on behalf of the Jews there. When Metternich visited Frankfurt in October 1821, he signalled his own sympathies by lunching with Amschel; Salomon meanwhile came to an “important financial arrangement” with Gentz, after he had once again “bent his ear about the fatal Frankfurt ‘Jews’ affair.” In 1822 Amschel even wrote to Metternich’s lover Princess Lieven “asking for the withdrawal of certain instructions towards [the Frankfurt Jews] that Count Münster must have sent to the Minister of Hanover.”
This campaign was not a total failure. A year after his letter to Princess Lieven, for example, Amschel was able to celebrate Buol’s recall and the arrival of the more sympathetic Münch-Bellinghausen. And, writing from Berlin in March 1822, Heine detected “better prospects” that the Jews would win back their citizenship. Yet Princess Lieven’s private reaction to Amschel’s letter was revealing: it was, she told Metternich, “the funniest letter imaginable . . . Four pages of sentiment, begging my help for the Jews of his town, and I, the patroness of the Jews! There is a kind of naive confidence in it all, which is at once laughable and touching.” If this was how Metternich felt too, the brothers’ efforts in Vienna may have been less productive than they imagined. In the end, the Frankfurt authorities made only the most minimal concessions. Although there was to be no return to the ghetto—in itself a cause for relief rather than rejoicing—a plethora of restrictions on Jews remained, and their citizenship was clearly of the second-class variety. The new law confirming the “private citizen’s rights” of the “Israelite citizens” (1824) excluded the Jews from political life as before; imposed restrictions on their economic activities; subordinated the community to a Senate commissioner; permitted, as before, only fifteen Jewish marriages a year (only two of which could be with outsiders); and restored the Jewish oath in the law courts.7 It is important to bear in mind that these regulations applied to more than a tenth of the town’s population (some 4,530 people). Most of the rules—including the restriction on marriages to Jews from outside Frankfurt—remained in place until 1848. Indeed, the Frankfurt Jews did not secure full legal equality until 1864.
Heine used the Rothschilds’ role in the emancipation debate to make a sarcastic joke about businessmen in general:
Frankfurt citizenship papers . . . are said to have dropped 99 per cent below par—to adopt the language they speak in Frankfurt . . . But—to speak like a Frankfurter again—have not the Rothschilds and the Bethmanns stood at par for a long time? A businessman’s religion is the same all the world over. The businessman’s . . . office is his church; his desk is his pew, his copybook is his bible, his warehouse his holiest of holies, the bourse bell his church bell, his gold his God, his credit his faith.
But this was to miss the point. It was not the position of the Rothschilds which was at issue, but the position of Jews in general. What Heine had to say about the religion or lack of religion of businessmen would be echoed by that other apostate Marx (who argued conversely that capitalism was the universalisation of Jewish “huckstering”); it was not, however, true in the case of the Rothschilds. In any case, the idea that Bethmann and Rothschild stood at par was not one which many Gentiles in Frankfurt accepted.
There is an obvious continuity running from the battle for Jewish rights in Frankfurt to the involvement of Nathan and his sons in the campaign to secure emancipation in Britain after 1828. For here the remaining legal discrimination to which Jews were subject did not in any way personally inconvenience the Rothschilds. Nothing prevented Nathan doing the business he did at the Royal Exchange; nothing prevented him buying the houses where he wished to live. The fact that British Jews were excluded from political life and the English universities could have been a matter of complete indifference to him, as he had no desire or need to enter any of these institutions. Yet it was not. Even Nathan, of all the brothers the most single-minded in his pursuit of profit, felt an obligation to act on behalf of the Jewish community as a whole, even for the sake of rights he himself had no intention of exercising.
In 1828 and 1829 Protestant Dissenters and then Catholics secured the repeal of the laws excluding them from political life, but Jews did not—thanks to the parliamentary Oath of Abjuration (originally intended to exclude “popish recusant convicts”), which contained the phrase “upon the true faith of a Christian.” This inconsistency appears to have galvanised Nathan—or, rather, to have galvanised his wife. For, like his brother Salomon, Nathan was evidently susceptible to feminine pressure on the issue. On February 22, 1829, his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore recorded in his diary how he and his wife Judith
took a ride to see Hannah Rothschild and her husband. We had a long conversation on the subject of liberty for the Jews. He said he would shortly go to the Lord Chancellor and consult him on the matter. Hannah said if he did not, she would. The spirit manifested here by Mrs. Rothschild, and the brief but impressive language she used, reminded me most strikingly of her sister, Mrs. Montefiore.8
In the subsequent manoeuvrings, Nathan and Montefiore worked closely together. Broadly speaking, they tended to urge a more cautious strategy than the leading figure on the London Committee of Deputies of the British Jews (later generally known as the Board of Deputies), Isaac Lyon Goldsmid.
For Nathan, the issue revealed with sudden clarity the limits of his relationship with the Tory government, and particularly with the Prime Minister Wellington. Perhaps somewhat naively, he offered to sound out his Tory contacts about the possibility of emancipation in early April, at the height of the political crisis over Catholic emancipation which was close to toppling the government. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, was evasive:
He advised them to remain quiet until . . . the Catholic business . . . was settled, but if they thought it more to their own interest to bring the matter forward immediately, to set Lord Holland to do so, and he would support him, as he considered it right that the Jews should be relieved from their present disabilities; at the same time they must be guided by public opinion.
On the basis of this ambiguous message, Nathan recommended to the Board of Deputies “that a petition praying for relief should be prepared, in readiness to be presented to the House of Lords whenever it may be thought right.” At Nathan’s suggestion the petition dealt solely with British-born Jews, and he advised that only British-born Jews sign it (hence his son Lionel’s name appeared, rather than his own). He and Montefiore then took it to their old friend, the former Chancellor Vansittart (now Lord Bexley), who agreed to present it in the Lords after some minor alterations. The Deputies were impressed, and wrote thanking Nathan “for the zeal and attention he has manifested on behalf of his Hebrew Brethren, and more especially for his personal Attendance this day and evincing so ardent a desire in promoting through his powerful influence a relief to the Jews of this Kingdom from those disabilities under which they are labouring.” Work was begun on drafting a bill.
Yet in the course of the following month it became evident that Wellington was opposed to the introduction of any such bill that year; nor would he commit himself as to the next parliamentary session. When Nathan went to see him in February 1830 to “entreat” him “to do something for the Jews,” the Duke replied that “he would not commit the Government on the question of the Jews, and advised them to defer their application to Parliament, or, if they did not . . . it must be at their own risk, and he would make no promise.” In the face of this, Nathan became pessimistic. The Liberal Tory Robert Grant proceeded to introduce a petition in favour of the Jews a week later, followed on April 5 by the first of many bills—an event Nathan himself may have witnessed. Two days later, however, he informed his brother James “that the Jewish matter is not going through.” He lobbied another old Tory friend on the subject—Herries, now President of the Board of Trade—but the government position remained unchanged and the bill was duly defeated by 228 to 165 on its second reading. It was now obvious that support for Jewish emancipation was much more likely to come from the Whigs. After years of proximity to the Tories, Nathan suddenly found himself siding with the Opposition.
The emancipation issue cut across party lines: supporters included the socialist Robert Owen, the Irish Catholic Daniel O’Connell and the Liberal Tory William Huskisson, while its most vehement early opponents included William Cobbett. A flavour of the more radical opposition can be gleaned from the numerous cartoons devoted to the subject. A caricature produced shortly after the introduction of Grant’s bill (though dated March 1, 1830) depicts a bearded Jew in the House of Commons listening to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s maiden speech in support of the bill and declaring: “It’s Liberty of Conscience my peoples vants—that’s all” (illustration 6.ii). The figure bears no physical resemblance to Nathan, but the fact that he has a bill in his coat pocket bearing the legend “Cent per cent interest” makes the connection between the Jews and finance clear enough.
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 Buddenbrooksimmortalised 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 Judengasse 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 typically Victorian corollary of this system of arranged marriages was that male Rothschilds were allowed to “sow wild oats”: the personal letters which Nathan’s sons, nephews and their friends exchanged hint at a number of premarital liaisons. These were tolerated by the older generation provided nothing took place which might impede or damage the system of intermarriage. In 1829, for example, Anthony—who was evidently the playboy of the generation—overstepped the mark by forming too serious an attachment with an unidentified (but unsuitable) girl in Frankfurt. His father angrily summoned him home, accusing Amschel of having failed in his avuncular duties.
The first and most important reason for the strategy of intermarriage was precisely to prevent the five houses drifting apart. Related to this was a desire to ensure that outsiders did not acquire a share in the five brothers’ immense fortune. Like most arranged matches of the period, each marriage was therefore accompanied by detailed legal agreements governing the property of the two contracting parties. When James married Betty, she acquired no right to his property, but her dowry of 1.5 million francs (£60,000) remained part of her own distinct property and, had he predeceased her without issue, she would have recouped not only the dowry but a further 2,250,000 francs. When Anselm married Charlotte a year later, she received not only a dowry of £12,000 (in British stocks) from her father, but a further £8,000 from her uncle and new father-in-law “for her separate use,” and £1,000 from Anselm as a kind of pre-nuptial down-payment; while Anselm got £100,000 from his father and £50,000 from Nathan. Such large dowries were easily given when the money was staying in the family.
But, mercenary considerations aside, there was also a genuine social difficulty in finding suitable partners outside the family. By the mid-1820s the Rothschilds were so immensely rich that they had left other families with similar origins far behind. Even as early as 1814 the brothers had found it hard to find a suitable husband for their youngest sister Henrietta, only deciding on Abraham Montefiore (to whom Nathan was already related through his sister-in-law) after much agonising. Their original choice, a man named Holländer, had seemed unsuitable to Carl not because Henrietta did not love him—that was neither here nor there—but because, as he put it, “There seems a horrible crowd connected with the Holländers . . . [T]o tell the truth young men of good class are very rare these days.” On the other hand, the man she loved, Kaufmann, was “a crook.” A decade later, when the brothers’ eldest sister Schönche (also known as Jeannette or Nettche) was persuaded by Amschel and Salomon to remarry following the death of her husband Benedikt Worms, her younger brothers disapproved. As James complained to Nathan, her new husband was merely an impecunious stockbroker from the Judengasse:
She has nothing to live on and she told my wife that she doesn’t have any bread in the house. The man is a scoundrel. He gambled her dowry away. Today he went to the Bourse again and perhaps he will earn again what he lost. However I don’t believe that he will. Tell me, what is your opinion? Do we want to make something for her every year? In the meantime I personally gave her a present of several thousand francs.
By this time only a Rothschild would really do for a Rothschild.
Nothing illustrates better the exclusiveness of both the partnership system and the intermarriage policy than the experience of Joseph Montefiore in August 1836. Though his mother Henrietta was born a Rothschild, his suggestion (in the wake of her brother Nathan’s death) that he might be “taken as one of the partners in the Firm” elicited an icy response from Lionel. “He was averse to this,” Montefiore told his uncle Moses, “alleging that there were already too many [partners] and that it would be a bad precedent, however that I might ask my Uncles at Frankfort, and that he should vote with the majority, observing that if I became a partner I must change my name to that of Rothschild.” This was plainly calculated to kill the idea, and it had the desired effect: Montefiore “most decidedly did not like this condition” and indeed “approved of it so little that [he] resolved not even to speak about it to [his] Uncles.” As the next best thing, this thick-skinned young man then suggested that he might join the London house without the status of a partner but with the possibility of marrying Lionel’s sister Hannah Mayer. But this proposal too was rejected, as we shall see.
There was a danger in the policy of intermarriage, however, which the Rothschilds can scarcely have realised. Prohibitions on cousin marriage had been widespread within Christian culture since the sixth century, when Pope Gregory ruled that “the faithful should only marry relations three or four times removed.” In nineteenth-century America, eight states passed laws criminalising cousin marriage and a further thirty made it a civil offence. William Cobbett even cited the fact that “Rothschild married his own niece” as an argument against Jewish emancipation. But Jewish law had no such restrictions, while the enforced exclusiveness of the ghetto in a town like Frankfurt positively encouraged cousin marriage. It was not until later in the nineteenth century that the scientific study of heredity began, and only in the second half of the twentieth century that a real understanding of the effects of cousin marriage and other forms of group endogamy has been reached by geneticists. It is now known, for example, that the high incidence among Ashkenazi Jews of Tay-Sachs disease—a condition which fatally damages the brain—is the legacy of centuries of marriage between relatively closely related individuals. Marrying a cousin—especially when the family had spent centuries in the Frankfurt ghetto—was from a strictly medical point of view risky, no matter what the financial rationale. If either Mayer Amschel or Gutle had carried a single copy of a harmful recessive gene, then every time two of their grandchildren married (and it happened four times), there would have been a one in sixteen chance of both partners inheriting a copy of the damaged gene; in which case their children would have had a one in four chance of receiving two copies of it and hence suffering from the disease in question.
The Rothschilds were fortunate not to fall victim to the kind of recessive gene which spread haemophilia through the ranks of nineteenth-century royalty. The only indication of poor health in the next generation is the fact that, of Mayer Amschel’s forty-four great-grandchildren, six died before the age of five. By modern standards that is a high level of infant mortality (13.6 per cent compared with 0.8 per cent today); on the other hand, around 25 per cent of all children died before their fifth birthday in Western Europe in the 1840s. Of course, the alternative possibility exists that there was a Rothschild “gene for financial acumen,” which intermarriage somehow helped to perpetuate. Perhaps it was that which made the Rothschilds truly exceptional. But that cannot easily be demonstrated, it seems unlikely, and, even if it was the case, those concerned knew nothing of it.