The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  The town of Warburg was sacked during the Thirty Years’ War, riled by religious fanaticism, and then struck by plague in 1666. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 severed sea access for the small German states, starving inland trade. All this probably explains why, in 1668, Simon’s great-grandson, Juspa-Joseph, moved north while retaining the name “von Warburg.” (Before their nineteenth-century emancipation, German Jews couldn’t take surnames, so sometimes adopted their hometown names.) Juspa-Joseph settled in Altona on the Elbe River, which flowed into the North Sea only seventy miles away. (He had been preceded by his son, Jacob Samuel, who moved there in 1647.) At the time, Jews couldn’t live in Hamburg, even if they worked there, so they resided instead in Altona, a separate principality under relatively benign Danish rule. The Danes granted the Jews ample liberties, including the right to their own schools, cemetery, and synagogue.

  Dropping his “von,” Juspa-Joseph became plain Warburg. His northward move was momentous: This maritime setting endowed the Warburgs with a cosmopolitan air that must have been quite liberating after provincial inland Germany. On the Elbe, the Warburgs operated in a wide commercial world! Old merchant families launched rich argosies to prosperous port cities of the medieval Hanseatic League and this northern seaside world tied residents closely to London, Amsterdam, and other foreign cities as well. The Altona and Hamburg Jews forged strong links to their cities and, by 1668, the first Warburg was buried in an Altona cemetery.

  In 1773, Juspa-Joseph’s descendant, Gumprich Marcus, moved to neighboring Hamburg, a thriving city-republic with its own merchant flag, foreign consulates, and military defense. The Dutch-looking town was crosshatched with canals, lined with tall, slim houses, and topped by pointed gables. Special cannons boomed warning of high tides that periodically flooded the town. Europe’s bounty passed through the harbor: fish bound for Scandinavia, wool for Flanders, fur from Russia. Like Bremen, Hamburg had elected councils and other quasi-democratic institutions missing in the backward, landlocked duchies. Not only would the Warburgs be anchored in this port city, but its tolerant civic culture would represent their Germany during the worst throes of nationalistic unreason. But although Hamburg had no ghetto, its Jews did remain fenced in by unseen barriers, assigned to certain streets. Even there, the Jews couldn’t buy houses or own property but had to rent their lodgings from Christian citizens.

  In 1798, Gumprich Marcus bequeathed his money-changing, pawnbroking firm to his two eldest sons, Moses Marcus and Gerson. They expanded it into a bank named M. M. Warburg & Co. which mostly brokered bills. The bank could not have been better located. Hamburg, renowned as a safe haven, profited from turbulence in neighboring countries. During the French Revolution, noblemen stashed funds there for safekeeping and Amsterdam businessmen fled there to circumvent Napoleon’s Continental Blockade. Hamburg jealously guarded its neutrality, since business was its secular religion. This single-minded devotion to material betterment would insulate it from political frenzy even as it created a certain smug, philistine complacency that would be the bane of some later Warburgs. If wealthy Hamburg burghers never reached for the sky, neither did they crawl in the mud.

  The Warburg family often spawned contrasting types, and Moses Marcus and Gerson were the first such paired opposites. One embodied the family’s solemn sense of duty and the other its free-spirited conviviality. With his thick shock of hair and cautious gaze, Moses Marcus was the steady, decisive brother, the Orthodox Jew and community leader, who subsidized publication of sacred Jewish works. He and his family lived above the Peterstrasse bank. The bald Gerson was a cheerful, uninhibited bachelor, irreverent and fun loving. When a relative visited Hamburg, Moses Marcus duly took him to synagogue, while Gerson spirited him off for a lively evening at the music hall.

  For thirty years, the brothers squabbled bitterly. Before his death in 1801, the ailing Gumprich drafted a will to reconcile his sons. “Never part,” he intoned. “Only through unity will you be strong and will your business flourish.… Mark my last words and admonitions.”1 Ignoring their dying father’s injunction, the brothers fought on. At one point, they didn’t speak for a year, if legend is to be believed. At the Hamburg stock exchange, they turned from each other in so rhythmic and reflexive a manner that people said it resembled a nimble square dance. Brokers would buy foreign exchange from one brother, then sell it to the other at a higher price. But in one area they agreed: Neither brother severed his Jewish roots, which was then unthinkable. When Moses Marcus and Gerson drew up their first partnership agreement in 1810, it was written in German with Hebrew lettering and dated 20 Sivan 5570 by the Jewish calendar.

  From 1806 to 1814, Hamburg was occupied by Napoleon’s troops and effectively annexed to France. For gentile residents, the occupation lacked redeeming features, since the new authorities levied heavy taxes and confiscated property owned in Hamburg by the British. The Jews, however, were in a quandary since the French Revolution had emancipated the Jews while Napoleon had liberated Italian ghettos. In fact, the otherwise brutal French reign proved something of a honeymoon for Hamburg Jews, who briefly enjoyed rights equal to other citizens and could buy houses and property in once-taboo streets.

  In 1812, the French tried to extort five hundred thousand francs from the Jewish community by arresting Gerson and interning him with other wealthy Jews on the Lüneburg Heath. Relieved to be rid of Gerson, Moses Marcus stalled in paying his ransom and only capitulated under extreme duress from the Jewish community. By one account, he greeted his brother’s release with the retort, “Why don’t they keep him for good!”2 Meanwhile, in prison, the sociable Gerson learned French and tried to drum up business with the military government.

  Ultimately, the occupation damaged the Jewish community by fomenting in its wake a new nationalism heavily laden with Christian overtones. These nationalists glorified German peasants and the medieval past and were distinctly xenophobic and hostile to diversity—traits that would unfortunately persist in the culture. And when the French left, the Jews surrendered their newly won rights. In 1814, Moses Marcus joined a committee that futilely tried to perpetuate these fleeting freedoms acquired under French military rule. Instead, the Hamburg Jews experienced in 1819 the six-day pogrom of the so-called “Hep Hep” riots, instigated by exclusionary guilds that felt threatened by Jewish competition. In Frankfurt, mobs attacked the Rothschild house.

  Gerson and Moses Marcus never called a truce in their private civil war. The friction between them surely sharpened when Gerson fell in love with Sara, the strikingly beautiful daughter of Moses Marcus.3 She was only fourteen, and Moses Marcus must again have been outraged by the irresponsibility of his insouciant, devil-may-care brother who had found fresh ways to offend him.

  When Gerson died in 1825, Moses Marcus faced a crisis that sporadically confronts every banking dynasty: he had no male heirs. With his sizable 250,000 Mark Banco fortune, he was ready to furnish a magnificent dowry for Sara: a partnership stake in the bank for any future son-in-law. Sara, a romantic young woman, must have been delighted to receive a marriage offer from her first cousin, Elias Simon Warburg, who had blue eyes, thin blond hair, and a handsome, sensitive, dignified face. But Moses Marcus and his wife, Rosa, thought they were too closely related. In 1829 they arranged for Sara to marry her queer-looking, slit-eyed second cousin, Aby Samuel Warburg, who thereby became a bank partner.4 Aby seems the one man in Hamburg for whom the hot-blooded Sara felt no amorous attraction, and it must have been a jolting initiation into the hard realities of a banking family.

  Such family liaisons were unavoidable in the small, claustrophobic Jewish community, especially in banking clans that sought suitable matches. To prevent the depletion of their precious working capital, the Rothschilds often married each other as well. And the pool from which Jewish banking families recruited prospects was tiny: Non-Jews were forbidden and most Jews were simply too poor. This chronic shortage of prospective partners made them search as far away as Russia, bringing marriage brok
ers into the scene. This tiny gene pool would intensify both the Warburg vivacity and gloom, yielding many marvels, oddities, and wonders. Wizards and dunces would issue from the same womb and the family would abound in eccentric geniuses. These semi-incestuous arrangements also yielded a dark legacy of manic-depression and schizophrenia that would haunt the Warburgs for generations.

  In 1831, Moses Marcus died of a stroke while in synagogue, leaving the firm to Aby and the spurned suitor, Elias. It must have been a relief to Sara when Elias six years later left and formed his own firm.

  By a fine coincidence, Sara and Aby bore the names of the original Jewish patriarch and matriarch, but were otherwise a classical mismatch: she was strong willed, smart, pious, and domineering, while he was timid, lazy, henpecked, and irreverent. He had an odd, distorted appearance, with a low forehead, pouchy eyelids that nearly obscured his eyeballs, and a long nose that ended in a wide mouth. His head was twisted about strangely on his neck. He was so small and jaundiced that boyhood friends dubbed him the “yellow dwarf.”5 Sara, in contrast, had been nicknamed the “Star of the Peterstrasse,” and Heinrich Heine allegedly dedicated to her the poem “A Youth Loved a Maiden.”6 Besides her wide-ranging literary interests, she sang beautifully, attended theater and opera, and overshadowed her husband intellectually. Sara was a dynamo, Aby a pleasant dud.

  Sara tried to rouse Aby to greater initiative, but the sallow little man cowered before her severity or else mocked her wryly. She educated their four daughters and two sons—Marianne (1830–81), Malchen (1831–1911), Rosa (1833–1908), Siegmund (1835–89), Jenny (1836–1894), and Moritz (1838–1910). The grooming of small children was a major outlet for stifled, frustrated wives in these arranged marriages. Yet Aby’s abdication of authority irked her, and she chided him for lounging in his easy chair instead of disciplining the children. “Perhaps you, too, could rouse yourself for once,” she taunted him. In response, he would jump up, smack some children at hand, then slump back in his seat.7 Even at the bank he installed a comfortable swivel chair so that his passivity grew proverbial. Letters were brought to him as he lazed on a sofa. One night, Sara shook him awake. “Aby, the house is burning!” she whispered. Unfazed, Aby pawed skeptically at the wall. “It is not yet hot,” he replied, then fell back to sleep.8 As Sara and Aby accumulated six children, he couldn’t quite keep track of them. One day, legend says, he found a filthy ragamuffin in the street and asked who the boy’s father was. “Why, you are,” said the surprised child.9

  The frustrated Sara grew rigid, sharp of tongue, and autocratic in manner, demanding strict religious observance and forbidding her family from writing on Saturdays. The outward forms of piety sometimes seemed more important to Sara than their intrinsic meaning. Every Friday evening, clad in her best jewelry and most fetching hats, she presided like a sovereign over family dinners. The furniture, silver candlesticks, and glasses sparkled. The devout Sara wouldn’t extinguish Sabbath candles. Instead, she put her pouting lips by the candles and recited a couplet that mentioned two Jewish holidays, Purim and Pesach. The hard “p” sounds blew the candles out, saving her from sin.

  If Sara had the Warburg piety, Aby had the family humor and liked to poke fun at his godly wife. Once he told Sara that heaven, like a modern railroad car, was arranged with various classes. She would certainly occupy a first-class compartment, while he would settle into second-class. He pictured them traveling through eternity, separated by a low wall: “We can see each other, but we can’t go to each other,” he told her. “Up there that will be good enough for me.”10

  Like all tyrants, Sara required many small rituals of deference and even her children addressed her by the formal “Sie.” If she was coming to lunch the next day, they had to inquire politely, “So mother, will we have the pleasure of seeing you tomorrow?” She would straighten and grandly answer, “The pleasure will be entirely mine.”11 Beneath these difficult, dowager airs, Sara was vain, insecure, and easily wounded. Once, she asked her little grandson Max whom he liked the most and he childishly stammered several names—his nanny, the milkman, a fruit delivery man, his parents—but omitted Sara. Later on, she said, “I have never forgotten this honest but stupid reply,” and banished the boy forever from her affections.12

  If Sara was imperious, her tyranny often betrayed a commendable sense of duty. Like other Warburg matriarchs, she had a strong, unremitting sense of noblesse oblige. Each summer, she and Aby rented one of three houses on the Alsterchaussee. One spring day, acting on a suspicious hunch, Sara asked Aby if he had forgotten to rent the summer house. “Of course not,” he lied. When he found that all three houses were already rented, he grew petrified of Sara’s wrath and secretly bought all three houses, renting out two. When Sara got wind of this, she asked, “Who lives in these other two houses?” An artist in one and a widow in the other, said Aby. “And you are taking rent from them?” she said, aghast. Refusing to take money from widows or artists, she made him go and return the money at once.13

  Sara’s children stood in awe of her and dreaded her disapproval. Through a marriage broker, she arranged for her eldest daughter, the plain, matronly Marianne, to marry a rich London Jew named Samuel Zagury, a man of Portuguese descent and dubious morals. The unscrupulous Zagury was a charlatan who squandered the dowry, seduced women, and engaged in disreputable business dealings.14 Terrified of Sara’s reaction, Marianne didn’t tell her what had happened. After a telltale dearth of letters, Marianne’s teenage brother, Siegmund, went to London and retrieved her.15 Not shirking responsibility, Sara went to London to negotiate with Zagury (characteristically, she also took in plays and strolled in the parks) and engineered a formal annulment of the marriage. It was no small fiasco, for Zagury fleeced the Warburgs royally and the final settlement, not including exorbitant legal bills, stripped the bank of a quarter of its capital.

  While Aby had a good head for figures, liked hobnobbing with clients, and had some talent for arbitrage—taking advantage of small price discrepancies in different markets—Sara called the shots at the bank and proved her father’s real successor. The fires of youthful passion were cooled and sublimated into stern business rigors, and Aby submitted the books to her nightly. The bank’s main business was now in foreign exchange and trade bills. When the French abandoned Hamburg in 1814, the Warburgs and other bankers replenished the local silver stock. These transactions brought them into close contact with the Rothschilds, who excelled in metals trading. In a letter of August 4, 1814, the Warburgs displayed growing confidence and assured the Rothschilds that they could handle metal deliveries as effectively as any house in Hamburg.16 The Rothschilds had greatly profited from the Napoleonic Wars and were then infinitely more regal than the Warburgs. So highly did M. M. Warburg & Co. value this connection that it kept a special stock of stationery on hand for letters to all Rothschild affiliates. At one point, the bank even hired a man trained in magnificent penmanship to draft important letters to the Rothschilds.

  Always a family of immense charm and masters at the art of business seduction, the Warburgs cultivated this relationship through exquisite courtesies. In 1838, they bought Meier Carl Rothschild a silver tray he admired on a trip to Hamburg. In the 1840s, Willy Rothschild lived with Sara and Aby, solving a dilemma posed by an absence of kosher food in Hamburg hotels. In a shifting financial world, the Rothschilds, with all their royal connections, seemed a secure bedrock. One night, as Aby tossed fitfully in bed, Sara asked what was wrong. “Oh, God,” he said, “I have given Rothschilds an overdraft of 10,000 pounds and I’m worried about it.” “Well, if that’s all, turn over and go to sleep,” Sara said. “If Rothschild fails it will be quite all right for you to go broke too.”17

  Even as the Warburgs emulated the Frankfurt Rothschilds, their own city acquired new importance. The wars and revolutions that roiled Europe in 1848 also produced a human tide of emigrants who swarmed through Bremen and Hamburg en route to England and America. Both seaports constructed vast halls to house refugees
awaiting transatlantic crossings, and this large, transient population spurred the growth of the St. Pauli district, the city’s notorious red-light zone. Since Hamburg shipowners commanded a fleet of four thousand seagoing vessels, the city became the crossroads of this profitable new human commerce.

  Already a port of colorful vitality, Hamburg throbbed with new energy. The morning streets teemed with vendors in peasant costumes who hawked vegetables carried in yokes balanced on their shoulders. Everything seemed in motion: Dogs pulled fruit wagons, donkeys drew milk trucks, and flat-bottomed barges drifted through dark, greenish waterways, gliding under bridges so numerous that Hamburg was labeled the Venice of the North. In this marshy country, even elegant stores by the Alster Lake stood on oak posts driven deep into the soft terrain. The analogy with Venice went beyond omnipresent water; it was matched in the self-confident wealth of local burghers. Even casual visitors noted the ubiquitous signs of money—servants in red tailcoats delivering messages for merchant princes or pampered children en route to school outfitted in fancy velvet pants and lace collars.

  The Hamburg Jews participated in the rising prosperity, with Jews and gentiles about equally represented in local banking and brokerage. Although until 1853 it was headquartered in the Neustadt, the petit bourgeois Jewish section, the Warburg bank flourished and the family seldom experienced discrimination. Yet, ugly undercurrents still flowed in the larger culture and occasionally surfaced. During the 1831 cholera epidemic in Berlin, the Jews were again accused of poisoning the wells. In 1842, an inflammatory tract claimed the discovery of an oven and old bones in a Nuremberg synagogue basement, supposedly the remains of grisly ritual murders committed by Jews against Christians. Each progressive wave of economic growth in Germany provoked a countermovement of virulent nationalism and intolerance among groups who felt threatened by change and this discontent always crystallized around the Jews.