The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  Such polemics against the social and political power wielded by the Rothschilds were probably most numerous in France, but they had their counterparts elsewhere. In Germany, for example, the Rothschilds were attacked in books like The Frankfurt Jews and the Mulcting of the People’s Well-being published by “Germanicus” in 1880, Max Bauer’s crudely racialist pamphlet Bismarck and Rothschild (1891), or Friedrich von Scherb’s 1893 History of the House of Rothschild. Such works found an echo in the rhetoric of the anti-Semitic “People’s” and “Christian Social” parties which enjoyed moderate electoral success in parts of Germany and Austria; Social Democrats also sometimes talked in this way. Indeed, so all-pervasive did the idea of Rothschild power become that the academically respected (though since discredited) Werner Sombart could assert in his book The Jews and Economic Life (1911): “[T]he modern stock exchange is Rothschildish (and thus Jewish).”

  English examples can also be found. There, as on the continent, “anti-Rothschildism” was as likely to come from the left as from the right. A good illustration is John Reeves’s book The Rothschilds: The Financial Rulers of Nations (1887), which returns a typical verdict: “The Rothschilds belong to no one nationality, they are cosmopolitan . . . they belonged to no party, they were ready to grow rich at the expense of friend and foe alike.”

  Reeves’s argument that the Rothschilds wielded international as well as internal political power was nothing new. As early as the 1830s, an American magazine could marvel: “Not a cabinet moves without their advice. They stretch their hand, with equal ease, from Petersburg to Vienna, from Vienna to Paris, from Paris to London, from London to Washington.” They were, according to the English diarist Thomas Raikes, “the metallic sovereigns of Europe.” Alexandre Weill’s essay “Rothschild and the Finances of Europe” (1841) went even further (in Reeves’s translation):

  There is but one power in Europe and that is Rothschild. His satellites are a dozen other banking firms; his soldiers, his squires, all respectable men of business and merchants; and his sword is speculation. Rothschild is a consequence that was bound to appear; and, if it had not been a Rothschild, it would have been someone else. He is, however, by no means an accidental consequence, but a primary consequence, called into existence by the principles which have guided the European states since 1815. Rothschild had need of the states to become a Rothschild, while the states on their side required Rothschild. Now, however, he no longer needs the State, but the State still has want of him.

  An anonymous German cartoonist made essentially the same point (though more vividly) in 1845 when he portrayed a grotesquely caricatured Jew—manifestly a composite Rothschild—as “Die Generalpumpe,” a monstrous engine pumping money around the world, with tentacles extending to control monarchs and ministers as far away as Spain and Egypt. A similar image appeared in Wilhelm Marr’s Mephistopheles in 1850, portraying “Rothschild” surrounded by the kings of Europe, all holding out their hands for money, and again in 1870, when Lionel was depicted in the same pose by the Period. Twenty-four years later, the American populist “Coin” Harvey envisioned “Rothschilds” as a vast, black octopus stretching its tentacles around the world. The French cartoonist Léandre likewise portrayed Alphonse de Rothschild as a giant vampire, grasping the world in his claws.

  The crucial question, however, was what use the Rothschilds made of this ubiquitous financial power. Was it merely an end itself, the result of a pathological appetite for interest and commissions? Perhaps the most frequent contemporary answer to this question was that it enabled the Rothschilds to prevent wars. As early as 1828 Prince Pückler-Muskau referred to “Rothschild . . . without whom no power in Europe today seems able to make war.” Three years later Ludwig Börne explicitly argued that Rothschild sales of Austrian government bonds had prevented Metternich from intervening to check the spread of revolution in Italy and Belgium. He also implied strongly that the Rothschilds were keen to see France adopt a more pacific policy towards Austria. Similar claims were made by political insiders too, for example by the Austrian diplomat Graf Prokesch von Osten in December 1830: “It is all a question of ways and means and what Rothschild says is decisive, and he won’t give any money for war.” After the Polish crisis of 1863, Disraeli claimed that “the peace of the world has been preserved, not by the statesmen, but by the capitalists.” Even a hostile writer like Toussenel took the same line: “The Jew speculates on peace, that is on a rise, and that explains why peace in Europe has lasted for fifteen years.” Later authors have echoed this time and again. Chirac purported to quote a Rothschild saying: “There will be no war because the Rothschilds do not want it.” According to Morton, the five sons of Mayer Amschel were “the most militant pacifists ever.” And few writers omit the anecdote which attributes to Gutle Rothschild the declaration: “It won’t come to war; my sons won’t provide money for it.”

  To modern readers, it is axiomatic that the avoidance of war is a good thing, even if we have come to doubt the ability of bankers to achieve it. However, in the era of military conflicts which began with the Crimean War and ended with the Franco-Prussian War, there were often those who questioned the Rothschilds’ motivations in seeking to preserve peace. At the time of the wars of Italian unification—which it was believed they were anxious to avert—the Earl of Shaftesbury found it “strange, fearful, humiliating” that “the destinies of this nation are the sport of an infidel Jew!” The Rothschilds’ New York agent August Belmont was widely attacked in the North during the American Civil War because he favoured a negotiated peace with the South and supported General George McClellan’s nom ination as Democrat candidate in 1864. In much the same way, the Prussian government was irked by the Rothschilds’ efforts to avert military confrontation during the “wars of unification,” when Bismarck actively desired it. Similar criticisms of Rothschild “pacifism” can be found in the diplomatic and political correspondence of the great powers before and after the turn of the century. To give a final hostile example, the foreign editor (and later editor) of The Times, Henry Wickham Steed, described Natty’s efforts to avert a war between Germany and Britain in July 1914 as “a dirty German-Jewish international financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality.”

  Yet other commentators—on both Left and Right—often took the opposite line: that the Rothschilds positively fomented wars. In 1891 the Labour Leader denounced the Rothschilds as a

  blood-sucking crew [which] has been the cause of untold mischief and misery in Europe during the present century, and has piled up its prodigious wealth chiefly through fomenting wars between States which ought never to have quarrelled. Wherever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumours of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity, you may be sure that a hook-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbance.

  The case was put in a more sophisticated form by the left-leaning Liberal J. A. Hobson, author of the classic Imperialism: A Study (1902). Like many radical writers of the period, Hobson regarded the Boer War as having been engineered “by a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race.” The Rothschilds, in his view, were central to this group: “Does anyone seriously suppose,” he asked in Imperialism, “that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or any great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connexions set their face against it?” Scherb had made much the same point from a German nationalist perspective in his History: “The House of Rothschild has arisen from the quarrels between states, has become great and mighty from wars [and] the misfortune of states and peoples has been its fortune.”

  War or peace? There was, however, another possibility: that the Rothschilds saw their financial power as a means to advance the interests of their fellow Jews. To poorer Jews throughout Europe, Nathan Rothschild’s extraordinary rise to riches had an almost mystical significance—hence the legend of the “Hebrew talisman,” the magical source of his
good luck, which became associated with him in Jewish lore. This extraordinary story—a version of which was published by an anonymous author in London just four years after Nathan Rothschild’s death—imagined that the source of Nathan’s financial success was his possession of a magical talisman. His wealth was in fact intended for a higher purpose: “to avenge the wrongs of Israel” by securing “the re-establishment of Judah’s kingdom—the rebuilding of thy towers, Oh! Jerusalem!” and “the restoration of Judea to our ancient race.”

  The notion that the Rothschilds had a design to reclaim the Holy Land for the Jewish people was frequently canvassed in more serious terms than these. As early as 1830 an American journal suggested that “the pecuniary distress of the sultan” might lead him to sell Jerusalem to the Rothschilds. The French socialist Charles Fourier raised the same possibility in his book The False Industry in 1836. Disraeli too spoke in 1851 of the Jews being “restor[ed] . . . to their own land” with the help of Rothschild money. And the same idea can be found in popular stories from the Russian Pale of Settlement like “The Czar in Rothschild’s Castle.”

  The other possibility (also raised in this story) was that the Rothschilds might use their financial power to force the Tsar to cease his persecution of the Russian Jews. This illustrated the choice which East European Jews had to contemplate throughout the nineteenth century: should one emigrate to some remote promised land, or stay and seek equality before the law? In the early part of the century, West European Jews had faced the same dilemma. Significantly, the author of the Hebrew Talisman concluded his tract by accusing Nathan of preferring the comforts of social assimilation in England to the rigours of his holy mission. Indeed, he claimed that Nathan’s death was the result of his decision to seek political emancipation in England—and a peerage for himself—rather than continuing to strive for the restoration of Jerusalem.

  The central dilemma which confronted the Rothschilds lay here: because of their wealth, other Jews looked to them for leadership in their pursuit of equal civil and political rights. As we shall see, this leadership was forthcoming from a remarkably early stage, beginning with Mayer Amschel’s efforts to achieve civil rights for the Frankfurt Jews in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, and continuing with his grandson Lionel’s campaign to secure the admission of Jews to the House of Commons in the 1840s and 1850s. It was a strategy which suited the Rothschilds well, allowing them to pursue their own familial strategy of penetrating the social and political elites where they lived without converting from Judaism; and allowing them to do good works on behalf of their “co-religionists” while at the same time acquiring quasi-royal status in the eyes of other Jews. However, the more the Rothschilds sought to pursue emancipation as an international objective—intervening on behalf of Jewish communities in Syria, Rumania and Russia as well as in the countries where they themselves resided—the more they encouraged the argument of anti-Semites that the Jews were a cosmopolitan race with no real national attachment. At the same time, when other Jews, despairing of assimilation as an objective, began to press for some kind of return to the Holy Land, the Rothschilds’ position was further compromised; for they themselves had no desire to forsake their palatial town and country residences for barren Palestine. But that was just what their anti-Semitic enemies desired. Hostile cartoons from the 1840s and 1890s depicted the Rothschilds in a throng of Jews leaving Germany for the Holy Land—travelling first class, but leaving nonetheless. Commenting on Lionel’s campaign for admission to the House of Commons, Thomas Carlyle asked: “[H]ow can a real Jew, by possibility, try to be a Senator, or even a Citizen of any country, except his own wretched Palestine, whither all his thoughts and steps and efforts tend?”

  This was broadly the argument (though not the language) of the early Zionists like Theodor Herzl, who came to believe that the only “solution to the Jewish question” was indeed for the Jews to leave Europe and found their own Judenstaat. Herzl made a succession of attempts to win the support of the Rothschilds in the belief that they were about to “liquidate” their vast capital as a response to anti-Semitic attacks. But his sixty-six-page address “to the Rothschild Family Council” was never sent, as he concluded from an initial rebuff that they were “vulgar, contemptuous, egoistical people.” The Rothschilds, he later declared, were “a national misfortune for the Jews”; he even threatened to “liquidate” them or to “wage a barbaric campaign” against them if they opposed him.

  If a Zionist could use such language in the 1890s, it is perhaps not surprising that the radical anti-Semites who flourished in the defeated states of Central Europe after the First World War did so too, albeit with a very different rationale. Indeed, perhaps the most interesting thing about early National Socialist or völkisch propaganda directed against the Rothschilds is its very lack of originality. A good example is Dietrich Eckart’s address “To All Working People” of 1919:

  The House of Rothschild owns forty billion! . . . [They] only need to administer their wealth, to see that it is nicely placed, they do not need to work, at least not what we understand by work. But who provides them and their like with such an enormous amount of money? . . . Who does this? You do it, nobody but you! That’s right, it is your money, hard-earned through care and sorrow, which is drawn as if magnetically into the coffers of these insatiable people.

  This was little different from the kind of thing radicals had been saying in France as well as in Germany since the 1840s. Another early National Socialist who cited the Rothschilds as examples of the “Jewish problem” he pledged to “solve” was Adolf Hitler. In an article in the Nazi Völkische Beobachter in May 1921, for example, he named them as one of a group of Jewish “capitalists” who controlled the socialist press. On at least two occasions in 1922 he gave speeches in which he referred to “the significant difference between the achievements of a man like Alfred Krupp, who has bequeathed an immense national achievement through his indefatigable work as an innovator, and the rapacity of a Rothschild, who financed wars and revolutions and brought the peoples into interest-servitude through loans.” Alfred Rosenberg made a similar point in his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century.

  Hitler’s use of the past tense was not accidental, for by the 1920s there was no longer a Rothschild bank in Frankfurt, and even the three remaining Rothschild houses in London, Paris and Vienna had ceased to play a major role in the German economy. Yet that did not stop the Nazis from repeatedly using the Rothschilds as a subject for their anti-Semitic propaganda once they came to power: the old myths were recycled and embroidered to illustrate the various racial characteristics which Hitler so detested. For example, Eberhard Müller’s play Rothschild Wins at Waterloo (1936) portrayed Nathan on the field of battle, intoning lines like: “My money is everywhere, and my money is friendly. It is the friendliest power in the world, fat, round as a bullet and smiling”; “My Fatherland is the London Stock Exchange”; and “The wealth of England is in my hands.” Similar themes were taken up in May 1938 when Julius Streicher’s anti-Jewish exhibition was sent to Vienna with a room devoted exclusively to the House of Rothschild. A later version in Frankfurt put on display forged “facsimiles of letters” by Mayer Amschel to “an English banker” which appeared to explain “how he planned to send his five sons all over Europe for the purpose of dominating all Gentile commerce and finance.”

  The culmination of the Nazis’ anti-Rothschild propaganda was Erich Waschnek’s film Die Rothschilds, which was screened for the first time in July 1940 and then re-released after further editing a year later with the sub-title Aktien auf Waterloo (“Shares in Waterloo”). This was one of a trio of films designed to prepare the German population for harsher measures against the Jews: the others were Jud-Süss and the notorious “documentary” Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”). It is true that the Waterloo legend presented problems for the Propaganda Ministry at a time of uncertainty about the correct “line” to take towards Britain. While some British characters (Wellington and the “Finance
Minister” Herries) are portrayed as corrupt and morally degenerate, others—in particular the banker “Turner” and his Irish wife—are cast sympathetically as victims of the Rothschilds’ machinations. But the portrayal of the Rothschilds themselves is unambiguous enough, as the plot summary drafted by the Allies after the war shows:

  In 1806 the “Landgraf ” of Hesse escaping Napoleon has to entrust his fortune of £6,000,000 to somebody for safekeeping. He deposits the money with the Jewish banker, Meyer Amschel Rothschild in Frankfurt. The abusive use of this money becomes the foundation for the power of the Rothschilds. Amschel Rothschild sends the money to his son Nathan who is not respected by his business rivals. But Nathan ruthlessly outwits all of them. He gets money to Wellington in Spain with the help of his brother in Paris—Nathan is the first to receive news that Napoleon has escaped from Elba and the only one to gamble all he possesses on the reinstatement of Louis of Orleans [sic]. He is a joke in Society—nobody takes him seriously but his Jewish hirelings and the British Ministry of Finance. “Lord” Wellington is again sent to fight Napoleon. He has very little time to prepare for the war—the ladies keep him busy! But he has time enough (just as Fouché does in Paris) to confer with Rothschild who implies that Wellington will be well rewarded if Rothschild is the first to know the outcome of the battle. The moment Rothschild hears that Napoleon is beaten he spreads news that the English cause is lost. A panic follows—everybody sells Government Bonds—Rothschild buys them. The poor lose their money. The few honourable rich Englishmen (one of them is pictured as extremely decent due to the fact that he is married to an Irish woman!) lose all they own. The star of David lies over England—over the part of the world that Nazi Germany fights.