The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  and 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 futu
re 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 was Parnass (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.