The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  To poorer Jews in particular, Nathan’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’s death—is one of the most bizarre early examples of what might be called the “Rothschild myth.” Although apparently by a Jewish author, the possibility that (like the later and much better known Protocols of the Elders of Zion) it was in fact the work of an anti-Jewish agent provocateur cannot be ruled out, so militant is its tone. Indeed, the story anticipates many of the more fantastic allegations of the overtly anti-Rothschild French pamphleteers of the 1840s.

  The story is narrated by a mysterious phantom, who describes himself as “detesting . . . the followers of the Nazarene, with a most holy and fervent detestation” and having been “doomed to long ages of agony and travail” by “the avenging one of Nazareth.” He is the custodian of a talisman, which confers on its holder magical powers. “Could I not command gold? Yea . . . had I not the talisman?—Had I not the ineffable words?—Could I not buy the whole evil race, from the false prophet even to the lowest among the evil genii?—Could I not task them in the midnight incantation, and, lo! would not plenty make the hearts of my people glad at sunrise?” His aim is to give the talisman to “a zealous hater of the Nazarenes,—a man exceedingly desirous of working their degradation and destruction . . . a champion to avenge the wrongs of Israel.”

  Arriving in Frankfurt during the Napoleonic occupation of the town, the narrator witnesses hideous scenes of pillage by French troops. The Frankfurt Jews in particular are the objects of systematic extortion. In a looted office in the heart of the Jewish quarter, he comes across a young man, “his eyes . . . red with much weeping, and his cheeks pale and haggard, as much with sorrow and long vigils.” As he looks on, a French soldier bursts into the office demanding yet more money. “ ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob!’ [the young man] exclaimed, as, kneeling, he lifted up his trembling hands to the east, ‘how long, O God! how long? . . . How long . . . shall the unbeliever triumph, and thy people be a jest and a bye word?’ ” Unmoved, the Frenchman seizes his last remaining object of value, the family teraphim (household shrine). After he departs, the young man “cursed the Nazarenes, and prayed in fervent tones that he might have the power to crush them, and vowed by the ineffable name of Jehovah to lose no opportunity of despoiling their wealth, and trampling down, yea, utterly bruising, their black and unsparing and unbelieving hearts.” “Here,” declares the narrator, “was a servant fit for the great master—here a champion fit for the great cause. His wrongs . . . would make him a faithful and very zealous foeman of the Nazarene of whatever nation. Here was, at length, the man, the long hoped, the long sought, who should build up the temple of the Lord, and make Israel and Judah feared and obeyed in all the quarters of the earth.”

  The phantom narrator therefore makes himself visible (“clad in the flowing robes of the far East,” he is “pallid as a corpse . . . with hoary hair and beard” and “great black eyes, that shot forth lurid fires, upon which no mortal could look and not tremble”). “I spake the words of power, and the talisman was once more committed to a man of my persecuted race,” on this occasion in the form of “a ring holding the keys of his rifled drawers.” “I gave to that ring the influence and might of the signet of the wise Solomon. Having done this, I commanded the young man to name some wish for instant accomplishment; and ere he had thrice, according to my instructions, whirled the ring upon his forefinger, steps were heard.” A man enters (later revealed to be a prince), weighed down with a huge bag of gold, which he entrusts to the young man. Needless to say, it contains “the very sum for which he had wished aloud while making his first essay of the power of the talisman.”

  “Men of the accursed and plundering race!” the narrator exclaims, revealing at last the identity of the chosen one:

  Ye whose estates were within a brief space to have been within his grasp; ye, whose equipages and whose liveried lacquies I so lately saw following to his premature grave the man of Israel whom I thus enabled to war upon ye in your vulnerable quarter,—accursed and detested Nazarenes—the young Israelite, to whom I thus committed the Talisman, and who thus early and thus fully experienced its mighty power—he who for years despoiled you of the gold which ye make to yourselves, even as a god—that man whom ye fawned upon, even while you hated him, and knew that he despised you—that man was NATHAN MEYER [sic] ROTHSCHILD. [He] waxed wealthy, more wealthy than any who had gone before him, his riches astonished the gentiles and very justly they said, such amazing wealth could not be amassed by one man, in so short a time by any human agency—they were right, it was the agency of the talisman . . .

  There then follows a brief but classic mythologised account of Nathan’s rise from the ruins of looted Frankfurt to fame and fortune. “He came by my direction to this paradise of loan-contracting and speculating fools, and became the leviathan of the money markets of Europe . . . the loan contractor, the jobber, and the money lender of the gentile kings.” When Napoleon (encouraged by the narrator) invaded Russia, “Rothschild was right speedy to make [his] ruin utter and inevitable—not to be repaired.” When the Emperor returned from Elba, “by whom was his hope blasted? . . . simply by Nathan Meyer [sic] Rothschild armed with the Talisman.” The British government needed money not only to pay Wellington’s army at Waterloo, but also to bribe “the Generals and the Senators of France” to desert Napoleon. “There was but one man on earth who both COULD and would provide the millions of golden pounds, required for the instant purposes of the English minister.—That man was ROTHSCHILD. By my instructions, he let the Minister have the hard gold . . .”

  But all this, it transpires, was for a higher purpose: for Nathan lent the money only “on one condition . . . the re-establishment of Judah’s kingdom—the rebuilding of thy towers, Oh! Jerusalem!”:

  That most elaborate of bad jokes, history, will, no doubt, say that the Jew Rothschild lent the Nazarene elder called Lord Liverpool, the sum necessary to crush Napoleon Buonaparte, in consideration of some such Judean motive as 25 per cent interest. The writers of history, in that case, will, as usual, lie . . . Rothschild was commanded to lend the money . . . [in return for] the restoration of Judea to our ancient race; the guarantee of England for the independence of the kingdom of Judea . . . In twelve hours, the millions were in the possession of the minister, and a secret agreement, guaranteed by the sign manual of royalty, was in the possession of Rothschild, for the restoration of Judea in 21 years from the day on which Napoleon should finally be driven from France.

  And here is the twist in the tale:

  This very year my task should have been completed; would have been completed, but he, Rothschild . . . at the twelfth hour proved false . . . His long round of success (unchecked save once when I reproved his presumption with the loss of a hundred thousand pounds in a single day’s business in Spanish Stock) . . . made him more and more purse-proud . . . [so] that it was rather with grief than surprise that I recently heard from his own lips that he had basely sold the agreement for the restoration of Judea for the promise of a petty English Emancipation Bill for our people, and a petty English peerage for himself. This delectable job, this high-minded bargain, was to be completed in the ensuing years, by which time the purse-proud, haughty renegade reckoned upon being worth 5,000,000 £ of money. He was already worth above four.

  But of course, having betrayed his master, these vain dreams could only be dashed. “His talisman disappeared, and I took care he should know it had disappeared forever. He never ventured upon the Exchange again, or the scribe who wrote his will should have been saved much trouble and time.”

  Did I give him the talisman, to enable him like Sampson to Gideon to intrude his family and found a peerage among the Normans? or to stifle his conscience with the weigh
t of riches? or to flatter it with ostentatious charities? No Israelite can put his hand to the plough of this great work, look back and live!

  In this bizarre fantasy, Nathan’s death therefore becomes his punishment for his failure to fulfil his promise to restore Palestine to the Jews; and the narrator moves on in search of a new “heaven-appointed champion” to bear the talisman. Like a Jewish version of the Nibelung saga, with its magic ring which corrupts as it empowers, the story of the “Hebrew talisman” vividly illustrates the mystique that as early as 1840 had begun to surround the career of Nathan Rothschild and his brothers.

  It is a good illustration of the wide currency of such legends that, shortly after Nathan’s death an American paper—evidently not a Jewish one—reported that

  “an extra number of watchmen, after the interment, will be placed at the grave for a length of time, to prevent the committal of any sacrilegious act towards the deceased.” We suppose that this is a hint to “our peo plesh” [sic] to keep their fingers off the fingerer of millions. A rumor is current that a large sum is bid for one of his ogles—in the hope that a “Jew’s eye” would be worth a fortune.

  As Nathan Rothschild died, a myth was born which was to prove as enduringly potent and dangerous as any myth of the nineteenth century.

  Succession

  To whom—in reality—did the “talisman” of Rothschild leadership pass on the death of “the commanding general?” The traditional assumption has been that the youngest of the five brothers, James, immediately inherited Nathan’s mantle. That was his friend Heine’s view. “Since the death of his distinguished brother in England, all the political significance of the House of Rothschild” was concentrated in his hands, he wrote not long afterwards. “The head, or rather the brain, of this family is Baron James, a remarkable man . . .” It is not difficult to see why Heine assumed this. In an earlier piece written in March 1841, he had portrayed James only half-ironically as a kind of financial emperor, literally holding court in the rue Laffitte at the centre of “a labyrinth of halls, a barracks of wealth.” Indeed, he noticed that James—in imitation of his brother Nathan—had begun to decorate his office with “busts of all the European monarchs who have contracted loans from his firm.” Like Nathan too, James was an intimidating figure in this, his natural habitat. “One must have respect for this man,” Heine went on, “if only because of the respect he inspires in others”:

  I like best to visit him in the offices of his banking house, where I can philosophically observe people—not only the Chosen People, but all the others too—bow and scrape before him. There you may watch a twisting and bending of backbones such as the most accomplished acrobat would find difficult. I have seen people who twitched convulsively when they drew near the great Baron as though they had touched a Voltaic battery. Even while approaching the door of his private office many experience a thrill of awe such as Moses once felt on Mount Horeb when he realised that he was standing on holy ground. And just as Moses then removed his shoes, so many a broker or commission agent who dared to enter Rothschild’s inner sanctum would willingly remove his boots if he were not afraid that the odour of his feet might give offence.

  “That inner sanctum is a remarkable place indeed,” Heine continued; “it inspires sublime thoughts and feelings, like the sight of the ocean or the starry heavens. Here we may see the littleness of man and the greatness of God.”

  Of course, Heine was letting his comic imagination run away with him completely when he described “a stock exchange speculator” doffing his hat respectfully before James’s “mighty” chamber pot; or an unidentified friend offering to “give half his nose to purchase” the honour of lunch with the Baron. But the recollections of just such a minor denizen of the bourse, Ernest Feydeau, vividly confirm the quasi-regal status James enjoyed in Paris, an irascible despot in a chaotic court, besieged from nine in the morning until the bourse closed at four by a procession of sycophantic brokers, jobbers and assorted hangers-on. James, recalled Feydeau (who visited the rue Laffitte regularly in the 1850s),

  felt obliged to receive all these sullen, busy people, sometimes sickeningly banal, almost all of them obsequious in their manner, dull in their solicitations, servile in their flattery. Leaning back in his chair, he absent-mindedly took the quotation handed to him by each of these uninteresting beings, who filed from door to door in front of his desk, barely cast a glance over it, sometimes allowing himself the malicious pleasure of dropping it in his wastepaper basket, usually giving it back to whoever had presented it to him and passing on to another.

  As he ran this depressing gauntlet day after day, Feydeau never ceased to marvel at the “truly infernal din, the bewildering disorder in the middle of which the baron found the means of handling—every day, and without an instant of respite—the most colossal financial operations.” The office was filled with

  the deafening and unceasing cacophony, the incessant racket produced by the banging of doors, the coming and going of employees carrying despatches or requesting signatures. The importunities of the brokers’ clerks and the jobbers looking for orders added no little noise to the tumult, which gave the office of “Monsieur le baron” an air akin to the Tower of Babel. Here all the tongues of the world were spoken, including Hebrew. A crowd of friends of all three sexes—men, women and beggars—followed one after the other throughout the day, all in quest of news. There were jewellers opening their cases of precious stones before the baron’s ailing eyes, porcelain dealers and art dealers coming to offer their choicest items. Pretty women wove their way everywhere, soliciting for information—or something else. And across this merciless and incessant procession, while the brain of the toiling millionaire must have been bursting under the accumulation of figures and calculations, the youngest of his sons—a large and chubby-cheeked child whom I can still picture—would periodically charge in, using his father’s cane as a horse, and blowing on his trumpet like the angel of the valley of J[eh]osaphat.

  And the poor baron did not utter a word of complaint, did not so much as frown.

  He “did not even have the right to eat and sleep in peace. From five in the morning, in winter and in summer, the bringers and takers of news besieged his door . . . When business required it, he dined with his entire family in a small room beside his office, seasoning his meal with stock exchange quotations, while the procession of brokers continued round his dinner table with merciless persistence.” Indeed, at times James seemed to Feydeau less a king holding court than a prisoner of his own work ethic. What else could explain the willingess of a man who was already so rich to continue working under such gruelling conditions but “a singular tyranny of habit, as much as a commendable sentiment of professional ambition?”

  Ultimately, however, James was more to be abhorred for his tyranny towards others—including Feydeau himself—than pitied:

  One of [his] malicious habits . . . consisted in not saying a word, not even lifting his eyes to look at the intermediary, leaving him there, with a look of embarrassment, his hat in his hand and standing on one leg, and passing his quotation successively to all the members of his family, who paid scarcely any more attention to it than he had. One day, when he had played this wretched trick on me, and as I was showing, despite myself, some impatience, he felt obliged to pay me a courtesy, after his fashion, in the charitable aim of calming me down. It was the month of January, and on the table there was a dish full of large, white strawberries. With his fork he picked the most appetising of these strawberries, the one which lay on the top of the pile, and, presenting it to me as he might have done to a parrot, said:

  “Vould you like von?”

  Feydeau was naturally mortified by this humiliating treatment, especially as James’s wife and daughter were evidently witnesses to it. However, he tried to put a brave face on it:

  “You are a thousand times too kind,” I replied, taking a step backwards, “but I would prefer an order.”

  The baron was not perturbed. He
nailed me cruelly by saying:

  “Buy five Northern shares for cash.”

  The price of five Northern shares then being around 50 francs, the amount I could make from such an attractive transaction was just 12 francs and 50 centimes.

  Such brutal treatment of underlings was, according to Feydeau, quite routine (a view corroborated by Alexander Herzen’s description of a visit to the rue Laffitte in 1849):3

  “You are annoying me! Dat isn’t true! Leaf me in peace!” were the civilities he addressed to me . . . whenever I took it upon myself to make some observation concerning an order. It is necessary to bear in mind that because of the peculiar language which he spoke and his accent, it was not always easy to understand him.

  One day, prompted by a stock market price which annoyed him, he became so angry that he tore my quotation in two, obliging me to make it up again, and called me a “blested impecile!”

  Others—even fellow Jews—fared just as badly: “ ‘Ah! Dere you are, you tamned thief of a Cherman Chew!’ he said one day to one of his coreligionists, a jobber, as he came into his office . . . The unfortunate man stood crushed, deflated, speechless and blank-faced. Perhaps he took it for a compliment.” The occasion when a broker named Manuel dared to speak his mind to James had become part of bourse mythology. “Good day, baron,” he had said, as he entered James’s office. “How are you keeping?”