Volume 30, Number 13 · August 18, 1983
A Family and Its Fortunes
By Gabriele Annan
Baron James: The Rise of the French Rothschilds
by Anka Muhlstein
Vendome Press, 223 pp., $17.95
The earliest history of the Rothschild family has a simple, legendary quality, like the story of Dick Whittington multiplied by five. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a money changer from the Frankfurt ghetto became banker to the richest of all the German princes, the landgrave and later elector of Hesse. The Jew was called Mayer Amschel Rothschild, and he grew rich too. He sent his five sons out into the world like arrows (and later, when they were ennobled, they chose five arrows for their coat of arms). Salomon went to Vienna, Nathan to London, Karl to Naples, and Jacob to Paris. The eldest, Amschel, stayed behind in Frankfurt. They threw a network of banks across Europe and, bound together by the terms of their father's will when he died, they grew richer and richer until they were as rich as Rothschilds. By 1863 they were worth 558 million francs.
Review, 3693 words
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