History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

salient facts about the Rothschilds are clear enough. They were a product of the Napoleonic Wars, just as the first phase of large-scale Jewish finance was a product of the Thirty Years War, and for the same reason: in wartime, Jewish creativity comes to the fore and gentile prejudice goes to the rear. In all essentials, the family fortune was created by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in London. What happened was this. Until the beginning of the revolutionary wars in France, in the mid-1790s, European merchant banking was dominated by non-Jews: the Barings of London, the Hopes of Amsterdam and the Gebrüder Bethmann of Frankfurt. The war quickly expanded the money-raising market and so opened room for newcomers.10 Among them was a German-Jewish group–Oppenheims, Rothschilds, Heines, Mendelssohns. The Rothschild name derived from the sixteenth-century red shield on their house in the Frankfurt ghetto. The family patriarch, Mayer Amschel (1744-1812), was a money-changer who also traded in antiques and old coins. He branched into textiles, which meant a British connection, and from selling old coins to William IX, Elector of Hesse-Cassel, he became his main financial agent. The elector had made himself very rich by supplying mercenaries to the British army. So that was another English connection.