Natalie Livingstone - The Women of Rothschild - The Untold Story of the Worlds Most Famous Dynasty

The Untold Story of the
Worlds Most Famous Dynasty

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To my parents Ann and Howard, with love

Mayer Amschels five sons were ennobled by the Austrian Emperor in 1822 and granted the right to use the nobiliary particle von in their names. The branches of the family in Frankfurt and Vienna adopted this convention, whereas those in Paris and Naples adapted this to the French de. In England, even though Nathan Mayer originally eschewed his foreign title, many of his descendants began to use de in their names. As will become clear, these honorific titles have not always been included in the text.

The family tree follows several lines of descent that would not appear on a traditional genealogy. As well as Rothschilds by birth and by marriage, the tree includes the offspring of women who were born Rothschild but took another name on marriage (and in some cases their offspring).

There was widespread cousin marriage in the nineteenth-century Rothschild family, therefore some subjects appear on the tree twice by birth and again by marriage. In these cases, dotted lines have been used to connect them to the offspring listed under their marital entries.

Owing to constraints of space, only figures mentioned in the book are included. Main subjects are shown in bold teal type.

R OTHSCHILD . A NAME that evokes wealth and power. A dynastic thread, strung with grand houses and gilded lifestyles. A bank whose backing was sought by sovereigns and statesmen, whose decisions could move markets, and whose prominence endured two centuries of breakneck historical change. The Rothschilds swift and dramatic rise from the cramped world of the Frankfurt ghetto to the capitals of Europe has been the subject of numerous books, as well as countless insidious conspiracy theories. There are few studies of modern Judaism, of nineteenth-century finance, or of the foundation of Israel in which Rothschilds do not appear; European history has the dynasty woven so deeply into its fabric that the Rothschilds have been described as the first European Economic Community; and modern Jewish history is so closely entwined with that of the Rothschilds that they have been referred to as the first family of Judaism or even the Jewish royal family. But what appears at first to be one of historys most heavily chronicled, widely known and deeply mythologised dynasties is really nothing of the sort. Half of the Rothschilds, the women, remain virtually unknown.

Almost everything about the Rothschilds all the books and articles, the calumnies and myths, the films and plays concern only the Rothschild men. Mayer Amschel Rothschild is routinely described as a founding father, as if the dynasty sprang from him alone. And while his and his wife Gutles five sons are famous, few could name a single one of their five daughters. Even books that purport to be about the family as a whole are really about the men. Count Cortis The Rise and Reign of the House of Rothschild comprises two volumes and 34,140 lines of text, of which 34,000 focus on the men.

The root of this exclusion is clear: the world of nineteenth-century finance, in which the family rose to prominence, was a male one. But the Rothschilds were never a banking business alone. They have always been a dynasty whose influence was grounded in banking but whose significance was much broader, reaching into literature and education and religion, into sport, science, horticulture, music and politics. That the women of the family were involved in these pursuits and in many of their own besides is clear from merely a glance at the historical record: their names crop up in contemporary newspaper articles, memoirs and subscription lists; their likenesses appear in cartoons, photographs and family portraits. But they remain silent, their stories untold. Works focusing exclusively on the women of the Rothschild family amount to a handful of essays and a few single-subject biographies, most of them written by female descendants curious at the exclusion of their ancestors from the historical record.

A few years ago I came across one of these works. Rothschild Women, by Miriam Rothschild, began life as a catalogue essay for a 1994 exhibition at Frankfurts Jewish Museum. Through Miriams essay, I began to learn about a whole line of Rothschild women, each of them unique in their talents and character and pursuits, and yet each shaped by the singular circumstances of their family.

Miriam began her essay with a quote from the literary critic and scholar of Jewish history, Naomi Shepherd: In all the historical literature produced since the end of the eighteenth century, women are a footnote to the story of Jewish survival. Nowhere was this truth starker, I realised, than in the story of the Rothschild women. Inspired by Miriams essay, I began my own investigation into these most fascinating footnotes. The story of the Rothschild women begins with an exclusion: the will of the banks founder, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, explicitly forbade his female descendants or the wives of any male descendants from having any share in the banks wealth, or in its decision-making processes. So I had not expected the story of the Rothschild women to echo that of the men. But I had no idea of just how different it would be, or how intriguing.

At the root of it all stood the mother of the business, Gutle, who provided her husband with essential business capital through her dowry, managed the Rothschild household, and played an integral role in the early years of the bank. In the following generation, as the familys operations expanded rapidly, two figures one married into the family, one born into it forged very different models of Rothschild womanhood for the nineteenth century. Hannah Rothschild (ne Cohen) became an indispensable advisor to the founder of the English bank in private, while also fashioning the familys public image. Meanwhile, her sister-in-law, Henriette Rothschild, provided a more daring model of what a Rothschild woman might be. After thwarting her brothers attempts to marry her off to an unsuitable husband, Henriette moved to London, married a man that most of her relatives had never met, and helped him build up his own business in competition with her birth family. Later, during her long widowhood, she would win renown for her lively Mayfair dinner parties and her great fund of the racy old Jewish humour.