Amos Elon - Founder: Meyer Amschel Rothschild and His Time

In 1814, 1 was equivalent to 10 gulden, 20 francs or 5 thaler. Consumer prices have risen by approximately 4,500 per cent between 1790 and the time of writing. Thus 1 in 1790 is roughly equivalent to 45 today (1996).

CHAPTER ONE

O NLY A FEW CRUMBLING bricks are left today of the Juden-gasse , a dark, foul-smelling alley in Frankfurt-on-Main where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Amschel Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty of which it was later said that its history was more important than that of many a royal house.

Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy and ingenuity. His life reflects, as in an old, half-blind mirror, the possibilities as well as the inequities rampant in the Age of Absolutism. He raised five famously gifted sons, veritable money-making machines, to carry on his work after him. Their names overshadowed his own and became synonymous with colossal wealth, extravagant living and hidden political power. A century after his death, the liberal polemicist A. J. Hobson would still ask, in all seriousness, if a great war was still possible in Europe if the House of Rothschild set their face against it. The exaggeration implied in this rhetorical question reflects the odd, and sometimes the lethal way in which the reality of the Rothschilds was subsumed and devoured by the myth.

Until very recently, historians tended to refrain from writing the lives of the underprivileged, especially when they were not politically active or engaged in one of the arts. Such modest men and women were usually dealt with anonymously or quantitatively. Rothschilds origins were certainly modest. There was little reason to foresee his destiny. The personal circumstances of his life were difficult throughout. They suggest a saga not only political and financial but also human and dramatic more dramatic, perhaps, than that of his flamboyant sons. The sons were not persecuted human beings, legally confined to the squalor of a congested ghetto but, for most of their lives, noblemen, free citizens, living in fairy-tale palaces and socializing with the great of Europe.

The old Judengasse where Rothschild lived his entire life was a narrow lane, more slum-like and overcrowded than any other tenements in Frankfurt. A closed compound, it was shut off from the rest of the city by high walls and three heavy gates. The gates were guarded by soldiers and were locked at night, all day on Sundays and Christian holidays and from Good Friday until after Easter. In it lived the largest Jewish community in Germany in conditions of almost total isolation, or apartheid.

The Judengasse was some ten or twelve feet wide. It ran in a half-circle from the Bornheimer gate in the north to the Jewish cemetery in the south where the oldest tombstones testified to a Jewish presence in the city as far back as the twelfth century. The home of the Rothschild family was a dilapidated tenement, at the back of No 188 Judengasse. Here Meyer Amschel Rothschild was born on 23 February 1744. In 1786, when he had achieved some success, he moved with his wife and children to a larger home at No 148, on the east side of the curving Judengasse, a few doors down from the main synagogue. This was a four story frame-house of brick, wood and slate and, though it was said to be one of the largest in the ghetto, it was so narrow that in the small dark rooms the beds could be placed only along side-walls, at right angles to the street. This house still stood until 18 May 1944, when it was razed along with much else in central Frankfurt during an American air-raid.

No trace is left of the house today, nor of the Judengasse itself (except for a few foundation stones), nor of the ancient synagogue, with its high Gothic windows and raised central nave surrounded by carved pews on its four sides, which Rothschild visited almost every day. Frankfurt was badly damaged during the war and was afterwards rebuilt from its ruins and modernized, more radically perhaps, than other German cities. A few well-known buildings in the old city center were reconstructed to appear (on the outside) more or less as they did before, in brand-new Gothic or Baroque. They have since acquired a patina of their own and look almost genuinely old. The most prominent sites were faithfully rebuilt from the ground up the main churches, the fine burghers mansion where Goethe was born, five years after Rothschild and a few characteristic old inns. The old town hall was also restored as was the great cathedral, where, until after 1792, the Holy Roman Emperors of the German Nation were crowned. The rest of the city is almost entirely modern. The old street plan was discarded. Where the old Judengasse ran in a wide curve round the old Dominican convent, with its fine altar by Drer and Holbein, there is now nothing left but a wide expanse of asphalt parking lots and wide avenues choked with traffic and tall office buildings. The Dominican convent was also rebuilt. And by one of those coincidences which, in Germany, are so often pregnant with heavy irony the remains of the old Judengasse are now buried under the sleek offices of the local gas works.