Founder: a Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time

Meyer Amschel Rothschild was born in the Frankfurt ghetto in the mid-eighteenth century, in a city more restrictive in its treatment of Jews than any in Europe. Elon brilliantly depicts Meyer Amschel Rothschild's position there, and life on the almost unimaginably cramped Judengasse (the single street of the ghetto), where he lived his whole life - even after becoming one of the richest men in Germany. We read how he established his small trading and banking business, and forged an uneasy relationship (though one mutually profitable in different ways) with the financially obsessed Crown Prince Wilhelm of Kassel; how he pushed at and eventually broke through the restrictions that bound him and his family to the ghetto until he found himself essentially paying for the English war effort in the Peninsula in 1810. On a richly delineated canvas the emergence and secularization of a family and Western European Jewry is depicted.
Founder is more than a short biography of an obviously extraordinary man. It is a portrait of Meyer Amschel Rothschild's times, of the condition of the Jews, of the state of Germany until it was overrun by the troops of Napoleonic France, which led to the collapse of the old order. It is about the threshold of modern times, when a world of aristocrats and gentlemen was permanently changed by a shrewd, dedicated, and loyal financier and his family. We still cannot know him as well as we do his children; but at last, in this book, Meyer Amschel Rothschild himself emerges from the shadows of the Judengasse.

"Well, nobody gets anything for nothing," Mayer Amschel Rothschild wrote from Frankfurt to his 19-year-old son Jacob (soon to be James) in Paris. Learning his lessons well, the brilliant, energetic Jacob would outwit Napoleon's fiscal watchdogs, bankroll his nemesis, Wellington, to the immense profit of the Rothschilds and assist in the undoing of Bonapartist France. The elder Rothschild, born in Frankfurt's crowded, rank Judengasse ghetto in which he lived all his life, would leave his five indefatigable sons his vast fortune and his even vaster pride. Much of his correspondence and papers have disappeared; in 1938, the Nazis even attempted to destroy his tombstone, and the crescent of tenements in which he lived and worked with his shrewd, sturdy wife, Guttle, burned in several conflagrations. No portrait of him exists. Yet out of what survives in documentation and in the memories of contemporaries, Jerusalem-based journalist Elon (Herzl: A Biography) has reconstructed the remarkable life of the creator of a banking empire that flourished despite a pervasive anti-Semitism that denied Frankfurt Jews even the right to leave their walled-in dwellings at night. Born in 1744, Rothschild began as a teenage dealer in foreign coins and later branched into every aspect of money exchange, financing sovereigns, merchants and armies. Posting his sons to other financial centers, he had established, by his death in 1812, a European banking empire. Filling in documentary gaps with 57 evocative illustrations, many of them contemporary, Elon has fashioned a brief but memorable first biography of a near-mythical founding father.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) rose from a modest upbringing in Frankfurt to head one of the most powerful families in late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe. During his time, this powerful court Jew had to live as other Jews in ghettos, deprived of the rights enjoyed by other citizens in the Holy Roman Empire. He used political savvy and skill as a money trader to develop a strong reputation and status among the most powerful people in the empire. After amassing a fortune, he used money and influence to make life better for his fellow Jews and, in the few years before his death, began to see success in this endeavor. His sons benefited from his work and prospered all over Europe in the years following his death. Israeli author Elon (Jerusalem, Kodansha, 1995) not only provides an account of Rothschild's life that is rich in character development, offering insight into the kind of man he was, but he details the era itself and Jewish life in particular. Illustrations add flavor and insight to the readable text, and an extensive bibliography is provided. A fine addition to any collection of Judaica in public and academic libraries.?Steven J. Mayover, Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A number of books have profiled the House of Rothschild banking dynasty. Each usually begins with a brief sketch of family patriarch Meyer Rothschild and his impoverished beginnings in the Frankfurt ghetto nearly 250 years ago, though none has focused exclusively on him. Relying on public and private family archives as well as the Frankfurt city archives and materials at the Frankfurt Jewish Museum, Elon has been able to reconstruct much of Rothschild's life as well as dramatically portray what life in eighteenth-century Frankfurt was like. Elon has written several books on Israel and Jerusalem and is a contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The publication of Founder coincides with an exhibit at New York's Jewish Museum called "From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art Patronage and Power, 1600^-1800." David Rouse