Share Bookmark
Baron Lionel von Rothschild

Baron Lionel von Rothschild

Male 1808 - 1879  (71 years)    Has 12 ancestors and more than 100 descendants in this family tree.

Personal Information    |    Notes    |    All

  • Name Lionel von Rothschild 
    Prefix Baron 
    Birth 1808 
    Gender Male 
    Death 1879 
    Siblings 6 Siblings 
    Person ID I303171  Geneagraphie
    Last Modified 21 Sep 2001 

    Father Baron Nathan von Rothschild,   b. 7 Sep 1777, Frankfurt Find all individuals with events at this locationd. 28 Jul 1836, Frankfurt Find all individuals with events at this location (Age 58 years) 
    Mother Hannah Cohen,   b. 1783   d. 1850 (Age 67 years) 
    Marriage 1806 
    Family ID F121619  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

    Family Charlotte von Rothschild,   b. 1819   d. 1884 (Age 65 years) 
    Marriage 15 Jun 1836  Frankfurt Find all individuals with events at this location 
    Children 
    +1. Baroness Leonora von Rothschild,   b. 1837   d. 1911 (Age 74 years)
    +2. Baroness Evelina von Rothschild,   b. 1839   d. 1866 (Age 27 years)
    +3. Baron Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild,   b. 8 Nov 1840   d. 31 Mar 1915 (Age 74 years)
    +4. Baron Alfred von Rothschild,   b. 1842   d. 1918 (Age 76 years)
    +5. Baron Leopold de Rothschild,   b. 1845   d. 1917 (Age 72 years)
    Family ID F121623  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
    Last Modified 17 Mar 2002 

  • Notes 
    • eldest son
      Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian consul general in London

      (b) Lionel and Brothers
      The most vivid and varied conquest of Vanity Fair took place in England. It was not an instant affair. Nathan had died so suddenly, and comparatively so early in the clan's total rise, that the London heirs had to reconfirm their business eminence before essaying society. Lionel, as the eldest of Nathan's three sons, assumed his father's place in New Court. But the stock exchange saw his agents rather than young Rothschild in the flesh. The "Rothschild pillar" remained untenanted. Rivals took optimistic note of this and of the fact that, like most upper-class Englishmen, Lionel indulged in a certain amount of education (at the University of Gottingen), in patriotism, and in noblesse oblige. Redoubtable Nathan hadn't been handicapped by such distractions. The monster tribe, London division, seemed to be declining into mere virtue. Would it be outpaced by its rivals? The question soon received conclusive answers. One of Lionel's legacies had been an uncompleted twenty-million-pound government loan reimbursing slave owners in the British dominions after the abolition of slavery. The young man in New Court managed the transaction with the smoothest skill. He was instrumental in raising the eight million pounds with which the British government relieved the Irish famine in 1847. And in 1854 he floated the sixteen million pounds that enabled Great Britain to prosecute the Crimean War.
      All these operations still had certain political overtones, masterfully modulated by Nathan's successor. The first item underscored the "sensibly liberal" antislavery stand of the House. The Irish deal constituted a form of very illuminated good works, further spotlighted by the fact that Lionel waived his commission. The Crimean loan deliberately broke with the antiwar policy of the House; to fight the Czar's anti-Semitic government, the Rothschilds shed their pacifist scruples.
      Other business was done more strictly for the money. Many of the eighteen government loans brought out during Lionel's career---totaling the vertiginous sum of I ,600 million pounds sterling (almost 25,000 million dollars ) ---were in this category. New Court played a key part in consolidating the mishpoche's control of Europe's mercury mines. It reached down to South Africa, where Cecil Rhodes was beginning to build a kingdom made of diamonds. It financed vast copper and nitrate enterprises overseas.
      The new generation began to play down the habit of clawing wealth directly out of the political arena. The trend was toward more purely economic and therefore less exposed endeavors. In the best circles one does not make history by the sweat of one's own brow. One hires the makers. And meanwhile one rides to hounds. Lionel knew that well. He tempered supremacy with dignity, a nuance New Court had not stressed before. His younger brother Anthony sat smashingly on horseback and was knighted by the Queen. Mayer, the youngest, bred fine horses, cut a figure at the Jockey Club, and became the first Rothschild to win the Derby. The three---patrician banker, baronet, and sportsman---needed one more elegance to complete the aristocratic gamut. This the fourth brother, Nathaniel, provided.
      He was an esthetic invalid, living in Paris. Despite a partial paralysis (the result of a hunting accident) he collected masterpieces, kept a brilliant salon, and, since it pleased him to have his own wine label, bought the renowned Mouton vineyards near Bordeaux.
      Each of the three brothers resident in England headed a part in the Victorian pageant. To begin with Lionel, we must begin with Gunnersbury Park. In 1835, shortly before his death, Nathan Rothschild had bought the domain as a suburban pleasance. Once Princess Amelia, daughter of George II, had lived there. But the estate did not come into its own until Lionel inherited it and, in the course of years, decked it with such splendors as were unknown in England outside her Majesty's own grounds.
      Gunnersbury encompassed, besides the obligatory lakes and swans, a resplendent Italian villa, exquisitely illuminated walks, huge flowerbeds landscaped in the form of baskets and rimmed with heliotropes, climbing rose trees, pergolas and latticed benches. It had an enormous Japanese garden, complete with giant cane, rivulets, stone bridges, palms and temples. "Marvelous," said the Mikado's ambassador on his first visit. "We have nothing like it in Japan."
      Lionel's parties were worthy of such backdrops. "The banquet," Disraeli wrote of one, "could not be surpassed in splendor or recherche even at Windsor or Buckingham Palace."
      A fete champetre held in July, 1845, in honor of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Gloucester became the social event of the season. Dukes royal and nonroyal, princes, diplomats and the sachems of the City, as well as five hundred other selected guests, sat down to dinner in tents laid out in the huge parks; strolled under the lights of thousands of multicolored lamps; listened to virtuosos, prima donnas and artistes proffering the best music from five capitals.
      After the Revolution of 1848, the most rarefied French aristocracy---such as the Duchess of Orleans, the Duke of Chartres and the Comte de Paris---would sweeten their exile here. (Everything and nothing changes. Five months previous to this writing, the present Comtesse de Paris attended a great garden fete given by Baroness Edouard de Rothschild.) Cardinal Wiseman readily accepted an invitation by way of protesting, it was rumored, the law in the Papal States that still confined Jews to the ghetto. The Cardinal, innocently enough, created the one crass outburst of religious prejudice in this Jewish palace: a Protestant refused to share the table with his Catholic Eminence.
      In 1857 Gunnersbury saw the nuptials of Lionel's eldest daughter, Leonora. She had, as one commentator put it, "lovely . . . liquid, almond-shaped eyes, the sweet complexion of a tea-rose," and ranked among classic English beauties of all time, like the Duchess of Manchester, Lady Constance Grosvenor and Mrs. Bulkeley. Her bridegroom was, in Family terms, the one young man in the universe worthy to raise her bridal veil: Alphonse, her cousin and future head of the French house. The band of the First Life Guards serenaded the two at their wedding breakfast. All the great world flocked to the ceremony where, under a chupah held by her brothers, Leonora de Rothschild became Baroness Alphonse de Rothschild. The French ambassador lifted his glass and his voice in honor of the bride. One past and one future prime minister of the Empire (Lord John Russell and Benjamin Disraeli) followed with toasts.
      "Under this roof," said Dizzy, overdoing things with his usual felicity, "are the heads of the name and family of Rothschild---a name famous in every capital of Europe and every division of the globe---a family not more regarded for its riches than esteemed for its honor, integrity and public spirit."
      Eight years later Lionel married off his other daughter, Evelina, to the one young man in the universe worthy of the prize: Ferdinand de Rothschild, her cousin and son of the head of the Austrian house. Among the fourteen bridesmaids were included such lofty names as Montgomery, Lennox and Beauclerk. The First Lord of the Admiralty proposed the health of the Rothschild family, and Dizzy, toasting the bride, again overdid things with his usual felicity.
      Some piquant overtones distinguished this wedding from the first one. Ferdinand's mother, a British Rothschild (Nathan's eldest daughter), was back in England for good. She had left Anselm because the Austrian chief-of-clan kept collecting railroad networks and mistresses with equal zest. The marital rift failed to diminish the dynastic solidarity, as was shown by the presence of the Austrian ambassador and the Austrian branch. A second example of Family insouciance materialized in an incident much relished by Jews all over England. Benjamin Disraeli, later Lord Beaconsfield, was a baptized Jew. The father of the bride could not help joshing his friend a bit as the cantor was about to pronounce his benedictions. "Ben," Lionel called out before the great assembly, "there are so many of you Christians present that our chazan [Yiddish for cantor] wants to know whether he should just read the prayers or sing them as in the synagogue?" "Oh, please let them sing it," Dizzy said. "I like to hear old-fashioned tunes."
      What made the second wedding most different from the first, however, was its scene: not Gunnersbury Park, but Lionel's new-built town mansion at 148 Piccadilly. It stood next to Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington's residence, and soon rivaled its neighbor in fame. Six stories tall, this Victorian monster had a tidal wave of a white marble staircase; a ballroom as big as the royal yacht; lusciously embroidered satin curtains the size of mainsails; whole coral reefs of salons and drawing rooms glistening with marble, gold and scarlet. Each chair offered, to quote a contemporary wit, gilt-edged security. The furnishings included, among a host of ineffabilities, a silver table service by Garrard weighing nearly ten thousand ounces; and the famous apple-green service of Sevres china partly painted by le Bel, a counterpart of which The Family gave to the present Queen Elizabeth for her wedding. The top of the mansion commanded a majestic view of Hyde Park and Green Park---and of the Duke of Wellington's iron chair, placed on the roof of his house so that he could sit there and watch the troops march by without being himself observed.
      At Lionel's house, Disraeli ate what he gladly admitted to be "the best dinner in London." And it was Lionel's hospitality that brought this high-colored genius some of the greatest private and professional moments of his life. "Mr. Disraeli," said Baroness Lionel one evening, "will you take Mrs. Wyndham Lewis in to dinner?" "Oh, anything rather than that insufferable woman!" muttered Diz, and did take in Mrs. Lewis, and repeated the sacrifice during subsequent Rothschild soirees, and married her when she became free, and found in her the indispensable support on which to rest a high career. A memorable climax of that career also began by way of a Rothschild meal. It was eaten, to be precise, on Sunday, November 14, 1875.
      Disraeli, Prime Minister by then, was supping with Lionel at 148 Piccadilly, as was his week-end wont. During the main course the butler approached with the telegram salver. The instant Lionel reached for the slip of paper, an episode unfolded which, for concentrated drama, approaches the Waterloo chapter in The Family's history. The message was from one of the Baron's Paris informants. Rothschild paused for a moment after he had read it, then summed it up aloud: Egypt's debt-ridden Khedive had offered his Suez Canal shares to the French government but had become impatient with France's terms. Rothschild and Disraeli looked at each other with the same thought. The Suez Canal was one of the world's great commercial and strategic assets. Britain had long wanted to lay hands on it, without being able to pin the Khedive down to a negotiating position. Apparently he was now in such desperate money straits that he would sell his 177,000 Suez shares to anyone who could pay a big enough price fast enough. At last the Prime Minister said a two-word sentence: "How much?" Lionel instantly sent a telegraphic query to Paris. The meat grew cold, but neither guest nor host had much of an appetite. Dessert came and went untouched, though Lionel was ordinarily a great lover of sweet fruit. By the time the brandy arrived, the telegram salver made another appearance. The answer was: one hundred million francs, or four million pounds, or forty-four million current American dollars.
      "We will take them," sald the Prime Minister.
      "Ah . . ." said Baron Lionel. For him the suspense was over, though for the world it was about to begin. At Downing Street the following Monday morning, Rothschild's information was confirmed by other sources.
      Both the Prime Minister and his aides agreed that England must strike while the iron was hot. She had to realize her chance before other countries learned of its existence. Speed was as essential as secrecy. Parliament happened to be in recess and therefore could not appropriate the sum. Nor could Disraeli rush off to the Bank of England; a law forbade it to loan money to the government while the House of Commons was not in session. In any case, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street could not have gathered so many millions so quickly without upsetting the money market. As for the joint-stock banks, their chairmen were empowered to dispose of such a giant amount only after a laborious summoning of the board of directors.
      "We have scarcely time to breathe!" Disraeli exclaimed in a note to Queen Victoria. All this, of course, added up to one inevitability, already implicit in Baron Lionel's "Ah . . ." Disraeli called his ministers together, received their authorization, then stuck his head outside the Cabinet chamber to speak a single prearranged word: "Yes." His secretary leaped into a waiting coach, to be ushered shortly afterward into the Partners' Room at New Court.
      There, at the very desk where Edmund de Rothschild sits today, his great-grandfather Lionel reclined, eating muscatel grapes. He went right on nibbling as he was told that the British government would very much like to have four million pounds sterling by tomorrow, please. For two seconds Lionel chewed a grape. "I shall give them to you," he said, and daintily spat out the seed. Within forty-eight hours the London Times announced that N.M. Rothschild & Sons had credited to the account of the Khedive the sum of four million pounds, and that all the latter's shares in the Suez Canal Company had passed into possession of Her Majesty's Government.
      These, together with a small lot of stocks already under British ownership, gave England a majority voice. Now she controlled the globe's new lifeline.
      "It is just settled!" Disraeli wrote on November 24, 1875, in a jubilant letter to the Queen. "You have it, Madam. The French Government has been out-generalled. . . . . Four millions sterling! and almost immediately. There was only one firm that could do it---Rothschilds." In 1935 the holdings acquired at that price figured in the national assets at more than ninety-three million pounds. And the dividends England received, almost from the start, more than matched the low 3 per cent interest charged by Lionel. In 1936-1937 alone the Canal earned England 2,248,437 pounds, a rate of 561/2 per cent on the original purchase money. Disraeli's evening meal, then, included a uniquely nutritious bite. Even before the occasion, though, Dizzy had thanked the clan for this and other entertainments with a bread-and-butter letter such as only he could write. In Coningsby, his most successful novel, the "Sidonias" figure prominently as a rich, powerful, admirable, intelligent, and easily identifiable Jewish family. In fact, they contain---and this always constitutes supreme tribute---some elements of the author's own personality.

      Lionel's house at 148 Piccadilly was not the only Rothschild residence in the neighborhood where a prime minister could get a good dinner. At 143 Piccadilly, Ferdinand Rothschild had his Louis XVI palais with an exquisite white ballroom. His sister lived magnificently at 142.
      At 107 Mayer moved into the pioneer West End mansion that Nathan, the founder, had taken. Nearby, Nathan's middle son, Anthony, maintained a ducal household at Grosvenor Place. Not much more than a diamond's throw away, at Seamore Place and Hamilton Place, Lionel's boys began to erect their great establishments. Before long the region was tagged "Rothschild Row"---a fairy-tale re-creation of Frankfurt's Jew Street.

      But a Rothschild Grove also came into being as an enclave in greenest Buckinghamshire. It was started by Mrs. Nathan. Like a good Jewish mother, she thought her boys were overworking themselves in the soot of the city. Consequently, she bought some hunting country in the Vale of Aylesbury. Mayer, the youngest, soon caught the bucolic spirit and hired the same Joseph Paxton who had created Prince Albert's Crystal Palace at the London Exhibition. Paxton built for Mayer an Anglo-Norman supervilla called Mentmore Towers, which he filled with several museums' worth of inlaid furniture, tapestries, vases, carpets and objets; surrounded it with gardens, parks, pastures, racing stables and a stud farm; and caused Lady Eastlake to exclaim that "the Medicis were never lodged so in the height of their glory."
      Thus Mayer, out of devotion to a worried mother, became not a pale pavement-bound clerk but the huntingest, shootingest, ridingest, merriest baron in England. One of the most hospitable, as well. At Mentmore Towers, Delane, the editor of the London Times, would volley brilliant dialectics at the above-quoted Lady Eastlake, a famous bluestocking who would volley right back. Prime Minister Gladstone would moderate, Matthew Arnold make measured interjections, and William Makepeace Thackeray sit by silently and politely, as writers will, and occasionally venture a mot juste. One of these was so juste that it entered public domain and became associated with Talleyrand, who is supposed to have delivered it at a French Rothschild dinner.
      But it was Thackeray's utterance, and it occurred during one of Lady Eastlake's tirades on fashion. "Female dress," said Thackeray, "is often like a winter's day. It begins too late and ends too soon." Another Rothschild country house filled Thackeray with a more tender inspiration. Mayer's elder brother, Baron Anthony, had developed an estate at Aston Clinton (just outside Aylesbury), as lush and more tasteful than Mayer's. Its long house parties would attract Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, Gladstone and Disraeli (the two prime ministers who kept succeeding each other), as well as Matthew Arnold and Thackeray. Baron Anthony's little daughters could take a survey course in nineteenth-century English political and literary history by just walking through their father's drawing room.
      To return to the tender inspiration. Heine's infatuation with Baroness James de Rothschild in Paris was no stronger than Thackeray's with Baroness Anthony at Aston Clinton. He sketched this touching portrait of her in Pendennis:
      I saw a Jewish lady only yesterday with a child at her knee, and from whose face toward the child there shone a sweetness so angelical that it seemed to form a sort of halo round them both. I protest I could have knelt before her too, and adored in her the Divine beneficence.
      Being immortalized is delightful, but when you're in your teens getting gifts is nicer still. And what kind of gift does a Rothschild daughter get? Constance, Sir Anthony's older one, had a passion for teaching. Quite naturally, Daddy gave her---a school.
      Constance was approaching sweet sixteen when, as she wrote in her journal,
      ". . . . my father asked me what I should like to have for a birthday present. I boldly answered 'an infants' school.' My request was granted and I was allowed to lay the first stone of the new building." All these splendors were outdone in the end by Baron Lionel's rusticities. Since he already had No. 148 and suburban Gunnersbury Park, he took to the country late in life. But when he made his move, it was on a scale behooving Nathan's eldest and his chief heir. As a start he bought Tring Estate in Hertfordshire, adjacent to the Buckinghamshire properties of his kin. Exclusive of furniture and pictures, the deal cost him a neat quarter of a million pounds (three and a half million dollars), for good reason. Over 3,500 acres surrounded Tring Manor, a lovely seventeenth-century mansion. Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, had designed it, and Charles II had presented it to Nell Gwynn. At Tring, the former orange-seller of Drury Lane, latterly risen to be Britain's Madame Pompadour, had sat and danced and drunk in state.
      Here Lionel Rothschild now held his country fetes, with the initials N. G. still blazing from cornices and ceilings. It is reported that the new owner was not always pleased with these curlicued grimaces of England's raffish past. Quite addicted to dignity, Lionel had assumed---and had made his brothers assume---the title of Baron which Nathan had so gruffly ignored. He also converted the Teutonic von Rothschild into the more soigne French de Rothschild. Old Nathan, as we have seen, had had himself buried without nobiliary adornment, but his son found a way of ennobling him after death. On the tombstone of the founder's wife Lionel put, "Baroness Hannah de Rothschild, relict of the late Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild."
      It is quite natural that such a man would gather around his fireplace fewer of the esthetic types often found at his brothers', and more of Disraeli and Gladstone in their official moods, as well as the greatest magnates, financiers and politicians of the age. And yet those Nell Gwynn initials seemed to sow, now and then, Restoration gremlins in the Victorian grandeur. A story has it that at one Tring stag dinner two cabinet ministers sat next to each other, one bald, one blessed with a full though artificial head of hair. While serving, a footman caught his sleeve button in the toupee and saw it drop to the ground. With more speed than discernment, he picked it up at once to replace it ---on the wrong pate. The bald Excellency had suddenly become hairy, the hairy Excellency bald, and the entire dinner company a good deal merrier.
      In addition to Tring, the Baron acquired great seats at Halton and at Ascott Wing. All these Rothschild settlements shed on Buckinghamshire a great anecdotal renown. Under the Family touch the livestock of the region throve as never before. Venery flowered: Anthony's partridge shoots and the princely stag hunt at Mentmore became proverbial.
      Still, one thing bothered the local gentry at first. Weren't those Rothschilds de-Christianizing Buckinghamshire? Would a velvet Judea displace the Anglican arcadia? Our rich infidels soon dispelled this doubt by restoring churches, installing organs, endowing vicarages more opulently than preceding owners had. When the Bishop of Oxford went confirming in the neighboring countryside, he and his entire retinue were put up at Sir Anthony's Aston Clinton.
      Yet what would perfect and confirm Rothschild supremacy in the end was not their gestures to the majority faith. In a rather fascinating way, the opposite process turned the trick. An Israelite family clinched pre-eminence in a Christian world by becoming more Jewish than most Jews.

      2. Kings of the Jews
      The same Lionel who had so carefully rebaronized his family branch lost all interest in Anglo-Saxon hauteur when it came to his religion. At the Feast of Tabernacles he personally hammered palm branches onto the very gentile architecture of New Court. Let any rabbi marry in London, and a Rothschild wedding gift arrived, usually by truck. At the Jewish New Year great baskets of flowers and fruit were delivered to synagogues "With the compliments of N.M. Rothschild & Sons." New Court, of course, remained closed on Saturdays and often used Yiddish dialect as a kind of code in its cables. (Once one of Baron Lionel's agents, having gotten wind of an impending truce in a South American war, sent a telegram reading, "Mr. Sholem is expected soon"---sholem being Hebrew for peace.) Baroness Lionel edited and collected a volume of Prayers and Meditations. The Baron himself went much further. We will soon see him fighting a dogged and seemingly hopeless battle for Jewish privilege in Parliament. And having wrested, against all odds, a decisive bit of Jewish emancipation out of the Commons, in 1869 he limped, already half crippled by gout, onto the dais of the new Jewish Synagogue, exclaiming, "We are emancipated, but if our emancipation should damage our faith, it would be a curse instead of a blessing!"

      He was only following dynastic precedent. His Viennese Uncle Salomon of the founding generation, for example, was an expert lobbyist who knew exactly how much pressure to apply at what governmental level. But on the point of aiding his coreligionists he became almost irrational with solicitude. On one occasion a fellow Jew named Roquirol had brought a fine flock of Merino sheep to Vienna and had asked Rothschild to help him in their sale. Salomon deemed the matter too urgent for mere livestock jobbers, and instantly dashed off a letter to the Chancellor of the Empire.
      "I humbly request your Highness," he wrote to Prince Metternich, "to put in a word for Herr Moses Roquirol when there should be an opportunity for doing so, as there is sure to be in the salons of your Highness, which are the meeting place of brilliance and fashion."
      It is a little difficult to visualize the Prince promoting a herd of sheep through a drawing room thronged with brilliance and fashion. But it is not easy, either, to imagine Nathan, a tycoon in full career, suspending his conquest of foreign markets to announce that he would honor no bills drawn on any German city which denied Jews their treaty rights. This is just what N.M. did in 1820. Two decades later James Rothschild was embroiled in his great railway duel with Achille Fould. Yet he even interrupted this fight to campaign against sudden anti-Semitic persecution in Syria.
      "M. Fould, the chief rabbi of Rive Gauche," wrote Heine, referring to Fould's Left Bank railway, "delivered with the calm of a sage an excellent speech in the Chamber of Deputies while his coreligionists were being tortured in Syria. We must give the chief rabbi of Rive Droit [Rothschild] credit for showing a nobler spirit in his sympathies for the House of Israel . . . ".
      Carl von Rothschild would not conclude a loan to the Pope without badgering his Holiness about the abolition of the Roman ghetto in 1850. In 1853 Austria imposed a new restriction on the Jews that kept them from buying real estate. The law didn't touch privileged exceptions like the Rothschilds, yet The Family instantly formed a coalition on the bourses of Paris and London (with the tacit connivance of the Vienna branch) in order to punish Austrian credit. James, in person, tore into the Austrian embassy with such ferociousness that the ambassador (then the not particularly Jew-loving Graf Hubner) advised Vienna "to soothe the children of Israel." "He is, in a word, beside himself," the ambassador reported of James.
      That same year Bismarck, still a Prussian career diplomat in Frankfurt, reported on the same subject to Berlin. "The efforts . . . which Austria made . . . to secure the emancipation of the Jews seems attributable to the Rothschilds. . . . The attitude a government brings to bear upon the Jewish problem . . . profoundly affects the house. . . There are occasions when other than purely business considerations determine the policy of this family. . . ."
      Bismarck did not realize how right he was. Soon after his memorandum, Berlin decided to honor Mayer Carl Rothschild, Amschel's nephew and his successor-elect as head of the Frankfurt house. The Prussian king appointed Mayer Court Banker and awarded him the Order of the Red Eagle, Third Class. It was, however, a Jewish Red Eagle. The normal form of the medal, a cross, had been redesigned especially for Baron Mayer into an oval badge. Evidently Prussia did not think a Jew fit to wear a cruciform emblem, even if it was of honorific and not religious significance.
      The Baron hinted his feelings to Bismarck: wasn't it strange to honor a man and at the same time to discriminate against him? The thought did not get through to Berlin. In 1857 the Prussian government imposed on Mayer another segregated Red Eagle, this time of the Second Class, in the form of a second oval. It was like being awarded the Order of the Yellow Star. Obviously Berlin considered Rothschild a very important but not particularly equal person.
      Now the Baron's feeling about those ovals was made plain. Pointedly he acted as if he didn't have them. He found flagrantly bad excuses to escape occasions when he would have to wear them and made rather free with his irritation. At last Berlin woke up. The Prince of Prussia ordered Bismarck, who had other things to do, to compile a detailed report on Baron Rothschild's behavior with his individualized medals.
      Bismarck's answer read in part:
      In accordance with the Royal Command of the 27th instant, I have the honor dutifully to inform you that I have not seen Court Banker Mayer Carl von Rothschild wearing such a decoration, since he does not go to big functions, and when he does wear orders, prefers to wear the Greek Order of the Redeemer or the Spanish Order of Isabella the Catholic. On the occasion of the official reception which I myself gave . . . which he would have to attend in uniform, he excused himself on the ground of ill health, it being painful to him to wear the Red Eagle decoration for non-Christians, as he would have to do on that occasion. I draw similar inference from the fact that whenever he comes to dine with me, he merely wears the ribbon of the Order in his buttonhole. . . .Prussia never desegregated its Red Eagles, and the Rothschilds never forgave---a fact which may have played a part later on, when the Kaiser asked them in vain to establish a Berlin branch of The Family.
      Nor did they stop expressing and defending their faith in ways Jewry had not known since the Book of Kings. Ferrieres, the French Family's great country palace, featured a private synagogue. The principal Rothschild town mansion in London, Lionel's 148 Piccadilly, had an unfinished cornice to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem. In imperial Austria the social fall season was marked by the Rothschild stag hunts, which, however, always suffered abrupt interruption on one afternoon. The sundry high-born Christian guests were reduced to chess playing while the hosts left for the Vienna synagogue. There they fasted and prayed through the Day of Atonement before resuming horse and hound again. All over Europe the greatest chefs began to learn, if not a downright kosher, at least a baconless cuisine. And a curious new custom began to spread from the Family fetes to great soirees in a dozen countries: after dinner the gentlemen did not adjourn from the smoking room to join the ladies in the salon; instead, the ladies had to come to the gentlemen. Rothschild practices were often followed before they were understood, and many people failed to grasp that this arrangement was the elegant outcome of a male-centered patriarchal philosophy. And of course the clan took great care to implant Judaism in the young, often through full-time religious tutors. The result was more than a formalistic respect for Hebrew tradition. A child's diary has preserved how aristocratic English diction, naive misspellings, a Talmudic delight in soul-searching, leaping high spirits and grave religious devotion were spontaneously intermingled in a Rothschild girlhood. Annie, Sir Anthony's younger daughter, wrote in
      her journal: How I should like to paint like a genius. . . . To have an innate genius, to be selftaught, to see masterly drawing developed under my own pencil. Yes, I should like it, but it is good that I have not been thus favored, that I have only a little natural talent, for it does not give rise to the love of superioty [sic) characteristic of me.
      I like to show my superioty in playing some pieces of brilliancy, my superioty in my little knowledge of Hebrew, my superioty of reasoning powers in geometry. It is a very difficult fault, this, to cut out, so difficult do I find it not to exult in the little I know. . . . But with all my faults I have an innate respect for love for religion and enthusiastic adoration for the holy creed of Judaism. May God forgive me, but even in this I did not wish to be inferior to anyone. I heard with envy of Clemmie's [her cousin, the daughter of Mayer Carl Rothschild) sudden [religious] zeal. Is that the way to show my reverence to him who hath said Love Thy Neighbor Like Thyself? Oh Almighty God, hear my prayer, make my heart soft and charitable to all those around me, then I may be worthy of being one of those chosen ones, for Thou hast said through thy prophet Moses that we shall love our fellow creatures. .
      The little enthusiast grew up to write, with her sister Constance, a stately tome called The History and Literature of Israelites. At twenty-nine she became the wife of the Honourable Eliot Yorke, M.P., son of Lord Hardwicke and prominent member of the Church of England. A generation earlier, her Aunt Hannah had also married a high-born Anglican.
      But whereas Hannah's union had once pained Jews, Annie's now scandalized Christians. For the first time a British aristocrat took as his wife a girl who remained after the wedding exactly what she had been before---a practicing and pious Jew. Quite contrary to the usual process, the Rothschilds embraced their faith more firmly with each generation.
      Lionel himself set all old and new members of The Family an example with the single most dramatic adventure in his life.

      3. Storming Parliament
      By the middle of the nineteenth century most of the restrictions on British Jews had been done away with. One remained: they were permitted to obey the law, to practice it, but not to make it. They were not admitted to Parliament. The vanguard of English Jewry, including the Rothschilds, had long chafed under this disability. Petitions were submitted, the sympathy of leading journals enlisted, press and pamphlet campaigns conducted. Parliament would not be moved.
      The head of the English Family then took prejudice by the horns, a decision that could not have come easily to a man of his rather prim and sedentary bent. Since he did not have the legal qualifications to run for Parliament, he began to storm it. In August, 1847, Lionel de Rothschild mounted the hustings as Liberal candidate for the City of London. The City, being the capital's financial district, had long stood for freedom of trade, a principle to which Rothschild astutely added freedom of religion. "My opponents say that I cannot take my seat," he told the voters.
      "That is rather my affair than theirs. I have taken the best advice. I feel assured that as your representative, as the representative of the most wealthy, the most important, the most intelligent constituency in the world, I shall not be refused admission to Parliament on account of any form of words whatsoever." The "form of words" became critical before long. Lionel was elected. Prodded by this fait accompli, the Commons passed a bill permitting the seating of a Jew. But the House of Lords rose in revolt. Many of the usually absent peers rushed to London. From the remotest demesnes of Cornwall and Wales, viscounts and earls hurried to vote down Hebrew insolence. Lionel, accompanied by his brother Anthony, stood in the august chamber, listened grimly to the wrathful speeches, would not withdraw even while the division was taken---and saw himself defeated. But his grandfather, the patriarch Mayer, had been no more stubborn in stalking the Hessian court than Lionel was in besieging the Mother of Parliaments. He formally vacated his seat, thereby forcing another election in his constituency. In 1849 Rothschild's renewed candidacy was broadcast in handbills and advertisements. "I do not hesitate again to solicit your suffrage," he said, "because in my person a principle can be vindicated and because I believe that you are prepared to maintain the great constitutional struggle that is before you with the same vigour and earnestness that you have heretofore evinced. . .
      Once more he was elected. Once more the Upper House cast him out. Lionel determined that the time had come for a direct and personal assault. He would take physical possession of the seat for which his constituents had chosen him, and to which he had every moral right. On July 26, 1850, his wife leaned forward in the gallery of the Commons and watched the House simmer with excitement.
      The Sergeant-at-Arms announced that a new member wished to take the oath. Lionel advanced to the Table of the House. The clerk rose to administer the Oath of Admission in the usual form and with the usual book, the Holy Bible. "I desire to be sworn on the Old Testament," Baron Lionel said in a loud, clear voice. The House exploded. "Sir," thundered Robert Inglis, leader of the opposing faction, "from the time that this has been a Christian nation and that this house has been a Christian legislature, no man---if I may use the word without offence---has ever presumed to take his seat here unless prepared to take it under the solemn sanction of an oath in the name of our common Redeemer. I for one will never give my sanction to his admission." After a long heated debate, an adjournment and three divisions, the Commons at last permitted Lionel to be sworn on the Old Testament. The following day he stood again before the Table. Now the battle of the "form of words" was properly joined. Among the admission ceremonies was the so-called Oath of Abjuration, with which the new M.P. must renounce all allegiance to the long defunct Stuart dynasty. A historical leftover, the Oath constituted the chief instrument of the anti-Jewish party because it ended with ". . . upon the true faith of a Christian." From gallery to front bench a hush fell over the House as Lionel repeated the formula after the clerk. Everybody waited for the last phrase. Here Lionel said, "I omit these words as not binding upon my conscience," and concluded the Oath in the Jewish fashion, using the Hebrew formula and covering his head. He was about to sign his name on the members' roll when, pen in hand, he was arrested by a voice from the dais.
      "Baron Lionel de Rothschild, you may withdraw," the Speaker said, and a moment later Lionel had to leave the House amid an uproar. But the Baron was only warming up. At the next general election, in 1853, the City of London doggedly returned him as its member. Again the House, after violent controversy, passed a bill to remove the oath difficulty, and again the Lords threw it out. The argument engulfed the nation. "If you destroy the groundwork of Christianity upon which this legislature is based," inveighed the Bishop of London, "in order to gratify for a time a handful of ambitious men, you will destroy Christian England." An Anglican M.P., on the other hand, said that "he should be sorry to have so indifferent an opinion of his religion as to suppose that the introduction of a Jew into Parliament would weaken or affect the principles of Christianity." Henry Drummond, a famous sectarian leader, railed against the election of a Jew "by the rabble of London, acting partly out of love of mischief, partly from contempt of the House of Commons, and partly from a desire to give a slap to Christianity."
      It was whispered that Rothschild money had paid for the election of Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister, to win him as a friend. The Bishop of Oxford and other ecclesiastics dignified the rumor with their names, whereas a number of eloquent voices within the Church championed the Rothschild party nobly. "We may guess," said one of these,". . . how many of the clergy will spend Christmas . . . the sacred time petitioning against Jews. Two courses will be served before the mince pies: the roasted heretic and the disenfranchised Jew.
      We shall be told of angels singing peace on earth by those who would prolong the reign of discord and persecution. Whose birth is it that the church commemorates? Is it not the birth of a Jew?" And the London Times declared in a leader: "If the qualities of any single candidate must, perforce, be associated with the merit of the principle he maintains, we think that those of Baron Rothschild will bear the comparison as well as any that are now before the public. . . "
      The peers of the realm did not see it that way. Altogether Lionel was elected six times by his stalwart constituency. Six times he marched up to the Table, demanding to be sworn according to the tenets of his faith. Ten times the Liberals introduced a bill revising the Oath of Abjuration. Ten times Disraeli crossed his own party, the Conservatives, and unsheathed his oratory in the revision's favor. Ten times it was passed in the Commons, and ten times the Upper Chamber tore it up. The eleventh time the Lords had to relent. In 1858 they consented to a bill allowing each house to modify the oath for its own members. On July 26,1858, Lionel went through the old dramatic scene with a new ending. He stood before the Table and took the oath with his head covered according to Jewish tradition, then signed his name to the rolls and proceeded to his seat unhindered.
      For eleven years this pampered nabob had chosen to live outside the palatial seclusion to which he was born. For eleven years he had made himself the butt of national argument, of caricature, scurrility and abuse, and possessed no martyr's nature with which to absorb it all---only the gouty, crotchety temper of a multibillionaire. "For eleven years," the Baroness is reported to have said, "we've had the M.P. question screaming in every corner of the house."
      For eleven years he had fought the good fight, disarrayed his emotions, snapped at his butlers, spent huge sums on electioneering, stirred up England to the far corners of her Empire. And after he had finally, painfully, moved the mountains that barred his way to parliamentary privilege, he gained it---to do nothing. Not a single speech or overt action was recorded during his entire tenure of over a decade and a half. It seems, in his case, a logical paradox. He was no more a simple politician than a mere capitalist. He was a Rothschild, ergo a living principle. The principle had wanted vindication, as he had said in his early election appeals. Vindication had been achieved. That seemed enough. The main thing was that he had thrust the gate open to others of his creed. Inevitably, however, the door of the Commons must lead to the portal of the Lords. If a Jew was good enough for the Lower House, was he not fit for the Upper? Gladstone thought so in 1869, and the Jew he had in mind was the same Baron Lionel, M.P. But now only one elector figured: the Queen. In this matter, as in several others, she chose to be more Victorian than her age. To Lord Granville, her Lord-in-Waiting, she wrote a letter bristling with italics.
      "To make a Jew a peer," she said, "is a step she could not consent to. It would be ill taken and would do the government great harm."
      At the Prime Minister's suggestion, Lord Granville prepared another brief. "The notion of a Jew peer is startling," he conceded to her Majesty, ". . . but he represents a class whose influence is great by their wealth, their intelligence, their literary connections." He then went on to the real reasoning behind the suggestion: the government felt that Rothschild's appointment would check republican sentiment, which seemed to be developing in some powerful financial circles.
      Her Majesty, though, thought the monarchy could survive without help from the grandson of a Jew Street peddler. Thereupon Gladstone made a personal attempt to disarm those royal emphases:
      10, Downing Street
      October 28th, 1869
      . . . . As the head of the great European house of the Rothschilds, even more than by his vast possessions, and his very prominent political position . . . Baron L. de Rothschild enjoys exactly the exceptional position, which disarms jealousy, and which is so difficult to find. . . . It would not be possible, in this view, to find any satisfactory substitute for his name. And if his religion were to operate permanently as a bar, it appears that this would be to revive by [the implication is, royal] prerogative, the disability which formerly existed by statute, and which the Crown and Parliament thought proper to abolish. Mr. Gladstone has now troubled Your Majesty to the full extent incumbent upon him, and will not think of pressing Your Majesty beyond what Your Majesty's impartial judgement may approve. Victoria sat tight. It was not until Suez had become British through Jewish money; not until Disraeli, baptized in faith but very unbaptized in sympathies and passions, had won her heart; not until Lionel had died in 1879; that she yielded to Lionel's weapon, that same old Rothschild weapon, his son. On July 9, 1885, Nathaniel Mayer de Rothschild walked into the great house in Westminster and did in the Upper Chamber what it had once forbidden his father to do even in the Lower.
      The new Lord donned the Jewish ceremonial headgear, the three-cornered hat, and on a Hebrew bible swore his holy Jewish oath. "It was the first time," an awed historian noted, 'that the Peers of the Realm had looked on while one of their number took the oath covered, or on another book than that which Christian practice and English tradition prescribed."
      But there was a second unique feature attending the ritual, which pertains to the uniqueness of the new Lord's generation, the next one.

      4. Three Suns at Noon
      Of Nathaniel, Lionel's eldest, the story goes that he once met at the stock exchange a fellow banker puffed up with pride. The man had just received a patent of nobility from the Italian king, in return for a favor, presumably financial. Natty listened to him go on and on about his new distinction, took a good look at the lire exchange rate---which had been especially favorable to the pound that week---and then, as usual, spoke his mind. "Congratulations, Baron," he said. "I knew you wouldn't fail to pick up a bargain." It is interesting that in the second half of the nineteenth century a Rothschild was already in a position to jest at the nouveaux riches of somebody else. It is even more significant that Lionel's three sons ignored their own baronial distinction and chose to become misters. The very title from which their grandfather had so warily kept his distance, and which their father had been so careful to use, they let lapse out of indifference. It became immaterial in the face of their prestige.
      The three brilliantly illustrated an old truth. Wealth or honors may be achieved in a lifetime, but, due to some perverseness in human nature, social position cannot be conquered by one man. It must be inherited several times over before it truly begins to exist. Society, like virginity, may be lost at any moment but will be gained only at birth.
      Natty, Alfred and Leo had the right kind of birth. In the case of another family the question might be asked:
      was it right enough? They were, after all, only two generations removed from the ghetto. In their case, no doubt ever arose, not only because of their incomparable fortunes, but also because of their superb casualness. It was this last flair which exempted The Family from the awkward stage of the arrive. An arrive is a clumsy imitation of the long-arrived. There is nothing more vulgar than trying not to be. But the Rothschilds, with their Yiddish jests framed in Cantabrigian flawlessness, with their proud observation of Sabbath on Buckinghamshire lawns, with their pictures of old Poppa Jews plastered across manor walls-the Rothschilds were always strictly themselves. They conformed to no earl, duke or marquis. They sported the kind of free-swinging eccentricity, the self-indulgent truthfulness unto their basic fiber which comes to another family only after five butler-born generations---assuming the basic fiber hasn't been refined away by then. In the instance of the Rothschilds, the basic fiber was (indeed, still is) remarkably sturdy. But some special factors set apart the trio of scions who made up the third generation in England. Of Lionel's brothers, only Nathaniel, the Parisian invalid, had sons, and they chose to become French Rothschilds, a somewhat different regal tribe. Lionel's three boys were, therefore, in complete possession not only of the London bank but of all the vast Family domains in Great Britain.
      In terms of time, they occupied a double zenith: no one before them had been as rich as they; no one after them who was as rich could escape the egalitarian fervor or strangling taxes of the leveler known as the twentieth century (in which, as a matter of fact, they had to spend their last years). In terms of place, the three scintillated among English nobility---an elite which has survived into the space-age culture more intact than its counterparts on the Continent. Natty's, Leo's and Alfred's universe, while exotic in its lushness, has come down to us with many of its trappings and meanings still present.

      5. At Marlborough House
      The greatest social triumph of The Family came to pass---by now a traditional irony---through their stubborn Jewishness. During a good part of the nineteenth century the two major British universities did not care for foreign faiths. They required that every academic candidate declare allegiance to the Church of England. At Oxford one had to do so before matriculation, at Cambridge not until the awarding of a degree. Therefore Natty, Leo and Alfred attended Trinity College, Cambridge, to study though not to graduate. Even today, long after the removal of religious restrictions, the Rothschilds read at Trinity as a result. In the 1850's this circumstance brought them together with a chubby, merry Cambridge boy named Bertie. He was also known as the Prince of Wales. The friendship between the future King of England and the grandsons of a ghetto apprentice was instant and intimate. It remained permanent and astounding. Bertie's chumminess with Natty, Leo and Alf---and, before long, with Ferdy (the Austrian Rothschild, Ferdinand) ---was unheard but not untalked of. It produced newspaper headlines, upset court chamberlains, and roiled protocol. Some of her Majesty's ministers worried lest the heir apparent pass on state secrets to a commercial firm. As it turned out, his Highness, primed by the Rothschild information service, often knew more than the fretting ministers. But generally the friendship intrigued every walk of life and thrilled Jews all over the world. Day after day the court circular announced that the Prince of Wales had stayed with Lord Rothschild at Tring Manor, joined Mr. Leopold at the Rothschild shoot in Leighton Buzzard or yachted with Mr. Ferdinand at Ramsgate. It was the Rothschilds, more often than the oldest ducal clans, who could send out cards with the magic phrase, ". . . to have the honor of meeting Their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales." On a darker occasion, after Bertie's appearance in the witness box of a divorce court, it was Alf's piano that beguiled the Prince through a sleepless night at the Amphytrion Club. More usually the friends sojourned at Marlborough House, where Bertie held his un-Victorian court; where one toasted, waltzed, placed bets together, occasionally lent one another money, and made the silkiest whoopee in the Empire. The "Marlborough Boys," of whom the Rothschilds were a vital part, became the set in Europe. A motley galaxy, the set was not without a certain historical impact. It did something about Lytton Strachey's complaint that royalty had been unfashionable in England since Charles II. The Hanover line had put a beery vein into Majesty. Victoria---respected, revered though she was---could not be admired as the quintessence of chic.
      But long before he became Edward VII, her son managed even his naughtiness with an Edwardian flair. At Marlborough House Bertie reigned more smartly and practiced a much more democratic snobbery than Mrs. Astor did on Fifth Avenue. Society went through a healthier house cleaning than anywhere else on either continent. Let the courtiers raise their eyebrows sky-high---joviality began to outrank genealogy in London; wit took precedence over etiquette, the colorful over the emptily decorous. The Rothschilds scored on every count. In addition, they were always ready to help a chap out with a few thousand pounds, even if his Mater's name was Victoria. Natty, Leo and Alfred played their part in running the wax figures out of Mayfair, in revitalizing the elite and thus adding to the viability of the country, in glamorizing the Crown. The Queen herself came to recognize this, despite her rather ingrained earlier thoughts about the place of Jews. However, it took more than the combined luster of the three brothers to sway her Majesty at last. It was a fourth Family personage who induced her to make the initial public move. Ferdy, the Austrian, turned the trick. We must go into his history a little to understand how. He had married Evelina, a sister of the three brothers, in the 1865 wedding described earlier. Eighteen months later she died in
      childbed. Ferdy decided to remain in England. He became an English Rothschild in residence, maintaining at Rothschild Row that town house with the famous white ballroom; English in political allegiance, becoming a subject of the Queen and, when Natty left the Commons for the Lords, taking over The Family's parliamentary fief by becoming the new M.P. for Aylesbury; English in his charities---he founded the Evelina de Rothschild Hospital for Sick Children in London and the Evelina de Rothschild School in Jerusalem.
      At Christmas he sent a brace of pheasants to every busman in London; as acknowledgment, the drivers ribboned their whips in yellow and blue, the Rothschild racing colors. And Ferdy was English in his eccentric willfulness. He would give a ball at such short notice that his female guests would not have time to prepare their dresses, whereupon the hasty host made amends by ordering them new couturier creations at his own cost for the next function.
      A typical Ferdy whim produced one of the greatest sights of southern England. In 1874 magic began to transpire at Lodge Hill, as desolate and deserted a spot as could be found in Buckinghamshire. Ferdy had bought it and 2,700 acres of environs from the Duke of Marlborough for some 200,000 pounds. Ferdy happened to like the view. To make the vantage point habitable, the entire top of the hill was sliced off. Water must be hauled from fourteen miles away. A special steam tramway with a track fourteen miles long had to be built to transport materials from the nearest rail station. Numerous driveways with a manageable gradient were hewn into the slopes. Teams of Percheron mares, imported for the purpose from Normandy, toiled up the rise with building stuff. A wilderness was coerced into a park through topographical surgery, drainage, irrigation, and the wholesale planting of shrubberies. Acres of flowerbeds were sown. Since Ferdinand placed his woods as conveniently as other people place their ashtrays, he had hundreds of trees transplanted. Since he liked large chestnuts, sixteen horses were needed to move each one; the telegraph wires by the roadside must be lowered for their passage. The whole thing was rounded out with the customary terraces, aviaries, rookeries, fountains, and groups of seventeenth-century statuary by Girardon, an important Versailles sculptor.
      What house could fit such an estate? Ferdy decreed a select anthology of his favorite French castles. Into his mansion of mansions he incorporated the two towers of the Chateau de Maintenon, the dormer windows of Anet, the chimneys of Chambord, two versions of the staircase of Blois (slightly smaller, and glazed to fight off the English climate) ---all "suitably combined, edited and improved," one expert thought. As to interior decor, Ferdinand sometimes had the paneling specially carved to accommodate outsize paintings like Guardi's two vast views of Venice. More usually he contented himself with ready-made wares---that is, with the finest boiseries (decorative paneling), extracted from the most luxurious Louis XV and Louis XVI Hotels in Paris, brought across the Channel, and integrated artfully into the various apartments. The furniture consisted largely of peacock pieces made for the royal family in France. The carpeting constituted the world's largest collection of Savonneries, so named after the workshop of their origin, whose products went exclusively to the Bourbons. The ceilings, Beauvais tapestries, Sevres porcelain, and objets (including a big musical elephant) matched the foregoing and each other. Canvases by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Cuyp, Pater, Van der Heyden---not to speak of those by Watteau and Rubens later added by heirs---were almost legion. After more than a decade of creation there rose above the English countryside an immense French Renaissance mirage, glistening in white marble, resplendent with 222 rooms.
      Ferdy rested, and thought it good. He called it Waddesdon Manor. To this day it remains an absolutely stunning circumvention of coziness. All the world came to see and to gasp. At his Saturday- to-Monday parties (the week end was practiced but not yet invented in the fin de siecle) the host would entertain the Shah of Persia, the German Emperor, Henry James, Robert Browning, Guy de Maupassant. (The Agha Khan and a series of prime ministers from Balfour to Winston Churchill are also found in the guest book.) Bertie honored one of the Blois staircases by breaking a royal ankle on it.
      Rumors of the phenomenon reached Victoria's ear. On May 14, 1890, Her Majesty did a nearly unprecedented thing. She called on a private individual. She had to see for herself what this Rothschild had wrought out of a bare hill. A small incident marred her reception. Lord Hartington, later Duke of Devonshire, committed the inexplicable gaffe of shaking Madam's hand instead of kissing it. As a result she kept it to herself during the rest of the introductions. But after a pony had driven her about the grounds in a Bath chair, after she had strolled through the galleries, vestibules, drawing rooms, she couldn't help agreeing with all other visitors. "The host was delightful," she said, "as the place was beautiful." The day warmed her heart toward the Rothschilds. When on the Continent, she began to drop in familiarly at the French estate of Alice, Ferdy's sister. She even used Rothschild couriers for some of her private mail, finding it a more discreet channel than the diplomatic pouches. (The extent of Family discretion became evident after her death, when Natty, appointed trustee of the Disraeli estate, discovered a number of "very private" letters from the Queen to the very dearest of her prime ministers. Natty took one look at them and sent them to King Edward. who for once expurgated his mother and not vice versa: he had the letters burned.)
      Even this supernal fellowship the Rothschilds conducted without damage to their Jewishness. On the contrary, sometimes the Church of England seemed in greater danger. On January 19, 1881, the Prince of Wales drove through a horrendous blizzard to appear at the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street for Leo's wedding. He loved the kosher food served at the reception. He roared at the Jewish jokes. These gradually became his passion. Since Natty shared the weakness, the House of Rothschild became a great international center not only of finance but also of stories about Moe and Ike. "At least one foreign diplomat, Baron von Eckardstein," reports a biographer, "had standing orders from the Rothschilds to collect and report all good Jewish jokes he heard abroad---especially stock-exchange puns from Berlin. On more than one occasion . . . he even dispatched bon mots by wire to New Court whence they would find their way before long to Marlborough House."
      The archivists at the London bank today, who guard so many secrets, also guard a treasury of Jewish jokes relayed in telegram language by a Prussian nobleman. Later the Jewish theme would emerge more seriously on a more august level. By 1908 Bertie had become His Britannic Majesty. The Rothschilds had long fought for the betterment of their coreligionists in Russia. And now that the King was to meet the Czar in Reval, there ensued a correspondence between the members of the Marlborough set on what exactly could be done about Russian intolerance. Something was done. Jewish persecution became an important item on the Reval agenda. "From my report," the British ambassador in Petrograd wrote to Natty shortly afterward, "you will see that the Russian Prime Minister contemplates amelioration for the lot of the Jews in Russia."
      It was about this time that a London rabbi is supposed to have said that the Jews, unlike the Christians, did not yet know a Messiah---but they did have a holy family. They had, if his simile be accepted, more than one. There were other Rothschilds in the world just as Rothschildian as the English ones. It is the only rich clan without poor relations. To round out the splendors of the mishpoche's fin de siecle, we must travel to France and Austria.



Home Page |  What's New |  Most Wanted |  Surnames |  Photos |  Histories |  Documents |  Cemeteries |  Places |  Dates |  Reports |  Sources