Founder

Description

Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), patriarch of the Rothschild clan, fathered five illustrious sons who made the family name a by-word for banking, fabulous wealth, and Jewish philanthropy. Israeli historian Elon has pieced together the story of the dynasty's founding father, largely unrecorded heretofore. Mayer Amschel spent his life traveling between the humble Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt and the mansions of the prosperous Gentiles whom he served, particularly that of Prince Wilhelm of Hesse. Jews were severely restricted in most areas of their lives, and Rothschild had to conduct himself with appropriate servility in the presence of his masters. However, the displacements of the Napoleonic Wars gave the discreet Rothschild his chance to act as Wilhelm's agent, and his monopoly on the disbursement of the prince's loans was his entry into banking. It was all the start he needed.

Description

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.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His TimeHardcoverViking Adult1996-11-01
• FounderViking1996-01-01
• FounderHarperCollins1996-01-01
• FounderPaperbackDiane Pub Co1996-11-01
• FounderPenguin (Non-Classics)1997-11-01