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The Power of Money Wisely Spent
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16266 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1989 |
2,686 Words |
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James Gardner
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ROTHSCHILD
The Wealth and Power of a Dynasty
Derek Wilson
Charles Scribner and Sons, 1988
490 pp., $ 27.50
When I think about the illustrious House of Rothschild, a musical analogy comes to mind. The history of that house has its thin "horizontal" melody line, represented in the fluctuations and increments over two centuries of the fortune that Mayer Amschel Rothschild established during the ancient regime, to which are added the harmonic elaborations and the rich choral clusters of the independent actions of the five branches of the family, sometimes working together, sometimes generating dissonance. Several themes recur through the collective symphony of their lives; the themes of ingenious getting and of profligate spending, of recurring anti-Semitism, and of their inevitable triumph as they assumed their places in the highest spheres of political and social power. Then there are the minor variations of sons, mothers, and wives--harmless eccentrics, certifiable lunatics, or accomplished society matrons who play hostess to some of the most brilliant politicians and men of letters of their age.
To chronicle this rich and eminent family would be a daunting task for anyone. But Derek Wilson, in his new book Rothschild: The Wealth and Power of a Dynasty, has researched his bulky subject thoroughly and presented it in a pleasing and palatable tone. It will probably prove impossible for most readers to keep track of all the doings of all the members of the five branches. Nevertheless, Wilson is prepared to satisfy one's curiosity with an account, in varying detail, of the lives of about one hundred and fifty members of the famous family.
He is at pains to stress at the outset that what he has written is not an official biography. And yet it would be hard to imagine a more official, more deferential document. Wilson is clearly impressed with the men and women whose lives he recounts. He is grateful to the eminent members of that house who consented to be interviewed. As a result, he has gone out of his way to magnify every virtue and every charitable act appurtenant to his subjects, while talking around, or making excuses for any of their financial or social faux pas over the past ten generations. This may well be one of the rare occasions when anyone has seen fit to canonize an entire family.
Yet the story is surely a fascinating one, and well worth telling. Although many European families have remained in eminence for over two hundred years, the Rothschilds are unique among Jews in having occupied so exalted a position for so long. Yet allied to this is the sobering truth that the eminence of the Rothschilds has never been without undertones of precarious fragility. The Rothschilds were for a long time in island of baronial Jewry in a sea of gentile aristocracy. As often as they were presented with the temptation to distance themselves ever so slightly from their roots, there were those who were more than eager to remind them of who they were and where they came from.
The dizzyingly detailed and convoluted tale of the rise to greatness of the House of Rothschild begins in the Frankfurt ghetto in the middle years of the eighteenth century. No trace of this unpleasant place survives, since the entire area was destroyed in an Allied
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