the world of private banking

20
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
extent, Rothschilds tended to marry Rothschilds. Of 21 marriages involving
descendants of Mayer Amschel between 1824 and 1877, no fewer than 15 were
between his direct descendants. Although marriage between cousins was far from
uncommon in the nineteenth century – especially amongst German-Jewish business
dynasties – this was an extraordinary degree of intermarriage. ‘These Rothschilds
harmonize with one another in the most remarkable fashion’, noted Heinrich Heine.
‘Strangely enough, they even choose marriage partners from among themselves
and the strands of relationship between them form complicated knots which future
historians will find difficult to unravel.’ 71 Not even the royal families of Europe
were as closely in-bred, though self-conscious references to ‘our royal family’
suggest that the Rothschilds regarded them as a kind of model. 72
Of closely related significance was the family’s attitude towards religion. The
fact that the Rothschilds were Jews is at once hugely important and profoundly
difficult to interpret. Mayer Amschel once recalled that ‘in my youth I was … a
very active merchant, but I was disorganized, because I had been a student [of
the Talmud] and learnt nothing [about business]’: this casts doubt on any simple
notion of the relationship between religion and financial aptitude. 73 Probably,
membership of a tightly knit ‘outsider’ group helped when it came to constructing
credit networks, and perhaps there was a kind of work ethic derived from Judaism.
But, obviously, these points can be made with equal force about the various
Protestant sects, as indeed they were by Max Weber. In fact, it may be that being
Jewish was less important to the Rothschilds than staying Jewish. As Ludwig
Börne noted with grudging admiration, they had ‘chosen the surest means of
avoiding the ridicule that attaches to so many baronized millionaire families of
the Old Testament: they have declined the holy water of Christianity’. 74 It was
a fact which also impressed Benjamin Disraeli, himself (like Börne) born a Jew
but baptized. It should be stressed that the degree of the Rothschilds’ religiosity
varied greatly: James was notoriously lax about observance, did not keep kosher
and often worked on the Sabbath. His nephew Wilhelm Carl, at the other extreme,
became a firm supporter of the Orthodox revival in Frankfurt, to the bemusement
of his Anglicized cousins. However, what most members of the family shared was
a belief that remaining Jewish was in some way integral to their good fortune; and
that to deviate from Judaism would be to jeopardize this.
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the family’s reaction when Hannah
Mayer, Nathan’s second daughter, converted in order to marry a Gentile (Henry
Fitzroy, a younger son of the Earl of Southampton) in 1839. When her uncle James
first heard of the relationship, he was appalled. ‘Nothing,’ he thundered
71
S.S. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy: A Study of his Portraits of Jews and Judaism
(Oxford, 1983), pp. 331–5.
72
RAL, T20/34, XI/109/48/2/42, Nat, Paris, to his brothers, 4 Sept., probably 1844.
73
RAL, RFamAD/2, Mayer Amschel, Frankfurt, to Nathan, undated, c. June 1805.
74
Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, p. 359f.