the world of private banking

THE ROtHScHILD ARcHIVE 33
most prized survivals, the so-called Cotton Book, a sample book used by Nathan
Mayer when travelling, to display textile samples to his clients and take orders,
from which he commissioned suppliers in and around Manchester.
From the beginning of the banking years in London, there is a very wide-ranging
archive which continues through to the present day. I cannot say comprehensive – I
wish I could – because the process of steady and efficient storage of papers for
evidential purposes within the business has, across two centuries, been tempered
by periodic and deliberate phases of destruction. Both the second and third heads of
N.M. Rothschild & Sons (NMR), Baron Lionel and Natty, the first Lord Rothschild,
required their executors to destroy all personal papers from their years of office
that were held on the bank’s premises, setting a family tradition which has been
honoured all too frequently for an archivist’s taste. These purges have not, it has
to be said, affected the routine correspondence and files of the Bank; only those
clutches of documents which arrived on and emanated from their own personal
desks. Nevertheless, as you will recognize, these are precisely the sources which
historians would most have wished to survive. It is a matter of daily regret to us –
though tempered by the sheer volume and quantity of what remains. This last point
indicates the peculiar quality of the Rothschild banking archive – its intermixture
of personal and business papers. This of course is far from unique, but given the
widespread involvements of the Rothschild family across two centuries, it gives to
the archive its particular richness and diversity. For the members of the Rothschild
family in London, the Bank was an extension of their study at home as well as a
place of banking business. When the cause was right, the offices at New Court
were put to use without hesitation. So, for example, there survives, from the 1930s,
a valuable body of paperwork relating to the Central British Fund for German
Jewry, a body set up by Lionel and Anthony de Rothschild in the early 1930s and
functioning from New Court in order to find employment for Jewish refugees from
the Nazi regime. In a totally different vein, from earlier on, there survive, from
the Estates Department of the Bank, housed in New Court and handling property
management and private accounts on behalf of the partners, papers relating, for
example, to the purchase of plants and seeds for the gardens of the Rothschilds’
first substantial country house, Gunnersbury; building accounts for more than one
of the later great houses; and records of purchases of jewellery and paintings. All
of these are sought after by social historians of many shapes and persuasions.
Most importantly, this mixture of business and social is embodied in the letters
which each of the brothers wrote to the others (and to their nephews) in the years
between 1814 and the death of the last of them in 1868. It is these letters which
form the richest material for historians – or rather, will form the most fertile
seedbed in years to come. The letters have a quality all of their own. There are
some 20,000 letters surviving in this series. Written mostly in Judaeo-German
(or Judendeutsch), they have largely hitherto defied attempts to prise open their
meaning (of this I shall say more). The Hebrew script when deciphered reveals not
Hebrew words but German beneath. In itself then, a knowledge of Hebrew script
and German, might, one would have thought, have opened them up. Added to these