the world of private banking

THE ROtHScHILD ARcHIVE 37
In a sense, we already know which are the most important series for historians.
They are, as I have indicated, the Judendeutsch letters between the brothers. Since
1989 a scheme of translation and transcription has been under way, using the
services and skills of Mordechai Zucker. Nine years later, something like 15 per
cent of the total has been completed. The publication of Niall Ferguson’s history,
together with the publication of the Guide, will, we can confidently predict,
increase the level of demand among historians for access to these letters, and
already thought is being given to the possibility of accelerating the programme and
possibly publishing, in one form or another, the results thereof. In the course of this
exercise it is a very real option to pursue the route of storing the scanned images
of the original Judendeutsch alongside, possibly, a transcription of the underlying
German text, and certainly an English translation, opening up the possibilities of
word-search and of critical assessment of the translations.
These goals are obviously the targets for development towards which we
work. In the meantime, like any other banking archive, we respond to the needs
of researchers, both external and internal to the Bank. I have already mentioned
the unusually broad range of academic researchers who come to us, and part of
our goal in publishing the forthcoming Guide will be to ensure that this volume
of use increases. It is also a goal to roll back the admittedly, by today’s standards,
fairly conservative date of closure after which material has not until now been
accessible to researchers. This has stood, for many years, at 1918. Already we
are countenancing requests for material to be made available for the period up
to 1930, restricting access only where proper schedules of the records have not
yet been made. The next target will be 1939, and so on, that movement forward
limited almost wholly and solely by the speed at which catalogues of material can
be compiled.
In all of this development we enjoy the active support of the members of
the Rothschild family still connected to the Bank, of those who form part of the
Archive Panel which oversees the work of the professional team and of those
who have deposited material with us. The substantial investment made in the
preservation of the archive begs some sort of return, and the fullest exploration of
it by historians constitutes that perceptible and measurable benefit to the outside
world, acknowledged by the family.
While there is a firm commitment to welcoming and attracting the academic
community to the Archive, there is another equally important aspect of our work
which has, quite properly, to be accommodated alongside. It has been a central aim
of the current staff of the Archive to ensure that the Archive works effectively and
promptly to meet the needs of the N.M. Rothschild Group throughout its offices
in some forty countries around the world. In this, we have sought to be more
than reactive. Of course, like other archives, we respond to historical enquiries
when presented to us by staff, but we have sought to go beyond this, presenting
N. Ferguson, The World’s Banker: a History of the House of Rothschild (London,
1998).