Word: rothschilds
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...family's story is handsomely told in The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848 (Viking; 648 pages; $34.95), the first volume of a chronicle by Oxford historian Niall Ferguson. The second volume is scheduled for next year...
...Frankfurt ghetto where the fortune started, the paterfamilias, onetime coin dealer Mayer Amschel Rothschild, left a last commandment to his five sons: Maintain absolute unity. In later years the brothers quarreled often but obeyed their father. They wrote to one another voluminously in the privacy of almost indecipherable Judendeutsch (German written in Hebrew characters) and bailed one another out. Hard times for James in Paris brought Nathan's London to the rescue, and so on--meaning that the Rothschilds, a power unto themselves, could usually float above the fates of individual nations and regimes...
Great fortune and power breed myths and demonizations. The Rothschilds were called, with admiration and loathing, "the Kings of the Jews and the Jews of the Kings"--sometime pariahs and masters of the universe. The bright version of the Rothschilds--benefactors of progress, multilingual cosmopolitans, patrons of the arts, sponsors of Rossini and Balzac, vintners of Mouton and Lafite--was shadowed by a vicious anti-Semitic twin, the view that culminated in Hitler's speeches about "the rapacity of a Rothschild." The family became an all-purpose and surreal villain. Karl Marx vilified the Rothschilds as a quintessence of capitalist...
Ferguson has had access to all the surviving Rothschild archives, including the family's vast private correspondence, which fills 135 boxes. He sorts through the intricacies of their business deals: financing governments, bill brokering, working the international bullion market, trading in American cotton and tobacco, Spanish mercury and Russian copper. The legerdemain of speculative finance in another century is sometimes occult material, but Ferguson manages it well...
...Bond Street. And there, on an easel, was a painting that had just come in on consignment a few hours before: Degas's pastel Dancer Taking a Bow, 1887, one of the finest of his ballet scenes, which had been in one of the collections of the Rothschild family for the past 80 years and had not been exhibited publicly in a half-century. "It just shone," Wynn recalls. "It knocked me flat. I knew I had to have it. And if Bill and I had delayed, it would probably have been gone the next day. So there...