The House of Rothschild (6 page)

Sources: CPHDCM, 637/1/7/115-120, Socieräts-Übereinkunft, Oct. 31, 1852, between Amschel, Salomon, Carl, James, Lionel, Anthony, Nat and Mayer; AN, 132 AQ 3/1, Undated document, c. Dec. 1855, reallocating Amschel and Carl’s shares.

It was a compromise which worked in practice. After 1852, James was prepared to show a much greater degree of deference to his nephews’ wishes than in the past. New Court no longer took orders from James—as can easily be inferred from the diminished length of his letters to London after 1848. Increasingly, he scribbled no more than a postscript to Nat’s despatch and often concluded his suggestions about business—as if to remind himself that there was no longer a primus inter
pares
—with the telling phrase: “Do, dear nephews, what you wish.” This was doubtless gratifying to Lionel. Yet the compromise of 1852 meant that the pre-1848 system of co-operation between the five houses was in fact resumed with only a modest degree of decentralisation. The balance sheets of the Paris and London houses reveal a rate of interdependence which was less than had been the case in the 1820s, but it was still substantial. To give just one example, 17.4 per cent of the Paris house’s assets in December 1851 were monies owed to it by other Rothschild houses, principally London.

Moreover, the London partners’ assumption that their house would be more profitable than the others proved over-confident. Although the Naples and Frankfurt houses tended to stagnate (for reasons largely beyond the control of Adolph and Mayer Carl), it was James who made much of the running after 1852, expanding his continental railway interests so successfully that by the end of his life the capital of the Paris house far exceeded that of its partners. Anselm too proved unexpectedly adept at restoring the vitality of the shattered Vienna house. It turned out to be far from disadvantageous for the London partners to share in these continental successes. The new system thus inaugurated a new era of equality of status between the London and Paris houses, with Vienna reviving while Frankfurt and Naples declined in their influence.

As in the past, it was not only through partnership agreements and wills that the Rothschilds maintained the integrity of the family firm. Endogamy continued to play a crucial role. The period between 1848 and 1877 saw no fewer than nine marriages within the family, the manifest purpose of which was to strengthen the links between the different branches. In 1849 Carl’s third son Wilhelm Carl married his cousin Anselm’s second daughter Hannah Mathilde; a year later, his brother Adolph married her sister Julie; and in 1857 James’s eldest son Alphonse married his cousin Lionel’s daughter Leonora at Gunnersbury. To list the rest here would be tedious.
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With a single exception in the years before 1873, those who did not marry other Rothschilds did not stray far from the Jewish “cousinhood.”
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In 1850 Mayer married Juliana Cohen—defeating a rival suit from Joseph Montefiore—while his nephew Gustave married Cécile Anspach in 1859. If Wilhelm Carl had not married a Rothschild, he would have married a Schnapper—a member of his grandmother Gutle’s family.

The brokering of these alliances was, as it had been for nearly two generations, a major preoccupation of the female members of the family. Charlotte made no bones about their rationale. As she enthused on hearing of her brother Wilhelm Carl’s engagement to Hannah Mathilde, “My good parents will certainly be pleased that he has not chosen a stranger. For us Jews, and particularly for us Rothschilds, it is better not to come into contact with other families, as it always leads to unpleasantness and costs money” The idea that either the pious groom or the musical bride was making a spontaneous choice was, in this case, nonsense. Charlotte’s cousin Betty saw the match in a very different light, reporting to her son that “poor Mathilde only determined regretfully to marry Willy.” Now she was “preparing herself with a truly angelic resignation for the sacrifice of her young heart’s dearest illusions. It has to be said that the prospect of being Willy’s lifelong companion wouldn’t entice a young woman brought up as she has been and blessed with a cultivated mind.” The question which remained to be resolved was whom Betty’s sons Alphonse and Gustave should marry. It seems that Hannah Mathilde had in fact set her heart on the latter, while her sister Julie had hoped to marry Alphonse. But, after teasing her son on the subject, Betty reported that:

This was good news for Charlotte, who was planning a similar double match between Betty’s sons and her daughters Leonora and Evelina. In her diary, she coolly weighed up the respective merits of the two putative sons-in-law:

She was only half-successful: nine years later it was Alphonse’s profile she saw at the altar, alongside her daughter Leonora. By that time, moreover, she had revised her opinion of the bridegroom. Now he seemed “a man, who perhaps for ten of fifteen years has run the round of the world—is completely blase, can neither admire nor love—and yet demands the entire devotion of his bride, her slavish devotion.” Still, she concluded, it was “better so—the man whose passions are dead, whose feelings have lost all freshness, all depth, is likely to prove a safe husband, and the wife will probably find happiness in the discharge, in the fulfilment of her duties. Her disenchantment will be bitter but not lasting.” In any case, her daughter attached “much importance to a certain position in the world, and would not like to descend from what she fancies to be the throne of the R’s to be the bride of a humbler man.”
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Such sentiments were doubtless based on Charlotte’s own experience, and tell us much about the distinctive quality of such arranged marriages.

The extent to which parental choice was decisive should not, of course, be exaggerated. The fact that Charlotte failed to secure Alphonse’s brother for her other daughter suggests that parents were less able to impose their choices of spouse on their children than had previously been the case. Anselm’s daughter Julie also successfully repelled the advances of her cousin Wilhelm Carl, as well as those of a more distant relation, Nathaniel Montefiore. On the other hand, her final “choice” of Adolph was strictly governed by her father and future father-in-law, who spent months drawing up the marriage contract; and although such negotiations often involved sums of money being settled individually on the bride-to-be to give her a measure of financial independence, this should not be mistaken for some sort of proto-feminism.
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There were limits to what the Rothschilds were prepared to inflict on their daughters, as became apparent when old Amschel announced shortly after his wife’s death that he wished to remarry none other than his own grand-niece, the much sought-after Julie (who was not yet twenty). The rest of the family—backed up by his doctors—closed ranks against this idea. But it is not known how far their opposition was actuated by fears for his health as opposed to the happiness of the young lady in question: James for one appears to have worried that, if Amschel’s proposal were rejected too abruptly, he might withdraw his capital from the firm and marry a stranger.

As Charlotte emphasised, endogamy continued to be partly a function of the Rothschilds’ Judaism: the family policy remained that sons and daughters could not marry outside their faith (even if they were socially so superior to their co-religionists that they could not marry outside the family either). The extent of Rothschild religious commitment in this period should not be underestimated: if anything, it was greater than had been the case in the 1820s and 1830s, and this was another important source of familial unity in the period after 1848. James continued to be the least strict in his observance. “Well, I wish you a hearty good Sabbath,” he wrote to his nephews and son in 1847. “I hope you are having a good time and a good hunt. Are you eating well, drinking well and sleeping well as is the wish of your loving uncle and father?” As the existence of such a letter itself testifies, he saw nothing wrong with being at his desk on the Sabbath. He and Carl also were conspicuously erratic in their attendance at synagogue (unlike their wives).

Yet James remained as firmly convinced of the functional importance of the family’s Jewish identity as he had been in the days of Hannah Mayer’s apostasy. Although he very nearly forgot the date of Passover in 1850, he was nevertheless willing to cancel a business trip to London in order to read the Haggadah. He was happy to receive the Frankfurt rabbi Leopold Stein’s new book in 1860 (though the size of the donation he sent Stein is not recorded). His wife Betty was as secular-minded as her husband, but she too had a strong sense that observance was a social if not a spiritual imperative. When she heard that her son Alphonse had attended the synagogue in New York, she declared herself “over the moon,” adding:

That said, it was evidently something of a surprise to her that Alphonse had gone to the synagogue of his own volition.

Wilhelm Carl meanwhile remained the only Orthodox member of the younger generation. Continuing his uncle Amschel’s campaign against the Reformist tendencies of the Frankfurt community, he supported the creation of a new Israelite Religious Community for Orthodox believers, donating the lion’s share of the funds to build a new synagogue in the Schützenstrasse. Yet he opposed the outright schism advocated by the new community’s rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch, who wished his followers to withdraw altogether from the main Frankfurt community. Orthodox though he was, Wilhelm Carl shared the Rothschild view that diversity of practice should not compromise Jewish communal unity.

His English cousins also continued to consider themselves “good Israelites,” observing holy days and avoiding work on the Sabbath. James once teased Anthony when he was visiting Paris that he liked to pick up his prayer books, an impression of piety confirmed when his nephew dutifully fasted at Yom Kippur in 1849, despite fearing (wrongly) that it was medically inadvisable given the outbreak of cholera then sweeping Paris. It was typical that he and Lionel had to supply Nat with
matzot
when he was in Paris during Passover. Even when on holiday in Brighton, Lionel and his family celebrated Yom Kippur, fasting and praying on the Day of Atonement. But the four London-born brothers were not Orthodox in the way that Wil helm Carl was. In 1851 Disraeli unthinkingly sent Charlotte and Lionel a large joint of venison he had been given by the Duke of Portland: