1The Mother of the Business
THE MOTHER OF the Rothschild dynasty was born in a dark and crowded ghetto in 1753. For centuries prior to Gutle Schnapper’s birth, the Jews of Frankfurt had been confined to a strip of land that curved around the edge of the city’s eastern fortifications.1 This was the Judengasse, or ‘Jews’ Lane’, and Gutle could expect to live her life within its confines. Frankfurt Jews were born among the Judengasse’s densely packed houses, they worshipped in its shul and shopped at its market; they studied, worked and died there.
The boundaries of their world had been rigidly fixed by the city council centuries before, and were unresponsive to the ghetto’s growing population. Over the centuries, with nowhere else to go, the buildings had been forced upwards, and cantilevered overhangs had been constructed to maximise living space on the same small footprint.2 By the time Gutle was old enough to walk along the lane, the slice of sky visible above her would have been no wider than a pair of outstretched arms. There was so little daylight that visitors were struck by how pale the Jews looked. The dense, smoky air and the open sewers made it hard to breathe.
During the nightly curfew, and on Christian holidays, the gates at the end of the Judengasse were closed, and the Jewish population entirely confined. At other times Jews venturing outside the ghetto were subject to an array of threatening and humiliating regulations. If they visited any of the Gentiles’ streets and markets, Jews were forbidden to touch fruit and vegetables. If anyone, even a child, said ‘Jud, mach mores!‘ (‘Jew, do your duty!’), they were obliged to raise their hat and step aside.3 Unsurprisingly, some chose to remain within the confines of the Judengasse. On the outside of the ghetto gates hung the sign of the imperial eagle, symbolising that the Jews lived under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Jews living in the lane were under no illusions: this was not a refuge, but a prison.
The Judengasse occupies the north-eastern quarter of the curved street that begins near the top of the bridge over the Main. It was constructed along the outside of the old (inner) city wall.
The houses of the Judengasse were not numbered. Instead, each was named after the shield that hung above the entrance: Red Shield, the Lion, the Lantern, the Cat. Gutle’s family, the Schnappers, lived in the Eule (Owl), just inside the ghetto’s gates and within earshot of the slaughterhouse. Built into the backyard of an older house, the Eule was not accessed from the street, but through an alley and a yard. Like most houses, it was occupied by more than one family: during Gutle’s childhood, the Schnappers had lived at the Eule along with the Geigers and the Scheyers.4
In relative terms, Gutle was fortunate. Since 1179, Christians had been banned from lending money at interest. Some of the city’s Jews, who were banned from many other lines of work, ended up establishing their own financial operations, banks catering to the needs of Christian and Jewish merchants alike.5 For several generations, the Schnappers had run one such business. When Gutle’s father, Wolf Salomon Schnapper, married Bella Gans in 1752, the Schnapper bank was doing 6 None of that meant the Schnapper family was immune to the perils – of fire and violence and disease – that haunted the lives of all Frankfurt Jews: Gutle’s mother Bella died when Gutle was only six. Desperate to keep the broader family and the alliance with his in-laws intact, her father soon arranged a new match, with his sister-in-law. Gutle’s aunt became her stepmother.7
The Schnappers were not the wealthiest or most prestigious family in the ghetto, but with their small business and a lineage that could be traced to one of the original ghetto families – the Gelhausers – they were highly reputable, and more prosperous than most.8 The Eule doubled up as the headquarters of the Schnappers’ operation, so Gutle spent her early years surrounded by the paraphernalia of a small eighteenth-century banking business. Wolf expected his first child to master basic literacy and numeracy, so that she could help in the family firm. In years to come, he knew, such abilities would allow Gutle to aid a future husband in his own work. Many businessmen in the Judengasse depended on their wives as a key source of unpaid labour, and Wolf Schnapper must have foreseen that Gutle’s competence in the business of a bank would aid her chances of finding a good husband in the ghetto. He could never have imagined the scale and significance of the dynasty that would spring from his first daughter’s marriage. At the root of the Rothschild empire is the figure of a small girl, fighting for air in the cramped world of the Frankfurt ghetto.
The Judengasse, c.1865.
The systems of physical and legal oppression confronted by the young Gutle had deep roots. Even before the physical walls of the ghetto were erected, the city’s Jews had been confined by harassment, hostility, legal disabilities and violence. Before the establishment of the ghetto, participation of Jews in the city’s financial life meant that the underlying hostility of the Christian population was periodically inflamed by business-related resentments, and for centuries periods of fragile tolerance were punctuated by massacres.9 In the pogrom of 1241, for example, more than three-quarters of the city’s Jewish community was killed. A century later, a wave of anti-Jewish violence swept through Europe in the wake of the Black Death, and Christians burnt the Jewish quarter to the ground.10
As Frankfurt continued to prosper on the world stage, the status of Jews was kept firmly in check. In 1372 a set of laws, the Stättigkeit, began to formalise various forms of discrimination, imposing strict rules and prohibitions on Jewish work, taxes and residential rights. Jews were accorded limited recognition well short of citizenship. In return they were encumbered by levies and obligations, including a 2,000-gulden ‘protection tax’ and a 250-gulden annual rent for their burial ground.11
The forced resettlement of the Jewish community became a serious prospect in 1431, when the Council of Basel, a general council of the Roman Catholic Church, ordered that Jews should only live in designated areas, away from other houses and places of Christian worship.12 Frankfurt’s Christian merchants had other, more pragmatic, reasons for wanting to expel their Jewish competitors from the commercial and trading centre of the city. The area chosen for Jewish 13
By 1610 nearly three thousand people were crowded into two hundred houses.14 New houses were built in the plots between old ones, then in the backyards of existing structures, or in the alleyways between them.15 When those spaces became scarce, non-residential structures such as stables were converted into human dwellings, existing buildings divided to accommodate multiple families, and further storeys were added. As buildings were subdivided, so were names: a house known as the Guldener Löwe (Golden Lion), for instance, became seven different residences, each with their own sign, among them the Löwenneck (Lion’s Corner) and the Löwengrube (Lion’s Den).16 Stagnant water and waste sat in the courtyards and passages, and the remains of the old moat ran with putrid sewage.
In the Christian parts of the city, the loathing felt for the Jewish population was shamelessly displayed in public ‘art’. One mural on the Brückenturm, an imposing tower that stood sentinel at the riverside entrance to Frankfurt, depicted a group of Jews dressed in traditional rabbinical clothing devouring the faeces of a pig, incited by the devil.17 Another, directly above it, showed a dead infant, his body punctured by stab wounds. The child was the victim of a ‘ritual murder’, a fictional practice whereby Jews allegedly slaughtered Christian children to use their blood in unleavened bread. Normally a tower would be a show of force to warn off external enemies. In Frankfurt, Jews were considered the enemies within.
Against this backdrop of claustrophobia and repression, the community into which Gutle was born had developed its own distinct politics and culture. Frankfurt’s Jews spoke their own dialect, Judendeutsch – a fusion of idiomatic German and Hebrew – and had their own governors, the Baumeister, who were every bit as susceptible to corruption and overreach as the Christian city authorities.18 Despite a legal ban on printing presses in the ghetto, the Frankfurt Jews published Hebrew commentaries, secular texts, manuals of religious observance and the popular ballads that became the soundtrack to Gutle’s childhood.19 The shul and mikveh were the first structures to be rebuilt and repaired after fires swept through the ghetto’s narrow streets in 1711 and 1721.20 A dynasty of rabbis dating back to the thirteenth century 21 Dotted among the communal buildings were wine and beer taverns and coffee houses. While the Stättigkeit forbade card games, dice games and roulette, other forms of gambling were allowed, so long as the stakes were no higher than a copper kreutzer.22
Inevitably, the ghetto had its own hierarchies.23 There were variations in legal status between those who’d been admitted to the rudimentary rights granted by the Stättigkeit, and others, such as visiting students and domestic servants.24 There were divisions in reputation, between esteemed figures such as doctors and rabbinic scholars, and those such as publicans and nightwatchmen whose occupations were thought of as lowly, and sometimes tainted by an association with criminality.25 There were divisions in wealth, between the destitute and the wealthy merchants or bankers, including those – the so-called ‘Court Jews’ – who held appointments as moneylenders or financiers to rulers of the patchwork territories that made up the Holy Roman Empire.
The men of the Frankfurt ghetto – by focusing on their business, their internal politics and their religious observances – had built a world of relative liberty within the severe limits of the Judengasse and the Stättigkeit. As a Jewess, however, Gutle Schnapper lacked access to even this limited freedom. On Friday evenings, after the start of the Shabbat, she was forbidden to walk in the city – women, it was thought, would ‘gather in groups’ and ‘bother people’ – and if she contravened this regulation, she could have been ‘pelted with faeces’ by the community wardens.26 Only married women could attend synagogue on Shabbat morning, and only women married to men born in the Judengasse were eligible for the Stättigkeit and the rights of residence that it conferred.27 Marriages had to be made quickly, and tactically. Only twelve were permitted each year in the ghetto.28
In 1770 Gutle was one of the lucky ones: Wolf Schnapper secured his daughter a match.29 On 29 August, after eight days of ritual confinement in her family home, she made her way along the Judengasse to the courtyard of the Great Synagogue. The man who stood waiting for her had a calm gaze and ‘eyes that reflected his sanity and good sense’.30 He wore the bridegroom’s prayer shawl, the tallit, over a hooded cloak. She was just seventeen years old.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Gutle’s husband and founder of the Rothschild bank.
His family was less wealthy than hers, and had a reputation for piety. Yet the man Gutle was to marry was not rabbinic or scholarly. He had spent the last few years as an apprentice in a bank at Hanover, and since his return to the ghetto had been developing a small business of his own.
His name was Mayer Amschel Rothschild.
‘Rothschild’ derived from the name of a house in the Judengasse: the Rotes Schild, or Red Shield, had been built by an ancestor of Mayer Amschel’s in around 1567.31 At the time, ‘zum Roten Schild‘ – ‘of the red shield’ – had been only a moniker, but over the years it became the name by which the family that lived in the house was known. By the time Mayer Amschel’s great-great-grandfather moved from the Rotes Schild to the Hinterpfann in the mid seventeenth century, the association between the family and their old house was strong enough for the name to move with them. The Rothschild family had come into being.32
The Rothschilds were still living at the Hinterpfann three generations later, when, in 1744, Mayer Amschel was born to Amschel Moses Rothschild and his wife Schönche. When Mayer Amschel’s parents both died within a year of each other, his studies at the famous yeshiva at Fürth were interrupted.33 His brothers sent him to Hamburg, to 34 Collectors of antique coins were predominantly aristocratic, so by the time he returned to Frankfurt, aged eighteen, he had not only become an adept coin dealer but had formed a significant business network.35 In September 1769 one client in that network, the voracious coin collector William, crown prince of Hesse, granted Mayer Amschel the title of Hoffaktor (court agent).36 The title was an important sign that Mayer Amschel was on the ascent, and there is little doubt that this recent aristocratic patronage won over Wolf Schnapper.37
Mayer Amschel had everything to gain from the match. The Schnappers were a reputable family with which to ally, and Gutle’s ample dowry of 2,400 gulden was crucial capital for his growing business, which was diversifying from coin trading into antiques and textiles, and would soon come to specialise in another field: banking.38
The union of two such prominent families was an important community event, performed in front of a large crowd that included the chief rabbi, the heads of the community and legal scholars.39 During the ceremony, Gutle and Mayer Amschel stood side by side to take their vows, their wedding girdles hooked together with metal eyelets as a symbol of their union.40 As the ceremony concluded, the couple threw a wine glass against the synagogue wall to signify the destruction of the ancient Temple as related in the Torah.
Gutle and Mayer Amschel’s first marital home was the Hinterpfann, where Mayer Amschel had spent his childhood and where his two brothers, Moses and Carl, still lived. Meaning ‘back of the pan’, it was less poetically named than the Owl – and a less poetic property. The narrow, cramped house was wedged against the ghetto wall and could only be reached by a tight alley between the buildings in front of it.41 Though the house backed onto the ghetto’s eastern wall and the tree-lined avenue of der lange Gang, many windows looking out of the ghetto from the upper floors of houses had been bricked up in order to save Christians the ‘indignity’ of being overlooked by Jews. As the poet Ludwig Börne said of a similar house on the Judengasse: ‘the sunlight seemed never to enter the narrow walls with their low ceilings’.42
It was within such gloomy walls that Gutle started her family: Jeannette was born in August 1771. She was followed by Amschel Mayer 43 Even by the standards of the period, the frequency of Gutle’s pregnancies was unusual; she would be pregnant at least nineteen times. Some pregnancies did not go full-term, and some of her children died in infancy. Ten would survive to adulthood.44
But Gutle was not just producing and nurturing the next generation of Rothschilds. During this period of steady financial growth, Mayer Amschel needed all the help he could get, particularly with cashing and issuing bills.45 Raised in a similar environment at the Eule, Gutle brought experience and commercial acumen to the bank’s Kontor (counting house), as well as to the management of household finances. She economised ruthlessly, despite the family’s burgeoning wealth, allocating just a small proportion of their income to the household expenses.46 She was the epitome of a thrifty matriarch, who, according to a close friend, ‘spent nothing, always saved’.47 In the cramped, overcrowded space of the Hinterpfann, Gutle was constantly on the move, tending to her ever-increasing brood of children, overseeing the domestic accounts, cooking and cleaning – all the while pumping money back into the business.
Gutle’s practical contributions remained largely unappreciated by the family’s men. One of her sons, Carl, would later write a letter to his older brother Salomon, in which he caustically stated that women make ‘bad cashiers’.48 Much like the Jews of Frankfurt themselves, the women of the Rothschild business tirelessly turned the wheels of industry, and were often rewarded with contempt.
2‘Merely a Machine’
IN NOVEMBER 1786 a thriving business meant that Gutle and Mayer Amschel could move out of the Hinterpfann and buy a house of their own. Situated roughly half-way along the Judengasse, the Grünes Schild (Green Shield) faced west, along a small alley that led to the ghetto’s middle gate, the only one that entered directly into the old city. Thanks to the break in the houses opposite, and the unusual width of the lane in front of the house, the Grünes Schild was better ventilated and lighter than almost any other on the street.1 The staircase to the first floor, though steep and narrow, was adorned with ‘beautiful iron handrails’ rather than dirty ropes. At the front of the first floor was the gute Stube, or ‘better living room’, where, for a short precious time in the evening, sunlight would pour through the gap in the houses opposite, and through the mullioned windows.2 Besides being one of the most recognisable houses on the street, it was also one of the best-appointed. It had its own well in the cellar, and a hand-pump to draw water up to the kitchen.3
The Grünes Schild was a bustling and chaotic household, cluttered with catalogues, coins, and an expanding range of other stock that Mayer Amschel had accumulated as his business diversified into antiques: woodcarvings, rare stones and medals. There was also a growing cohort of children, four of whom were born in the years after the move: Carl (1788), Julie (1790), Henriette (1791) and James (1792).4 Later, when the house had become famous for the dynasty that sprang from it and was redesigned for visitors, the Kontor – which occupied a narrow outbuilding at the back of the house – would be neatly furnished with a money chest or Geldkiste, a stand-up desk with a high stool, and a cupboard for ledgers.5 The late eighteenth-century reality was a hectic, disorderly place in which cupboard doors hung open, papers were left out, few things were locked, and clients and family members came and went constantly.6 The one place that was truly secure was a second ‘secret’ cellar, which was accessible through a trapdoor under the stairs.7
The Grünes Schild, where Gutle and Mayer Amschel lived from 1786.
In autumn 1792, a few short months after the birth of Gutle’s youngest son James, the French Revolutionary Wars reached Frankfurt and the Judengasse. French forces stormed the city. By October the Tricolour was fluttering over the arsenal outside the northern gate leading to the Judengasse.8 Frankfurt’s Jews remained largely unmoved by the force’s rhetoric of liberté, égalité, fraternité: such words did little to alleviate the day-to-day thefts, humiliations and outrages of the occupation, the burden of which fell disproportionately on the residents of the Judengasse.9 Besides, there was no reason to think that the French occupation would last. Indeed, French forces ceded the city to Prussian and Hessian troops, who in turn capitulated to the Austrians. When the French advanced again in July 1796, they did so to devastating effect, with a ferocious bombardment. In the Judengasse, a fire ignited by shelling spread quickly. The Grünes Schild survived, but 119 houses – about half of the houses on the lane – were destroyed.10
From the ashes of this latest devastation, hope would grow for residents of the ghetto. Given the sheer scale of destruction, the Frankfurt city council had little choice but to relax the regulations and allow Jews who had been made homeless to temporarily rent accommodation in the city. In April 1798 it gave permission for Jews to leave the ghetto on Sundays and Christian holidays – in exchange for a yearly payment.11 Though the city’s new policy of defortification was motivated largely by military rather than moral considerations – the fortifications had only intensified the onslaught to which Frankfurt was subjected by advancing armies – it would have significant benefits for the Jewish community: as part of the programme, the bridge tower or Brückenturm was torn down, along with the infamous murals, against which Frankfurt’s Jews had protested for many years. In 1803, after considerable debate, it was finally agreed that the gates and main wall of the Judengasse would be destroyed, and the lane widened.12
The trauma of occupation had begun when Gutle’s youngest children were still infants and her eldest were embarking on apprenticeships, business engagements and marriages. Soon after the birth of her last child, James, in 1792, Gutle’s eldest daughter Jeannette married Benedict Moses Worms. Her dowry (5,000 gulden) and the legacy promised to her (10,000 gulden) attest to the rapid rise in the family’s fortunes during this period.13 Gutle was used to the idea that her sons might travel to other German towns for work, education and training. But as the business grew, her sons moved farther afield. In 1798, when her third son, Nathan, left the Continent and sailed for England, it was an unprecedented wrench. At the Grünes Schild, Gutle had to endure weeks, sometimes months, without word from Nathan. Their only means of communication was an erratic postal system.14
Gutle’s maternal instincts and her frugality ran deep. Even as Nathan began to amass his own fortune abroad, she was still keen to send food and clothing.15 Just to the west of the ghetto walls, next to the Jewish cemetery, was the community’s Bleichgarten, or bleaching ground. Here Gutle arrayed her resources, allotting different pieces of fabric to be made into tablecloths, shirts, scarves and other items, which were transported to England by trusted associates. ‘I sent with Kassel and Reiss 6 shirts,’ she wrote to Nathan in a rare surviving letter, ‘and with Israel Reiss also 6 shirts, 2 scarfs, and with Michael Bing you will get 2 tablecloths. If you write the length and width, I shall send you more.’16 In letters to Nathan and Carl, she wrote that ‘not a 17 As further children moved away from the Grünes Schild, this feeling intensified. Her experience of the emptying house is captured in a later letter, written to Gutle’s eldest son Amschel by his wife Eva, while the former was away travelling: ‘Tonight, I will certainly feel as your mother did all the time, and shall have to cry at the table.’18
Copyright © 2021 by Natalie Livingstone
