Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born in 1743 or 1744 in Frankfurt’s Judengasse, a ghetto locked at night and on Christian holidays, where his family lived behind an 11-foot-wide house front with more than 30 people. The name came from an ancestor’s house sign, zum roten Schild, the red shield; from 1664 the family actually lived in a house called Hinterpfann, the back of the saucepan. Orphaned by 1756, he apprenticed in 1757 at the Hanover bank of Simon Wolf Oppenheimer, learning to weigh coins and trade among the Holy Roman Empire’s many currencies. Back in Frankfurt in 1763 he dealt in rare coins, won the patronage of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Hesse, and became a court factor in 1769.
When Wilhelm became Landgrave in 1785, Rothschild became his trusted banker, handling British payments for Hessian troops during the French Revolutionary wars. After Napoleon drove Wilhelm into exile in 1806, Rothschild kept investing the prince’s money in London and ran goods through Napoleon’s Continental System with couriers, chartered ships and double-bottomed carriages. He sent his son Nathan to England in 1798 with 20,000 pounds, formed a partnership with his elder sons in 1810, and sent his youngest son Jacob to Paris in 1811; the brothers moved funds to Wellington’s army in Portugal by balancing family accounts instead of shipping gold. In 1811 he financed the 440,000-florin fee Frankfurt demanded for Jewish civil rights. He died on September 19, 1812.
- Forbes ranked him seventh on its 2005 list of the most influential businessmen in history.
- He married Gutle Schnapper in 1770, and they had ten children, five of them sons.
- Solomon went to Vienna, Carl to Naples and Amschel ran Frankfurt, forming the five arrows.
- He structured the payment for Frankfurt’s Jewish civil rights as a loan at a profit.
- Emperor Francis I of Austria ennobled him posthumously in 1817, and he is buried in the old Jewish cemetery beside the ghetto.
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