How influential are the Rothschilds throughout history?

How influential are the Rothschilds throughout history?


An earlier version of this text was first published at Quora.


The Rothschild Coat of Arms

INTRODUCTION

The Rothschild dinasty has been subject of much speculation over the last quarter of millenium. Their rise to power is somewhat indistinguishable from the rise of the financial industry they spearheaded. For that, they’ve been both venerated and vilified. They’ve inspired both eager financiers and conspiracy theorists. For the latter, they’ve become the very embodiment Jewish evil for Europe’s rampant anti-semitism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Here is a supercondensed version of their history. There are much richer narratives on the web, though they are interspersed with the aforementioned speculation. I’ve endeavoured to filter that as much as possible, leaving the reader with only the facts and for him to speculate to his heart’s content.

I did include, however, along with the text, quotes from various sources, some directly about the Rothschilds, some indirectly, others about the financial industry they spearheaded, and some from the Rothschilds themselves. Some are from primary sources, others are attributed. The quotes illustrate how the Rothschilds were perceived, and still are, the sourced ones by their authors, and the others by those who attributed to them.

As noted above, much of what follows has been used to justify anti-semitism. Indeed it has. It is nonetheless informative to consider both the facts and their narrative to understand their interplay, and how much the Rothschilds influenced the world around us as well as the world within us.

Without further ado…

THE ROTHSCHILDS

Late 1700s till early 1800s

“Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet.”
Heinrich Heine, poet and a close friend of James (Jakob) Rothchild, 1840 [7].

Mayer Amschel Rothschild started out in 1763 as a rare coin dealer. In 1769he was appointed Crown Agent to the Principality of Hesse-Hansau. In 1785 he became a banker for Wilhelm IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and handled Britain’s payments to Hessian mercenaries during the French Revolution.

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!”
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, attributed by Gertrude M. Coogan (1935) [12], or maxim of the House of Rothschild as attributed by one Mr. Daniel (1914) [21].

In 1812, Mayer sent his youngest son Jakob to Paris, where he opened the Banque MM. de Rothschild Frères, which later became a finance giant in Paris. By that time Mayer’s third son, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, had already established himself in London since 1798 with one of Europe’s most powerful banking institutions: N. M. Rothschild & Sons. From 1813 to 1815, Nathan almost single-handedly financed the British Crown and its continental allies in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1815 alone, he lent US$10.1 billion to Britain’s continental allies (indexed by average earnings, Ferguson 2008).

“Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”
Napoleon Bonaparte (1815), attributed by R. McNair Wilson (1933) [14]

Nathan learned a day ahead of everyone else that England had won the Battle of Waterloo. To capitalise on the victory, instead of buying more Crown bonds from traders, he dumped his onto the market, misleading the street to infer that England had lost. A fire-sale ensued, and Nathan bought them all back at 95% discount, multiplying his wealth 20-fold in 3 days.

“The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”
The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York (1863) attributed by Senator John Sherman.

In 1822, along with his four brothers, Jakob was bestowed the hereditary title of “Freiherr” (Baron) by Emperor Francis I of Austria, and adopted the name James de Rothschild. That same year he was appointed consul-general of the Austrian Empire, and in 1823 was awarded the French Legion of Honor. In1825 Nathan bailed out the Bank of England, establishing himself as Britain’s lender of last resort.

“Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign
     O’er congress, whether royalist or liberal?
Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain? [*]
     (That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.)
Who keep the world, both old and new, in pain
     Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all?
The shade of Buonaparte’s noble daring? —
Jew Rothschild, and his fellow-Christian, Baring.”
Don Juan, George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1823.

In 1835 Nathan secured a contract with the Spanish Government giving him the rights to the Almadén quicksilver mines in southern Spain, effectively gaining the monopoly of mercury in Europe. In 1845, the French government awarded the Rothschilds the contract to build the Nord line, the coutry’s first major railway. Nathan’s son, Lionel de Rothschild, was elected London’s MP in1847.

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, Unsourced.

Late 1800s till early 1900s

The Rothschilds became increasingly involved in ever larger transactions:
1871 Loaned France $1m thaler to cover part of its war reparations to Prussia.
1873 Bought out loss-making Rio Tinto copper mines.
1875 Financed Britain’s £4m purchase of 44% of the Suez Canal. [5]
1886 Founded the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company.
1887 Financed the establishment of De Beers.
1894 Baron Mayer de Rothschild’s son-in-law, the Earl of Roseberry, became British Prime Minister.

“I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people.”
Reginald McKenna, as Chairman of the Midland Bank, addressing stockholders in 1924.

At that time, J.P. Morgan, America’s richest man at the time, financed John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Edward Harriman’s railroads and Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills.

“Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing.”
Ralph M Hawtry, former US Secretary to the Treasury.

In 1895, at the depths of the Panic of 1893, the Federal Treasury was nearly out of gold. President Grover Cleveland accepted Morgan’s offer to join with the Rothschilds and supply the U.S. Treasury with 3.5 million ounces of gold to restore the treasury surplus in exchange for a 30-year bond issue. [6]

“Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are the United States government’s institutions. They are not government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign swindlers.”
Congressional Record 12595-12603 — Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the Committee on Banking and Currency (12 years) 10 Jun 1932.

In 1907, J.P. Morgan and partners cornered the overextended US private banks, and generated a bank run. Morgan offered to bring liquidity back to the market through the issuance of his own currency. He indeed reestablished confidence in credit markets and was heralded a national hero by then Princeton University’s president, one Woodrow Wilson.

“The bank mania is one of the most threatening of these imitations. It is raising up a moneyed aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance [23]. I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1816-17. [24]

Wilson recommended appointing “a committee of six or seven public-spirited men like J.P. Morgan to handle the affairs of [the] country”, which Theodore Roosevelt promptly did. He created the National Monetary Committee (NMC), which included J.P. Morgan, and was chaired by who would later be John D. Rockefeller’s co-father-in-law, senator Nelson Aldrich from Rhode Island.

“If congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.”
Andrew Jackson.

After extensively consulting with private central bankers in England, France and Germany, Aldrich returned in 1910 and chaired a secret meeting in Jekyll Island. Other than J.P. Morgan and Aldrich, the meeting included Frank Vanderlip, then president of National City Bank of New York and Paul Warburg. Warburg had been hired by Kuhn, Lobe and Co., an investment firm, to lobby for a privately owned central bank in the US.

“Issue of currency should be lodged with the government and be protected from domination by Wall Street. We are opposed to…provisions [which] would place our currency and credit system in private hands.”
Theodore Roosevelt.

On 23 Dec 1913, when most of Congress had gone home for Christmas, Woodrow Wilson, then US president, signed the Federal Reserve Act into law.

“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men… We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”
Woodrow Wilson, 1913. [13]

In 1919 the first Gold Fix takes place at the offices of N M Rothschild & Sons in London. In 1926 they finance London’s Tube.

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their  currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of  all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Thomas Jefferson in the debate over the Re-charter of the Bank Bill (1809).

Warburg’s contact at Kuhn, Lobe & Co., Jacob Schiff, was his brother’s father-in-law, and their grandparents had shared a house with the Rothschilds back in Frankfurt. Since then, the two families maintained a strong bond between them. In 1913, Jacob Schiff funded the Russian Revolutionaries with $20m USD to overthrow the Czar of Russia [20]. That eventually happened four years later. The Russian nobility had steadfastly refused to allow European financiers to set up a private central bank in Russia.

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”
James Madison.

For this reason, in 1863, Czar Alexandre II sent part of his naval fleet to San Francisco in aid to Lincoln’s battle against the South, which in turn was aided by Britain and France. [2] [3]

On that same year, Lincoln had issued the first USD to finance his troops, freeing the Union’s finances from European-backed lenders, thus cutting short substantial revenue of Europe’s private central banks. The Czar knew that a victory of the South would strengthen its backers, and enable them to have another go at Russia.

“The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of  consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.”
Abraham Lincoln (1865) [18] attributed by Michael Rowbotham (1998) [19]

In 1865, Lincoln was assassinated.

“The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilization.”
Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), German Chancellor.

Seventeen years before that, in 1848, Marx and Engels had published their Communist Manifesto. Marx’s grandmother was a first cousin of Nathan MayerRothschild’s wife. Nathan’s brother, James, was also a close friend of Marx’s equally close friend, the poet Heinrich Heine. In 1882 the Manifesto arrived in Russia. A 35-year generation later, the Manifesto inspired the 1917 Russian Revolution that took down the Czar.

“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer.

MK Mordechai Nurock at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the Knesset; behind him are the President, Knesset Speaker, and Dorothy deRothschild, 14 Oct 1958.

On that same year, 1917, on 2 Nov, UK’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, had sent a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, great-grandson of Nathan Mayer Rothschild. That letter became known as the Balfour Declaration. [4] Thirty-one years later, on 14 May 1948, Israel was proclaimed, and in 1956, it was made public that Baron James de Rothschildhad left $6m Israeli liras in his will for the construction of the Knesset. It was inaugurated on 30 Aug 1966 in the presence of the baron’s widow, Dorothy deRothschild. [9] [10]

In 1938, the Austrian Rothschilds’ interests were seized by the Nazis, bringing to an end more than a century at the heart of middle European banking. [16]

“Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and this the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” Adolf Hitler, Speech to the Reichstag, 30 Jan 1941. [15]

Lustige Blätter (v. 27, 1943) suggests that the Jews controlled the Allied forces.

Late 1900s till early 2000s

On 4 Jun 1963, Kennedy transferred the authority of issuing silver certificates from the Federal Reserve to the US Treasury. On 22 Nov 1963, he was assassinated. On 15 Aug 1971, Richard Nixon terminated the gold standard, crowning the USD the de facto world currency.

“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society. […] For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy. […] It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.”
President John F. Kennedy, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, 27 April 1961.

“After visiting these two places you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country, which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”
John F. Kennedy, personal diary, 1 August 1945. [22]

In 1969, former Rothschild general manager, George Pompidou was elected President of France. In 1985, Lord Victor Rothschild, former MI5 spy, advised Thatcher on the privatisation of Britsh Gas, and in 1986 penned the policy paper that spurred her nemesis: the Poll Tax. Victor was Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s father-in-law.

Does ‘R.F.’ mean Republique Francaise or Rothschild Freres?
New York Times, 25 Jun 1967.

In 1976 Victor passed his chairmanship of N M Rothschild & Sons to Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild. At the time, since 1972, Evelyn had already been chairman of The Economist, a position he held until 1989, the year he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. On 30 Nov 2000, Bill Clinton had him over at the White House to spend his honeymoon. On that same year, N M Rothschild& Sons advised the British government on 3G mobile phone licensing. [9]

Evelyn is a Governor of the London School of Economics, served as Chairman of the Delegacy of St Mary’s Hospital Medical School from 1977 to 1988, a Council Member of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a trustee of the Shakespeare Globe Trust, Chairman of The Princess Royal Trust for Carers since 1988, and was founding chairman of The European Association for Banking and Financial History in Frankfurt from 1990 until 2004.

Victor’s son Jacob Rothschild is Chairman of RIT Capital Partners plc, one of the largest investment trusts quoted on the London Stock Exchange with a net asset value of over £2 billion. In 1989, he joined forces with the Anglo-French financial tycoon Sir James Goldsmith (Oliver Stone’s inspiration for Gordon Gecko in Wall Street) and Australia’s wealthiest man Kerry Packer on an unsuccessful bid for British American Tobacco. In 2002 he hosted the European Economic Round Table conference at his country estate; attendees included James Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, Nicky Oppenheimer, Warren Buffett and Arnold Schwarzenegger. On October 2003, Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California.

Warren Buffett, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jacob Rothschild

On that same year, 2003, Russia’s wealthiest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky passed his YUKOS stock to Jacob just prior to his arrest. From November 2003 until his retirement in 2008, he was Deputy Chairman of BSkyB Television, and in 2006 Jacob became a Founding Partner and Advisory Board Member of the Xander Group in India, with over $2 billion USD in infrastructure, hospitality, entertainment, retail and real estate under management. In 2011, Jacob Rothschild bought 25% of former JP Morgan Investment Bank co-chief executive Bill Winters’ new investment firm Renshaw Bay [11]. In 2010, Jacob paid $10 million USD for 5% of Genie Energy, a subsidiary of IDT Corp, which is advised by former vice president Dick Cheney. In 2012, Sarah Palin hired former IDT executive Michael Glassner as her chief of staff. In 2013, Genie Energy was granted exclusive oil and gas exploration rights in Israeli occupied Golan Heights, Syria [22].

[1] Rothschild family
[2] “British shipyard (John Laird and Sons) [built] two warships for the Confederacy, including the CSS Alabama, over vehement protests from the United States.” – Britain in the American Civil War
[3] “[S]everal major industries in France and Emperor Napoleon III had economic interests or territorial ambitions which favored dealings with the Confederacy.” – France in the American Civil War
[4] The Rothschild Archive :: Genealogy
[5] Suez Canal
[6] The Golden Touch
[7] HEINE, Heinrich. Lutetia. Parte I, Paris, 31 March, 1841.
[8] Ferguson, Niall, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, (London 2008).
[9] The Rothschild Archive :: Timeline
[10] The Knesset’s Early Years
[11] Rothschilds confirms backing for ex JP Morgan chief’s new firm
[12] Coogan, Gertrude M., Money Creators, 1935.
[13] Wilson, Woodrow, The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People, Chapter VIII, New York and Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913.
[14] Wilson, R. McNair (1933). Monarchy or Money Power. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. OCLC 3561268. Reprinted as God and the Goldsmiths. Hawthorne, Calif.: Omni Publications. 1961. OCLC 3088576.
[15] Hitler’s Threats Against the Jews
[16] The Rothschild History from 1914 to 1945
[17] W. Adams, Silas,The Legalized Crime of Banking, 1958.
[18] Lincoln, Abraham, Senate document, v. 23, p. 91, 1865.
[19] Rowbothom, Michael, The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics, p. 220.
[20] Sutton, Anton,How western capitalists funded Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the Soviet Union, 1974, source: Reformed Theology
[21] United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Banking and Currency, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Banking and Currency, U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1914 – Rural credit
[22] Israel Grants First Golan Heights Oil Drilling licence To Dick Cheney-Linked Company
[23] Letter to Josephus B. Stuart (May 10, 1817) ME 15:112; reported in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (1904), vol. 15, p. 112.
[24] Letter to John Taylor (28 May 1816) ME 15:23.

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