Rothschild the First

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18544, 18 August 1928, Page 19 (Supplement)

Rothschild the First

you -went down the Rhine . long since, and were new to it, and rejoiced in the old imperial cities one after another, you did two things on your first morning in Frankfort. In the Grosse Hirschgraben you saw in what a bright exact house, underl'urnished yet fastidious, the sanity of Goethe's genius was formed in his boyhood* Then you went down what used to be the Judengasse, where name, and scene are transformed, but the oid home of the Rothschilds is left standing. In the dark, packed,

clamorous, yet enigmatic street, it was a cramped, beetling house, dingy without like its neighbours. Within, when the foundations of greatness were being solidly laid by Meyer Amschel—who made himself and made them all—every inch of space had to be turned to account. Below the first counting-house was a cubicle. There was a tiny garden on the roof. In the walls of several rooms were secret cupboards and shelves. The place was steeped in secrecy. Then and after, this audacious and tenacious family learned other people's secrets and guarded their own. ...

Meyer Amschel was a wonderful person, without show or a polished education. But it is a mistake to suggest, as some do. that at the start he kept cn ordinary kind of old curiosity shop and was little above the pedlars. So-

cially he belonged to the middle stratum. of the Ghetto. Born a few years before Goethe in the same city, and schooled as a boy for the rabbinate, he set up in a small way as a moneychanger and general dealer. Germany, broken up into hundreds of fragments since the Thirty Years’ War, had a bewildering medley of currencies, and even a short journey might involve conundrums of exchange. Meyer Amschel studied coins not only a dealer but as a connoisseur. Even as a young man he became an expert numismatist.. His hobby was the key to his fortunes. He could cater for collectors. This fact helped to bring him more and more into relations ultimately as chief agent, with a neighbouring potentate who was not only a collector but a Croessus—and otherwise an indescribable personage not to be paralleled except in the miner German States during the eighteenth century—J. L. Garvin, in “The Observer.’’