What I learned from reading Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild by Amos Elon.
Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the foul smelling alley in Frankfurt, where, in the second half of the 18th century, a disenfranchised jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a european banking dynasty.
Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy and ingenuity.
He raised five famously gifted sons, veritable money making machines to carry on his work.
After him, their names overshadowed his own and became synonymous with colossal wealth, extravagant living and hidden political power.
A century after his death, you could still ask, in all seriousness, if a great war was still possible in Europe, if the house of Rothschild set their face against it.
Rothschild's origins were certainly modest.
There was little reason to foresee his destiny.
The personal circumstances of his life were difficult throughout.
They suggest a saga not only political and financial, but also human and dramatic.
More dramatic, perhaps, than that of his flamboyant sons.
The sons, after all, were not persecuted human beings, legally confined to the squalor of a congested ghetto.
The old ghetto where Rothschild lived his entire life was a narrow lane, more slum like and overcrowded than any other tenement in Frankfurt.
A close compound, it was shut off from the rest of the city by high walls and three heavy gates.
The gates were guarded by soldiers and locked at night and all day on Sunday.
In it lived the largest jewish community in Germany in conditions of total isolation and apartheid.
That was a description of the unbelievably terrible conditions that the Rothschild dynasty sprang from.
And it's an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is founder, a portrait of the first Rothschild and his time.
And it was written by Amos Elon.
Okay, so just a few things before I jump into the book.
One, this is going to be part one of a three part series on the Rothschild dynasty.