THE founder of the Rothschild financial power was Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1743-1812), born in the Frankfort ghetto; his father [Moses Amschel Bauer — JR, ed.] was a banker and sent his son to study for the rabbinate, but the latter was more attracted by the handling of money, and took a post in Oppenheim’s bank at Hanover. In 1760, he started business for himself at Frankfort when only 17 years of age. It is interesting to note that the house in which he lived, which was divided into two parts, was owned, until Amschel purchased it, by the forebears of Jacob Schiff, the Jew who became head of the New York firm of Jew bankers Kuhn Loeb & Co. In fact, Jacob Schiff’s father was broker to the Rothschilds. At that period, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, Frederick II., was one of the richest men in Europe, having made immense sums by hiring out his subjects as mercenaries to serve in the armies of other nations, particularly Britain. These mercenaries were the “Hessian troops” we heard so much about at school. But as Amschel Rothschild never contacted Frederick II. In business matters, he had nothing to do with the arrangements made for the hiring of the Hessians, drunken and useless as they were, to attempt to subdue the Americans in their revolt known as the War of Independence, 1773-83. It is necessary to emphasise this, as the contrary is often stated in anti-Jewish books. It was the firm of Van der Notten in England that handled the financing of that business. But Frederick’s son and heir, William, took an interest in coin-collecting, which Amschel Rothschild cunningly served and so gradually obtained some sort of notice from William. This was the beginning of the association of the Rothschilds with the house of Hesse-Cassel which laid the foundation of the Rothschild Money Power. Worming his way into William’s favour by means of supplying him with rare coins for the latter’s collection, Amschel began to gain William’s interest, although not yet his confidence. In 1769 when he was only 25 years old, Amschel secured from William the designation of Crown regent to Hesse-Hanau, but this was a mere title without official status, so Amschel found it necessary to cultivate the favour of William’s treasurer Buderus to assist him gradually to overcome the suspicion with which William naturally regarded him. Apart from bill-discounting for William who had succeeded his father as Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel in 1795, a business which had to be shared with many others, no big business for William came into Rothschild’s hands until 1800. William of Hesse-Cassel was now enormously rich by inheritance. But Amschel had many other irons in the fire, connected with financing and trading in the war-necessities of the countries engaged in the struggle with Napoleon, and by 1800, he was, chiefly through such work, the tenth richest Jew in Frankfort. By this time he had worked himself into the Landgrave’s favour, and in 1803 (during which year William was promoted to the title and powers of Elector) Rothschild acted as middleman in secret for the loan of the Elector’s money to Denmark, and from that time frequently invested large sums for William with handsome commissions and perquisites. Rothschild had a large family to support, of which his five sons were Amschel (whom I shall call Amschel II.), Solomon, Nathan, Karl and James. As is well-known, these five sons ultimately managed branches of the Rothschild business in the principal financial centres of Europe, Amschel II. succeeding his father in Frankfort, Solomon settling in Vienna, Nathan in London, Karl in Naples and James in Paris. At the period with which we are now dealing, the only son to leave the Frankfort ghetto was the most cunning of them all, Nathan, who came to England where he did some very sharp practice connected with monopolising raw material for Manchester’s manufactures, and this when he was only 21 years old. After that, in 1804, he set up business in London and we shall follow his fortunes in Chapter II. In 1806, Napoleon shattered the Prussians at Jena, and Elector William had to seek safety in flight, leaving his business affairs and treasures to his trusted agents: there is a romantic tale, which must now be “de-bunked,” that before leaving he entrusted everything to Amschel Rothschild; a Jew artist of Frankfort, Moritz Oppenheim, has endeavoured to perpetuate the romance by painting a picture showing the Elector patting Amschel on the shoulder whilst lackeys carry boxes of specie into the latter’s house. Actually, the Rothschilds were only entrusted with four boxes of securities and papers, the bulk of the Elector’s treasure being distributed for hiding elsewhere (A, Vol. I., p. 66). Buderus, the Elector’s treasurer, was still unable to imbue his master with much faith in Rothschild, although eventually the latter was able to give full satisfaction to his exalted client when William returned to Hesse-Cassel in 1812 after Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig. Rothschild’s success in farming the Elector’s credit under the accommodating eye of Buderus was due to the fact that he was favouring both sides, for he had also wormed his way into the high favour of Napoleon’s representative, Carl von Dalberg, who had been made Prince-Primate of the Confederation of the Rhine and later Grand Duke of Frankfort. “There would appear to have been financial reasons for this relationship, and it no doubt originated in loans granted by Rothschild” (A, Vol. I., p. 69). For example, one such loan was made to Dalberg by Amschel in 1811 to enable him to travel to Paris on the occasion of the baptism of the son of Napoleon and Marie Louise. No wonder, then, that the Jewish Encyclopædia (B, Vol. IV., p. 413) records that Dalberg favoured the complete emancipation of the Jews and actually obtained it for them in return for a cash consideration of 440,000 florins! Rothschild did not rely merely upon the favour of one of Napoleon’s men; he was also very friendly with Dalberg’s Police Commissioner, a Jew called von Itzstein. In 1810, Rothschild was powerful enough to make a huge loan of his own money to Denmark. In 1812, Amschel Rothschild died. It is to be noted that only two of his five sons at this time were settled abroad, namely, Nathan in England, and James who had gone in 1811 to Paris where we shall meet him again in Chapter III. Amschel II. took over his father’s office at Frankfort. He sent his brother Solomon to open offices in Vienna in 1816, and his brother Karl to Naples in 1821. He negotiated immense loans to Austria, Prussia and to France (under Louis XVIII.) and secured for himself and all his brothers titles of Austrian nobility, a development culminating in 1822 in them all becoming Barons of the Austrian Empire. The only brother who did not assume the title was Nathan in England. It was late in Amschel II.’s life when he became acquainted with Bismarck. In 1851 Amschel II. persistently curried Bismarck’s favour when the latter came to Frankfort as Prussia’s representative. At first these servile overtures were regarded by Bismarck with some amusement, but nevertheless we find him in the same year accepting the use of a residence from Rothschild (A, Vol. II., p. 317) and in 1853 the Rothschilds became Court Bankers to Prussia. From about 1852, the Rothschilds were high in Bismarck’s favour. This registers the usual change of view by Gentile politicians coming under the pernicious influence of Jewish favours and money power. In 1847 Bismarck had declared he was not in favour of allowing Jews to occupy official positions in a Christian State, the function of which was the realisation of Christian teaching. Yet in 1869 it was under his Chancellorship that Jews were completely emancipated. How much this was due to the Rothschilds and how much to other Jews’ influence, can only be guessed. Bismarck’s most familiar Jew was Baron Gerson von Bleichroder who founded a banking syndicate with the Rothschilds after 1866 and represented that firm in Berlin and Prussia generally. Amschel II. died in 1855, and the Rothschild firm in Frankfort was taken over by Mayer Karl Rothschild, his nephew, son of Karl of Naples, assisted by his brother William. The latter took over on Mayer Carl’s death in 1886 but under him the firm did not prosper and closed in 1901 on William’s decease, the Disconto Gesellschaft taking over the local connection. In the years between, Bleichroder in Berlin and Alphonse Rothschild (James’s son) in Paris were the secret purveyors of news to Bismarck and Napoleon III., being in constant communication. They were thus able to tell Bismarck what they thought he ought to know about Napoleon III., and Napoleon what they thought he ought to know about Bismarck. During the Franco-Prussian War it was in Alphonse Rothschild’s castle at Ferrieres that Bismarck made his headquarters when besieging Paris. The same two Jews, Bleichroder for Prussia and Alphonse Rothschild for France, made the arrangements for the satisfactory payment of the indemnity by the vanquished, which reminds one of the similar situation at Versailles after the Great War when the Jewish bankers Warburg had a member of the family as financial adviser on each side, one for America, one for Germany. A curious occurence took place at a protest meeting against Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, at the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road, on 10th December, 1934. An excited Jew speaker, M. Soman, claimed Bismarck as a Jew. That Bismarck might have had some Jewish blood is not such an absurd proposition after all. Frightened Jews sometimes blurt out the unaccustomed truth. Bismarck’s mother was born a Mencken, a common Jewish name, whilst there is some doubt as to Bismarck’s actual paternity, one author, not remarkable for his general accuracy, believing that Marshal Soult was his real father, Soult being identified as a Jew by Disraeli in Coningsby. Certainly, Bismarck’s son Herbert had none of the healthy Aryan’s repugnance to Jews as he actually proposed to the half-Jewish daughter of Duke Ludwig of Bavaria (My Past, by Countess Larisch, Chapter II.) C. Spring Rice in a letter written when he was Second Secretary to our Embassy at Berlin in 1897 said that Rothschild’s agent was admitted into the German Foreign Office before the Ambassadors of the Powers (D, letter dated 7th November, 1897). The press, he also said, was almost entirely in Jewish hands. In 1878, the Jew banker Max von Goldschmidt of Frankfort married William Rothschild’s daughter and changed his name to Goldschmidt-Rothschild. * * * * * * During the period of Europe’s history in which the first Amschel Rothschild was established at Frankfort, the French Revolution stands out as by far the most important political event; it is now established that it came about under the influence of Freemasonry and the subversive society behind Masonry, known as the Illuminati. Seeing that the Jews obtained emancipation in France only two years after the Revolution, and that the new social order imposed by the Revolution summed up in the catch-cry “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was based upon false destructive principles typically Jewish, it is necessary to see what relationship the Rothschilds of the period may have had with regard to the outbreak. Illuminism penetrated into all the Lodges of Grand Orient Freemasonry in France, being backed by organised cabbalistic Jews. (E.) According to F, Vol. I., p. 184, the Jewish financiers behind the 1789 Revolution were as follows (their dates, places of abode and some other details have been added):— Daniel Itzig, 1722-1799, Berlin, Court Jew to Frederick William II. David Friedlander, 1750-1834, Berlin, his son-in-law. Herz Cerfbeer, 1730-1793, Alsace. Benjamin Goldsmid, 1755-1808, London, William Pitt’s (the younger) financier. Abraham Goldsmid, 1756-1810, London, his brother. Moses Mocatta, 1768-1857, London, partner of a brother of the two Goldsmids, and uncle of Sir Moses Montefiore. Lady Queenborough’s list also includes V. H. Ephraim, Court Jew to Frederick William I., and to Frederick the Great; but his work was preparatory to the Revolution, and he died 14 years before it came about. There is absolutely no evidence that I have found to connect the first Amschel Rothschild directly with the 1789 Revolution. He most emphatically was not the alter ego of Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, as has been stated by a certain author, and never had anything to do with that potentate, at whose palace in Wilhelmsbad the notorious Masonic Congress was held in which Illuminism definitely allied itself to Freemasonry, the Landgrave himself being Grand Master of Bavarian Masonry. This was in 1782, and the headquarters of Illuminised Masonry was set up in Frankfort in the same year. But at that time, Amschel Rothschild had no considerable influence even with Frederick’s son, and none at all with the Landgrave himself. There was, however, an organisation formed at Berlin called the League of Virtue or Tugenbund, which was, in the words of the Special Commissioner of Police at Mayence “so identified with the Illuminati that no line of demarcation was seen between them” (1814, Archives Nationales F 7/6563). The headquarters of the Tugenbund were at the house of a Jewish member of the Illuminati, Herz, friend and pupil of Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish “intellectual” revolutionary; Herz’s wife, Henrietta, usually presided at the gatherings. Among its adherents were two of Mendelssohn’s daughters, who had two brothers married to members of the family of the Jew Daniel Itzig; Mirabeau, who according to Graetz’s History of the Jews, Vol. V., was more often in Mrs. Herz’s company than her husband, and who introduced Illuminism into France and initiated the Duke of Orleans and Talleyrand into the order (F, Vol. I., p. 374); Fanny von Arnstein, daughter of Daniel Itzig, who ran a similar salon in Vienna; William von Humboldt, who later became Prussian Ambassador in London, and his brother, the explorer Alexander von Humboldt who learned Hebrew from Mrs. Herz. But the most prominent member of the Tugenbund was Frederick von Gentz, a crypto-Jew “intellectual” quite unburdened by any morals, who later became secretary to Prince Metternich, Chancellor of Austria. We have it on the authority of the Jewish Chronicle, 1st Sept., 1922, that Mrs. Herz herself said that the Tugenbund Jews were ardent supporters of the French Revolution. Now, although Amschel the first cannot be incriminated as supporting the Illuminati, it is a striking fact that members of his family had the closest relations with some of the above mentioned members of the Tugenbund. It was von Gentz to whom the Rothschilds owed their later position with Prince Metternich of Austria (A, Vol. II., p. 619), although the first meeting between one of Amschel’s sons and von Gentz did not take place until 1818. It is noteworthy that William von Humboldt’s estates were managed by Amschel Rothschild II. in 1830, whilst as early as 1818 Alexander von Humboldt was, with his brother, in intimate social relationship with Nathan Rothschild in London (A, Vol. I., p. 215). It is simply impossible to believe that the five Rothschild sons were not secretly supporting the Revolutionary cause in France through the first half of the nineteenth century. Fortunately, however, we have a decisive piece of evidence which puts the matter beyond dispute. It will be noted that Solomon Rothschild was not sent permanently to Vienna until 1816, when he was 42 years of age. Before that, he was assisting his father at Frankfort. Here, at a date not known but previous to 1814 and probably in his father’s lifetime, although that is uncertain, he became a member of a Grand Orient Lodge of Freemasons called L’Aurore Naissante; this is shown in a report of the Director of Police at Graetz. (Reference Les Dessous du Congres de Vienna, by Commandant M. H. Weil, published by Libraire Payot in 1917, which, in turn obtained its data from original documents of the Ministry of Interior, Vienna, the reference being p.p. 419 and 420, Vienna, 6th Nov., 1814, F, 34468 and 3565). This Lodge was later taken over by the United Grand Lodge of England, a curious fact, but one which does not concern us here, since the transfer did not take place until 1817 (History of Freemasonry, by R. F. Gould, Vol. III., p.p. 236/7). It is also to be noted that the Montefiore family, which is so closely intermarried with the Rothschilds, is also connected by marriage with the Goldsmids whose forebears Benjamin and Abraham are mentioned above as Jew financiers of the French Revolution, and that the sister of another of these, Moses Mocatta, was mother of Sir Moses Montefiore who became jackal to the London Rothschild House. In 1807, another Tugenbund was formed, apparently with the genuine political object of uniting Germany against Napoleon; Amschel Rothschild had very close relations with it and “the Rothschilds appear to have become members” (A, Vol. I., p. 81). William of Hesse-Cassel was an important member and the Rothschilds acted as go-betweens for his correspondence concerning it and made payments in favour of the Tugenbund. |