The Warburgs: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family by Ron Chernow - 1993, 880 Pages

I offer my great thanks to Max u for The Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to read this great book.

An Autodidactic  Corner Selection.

Anyone interested in twentieth century Jewish history, international finance, German banking, the Holocaust, and much more narrated through the lives of the Warburg Family will love this book. The story begins in the mid 16th century when a Warburg was a “Court Jew” in Hamburg to the development of a fortune and a legend to rival  the Rothchilds.  One Warburg founded the Federal reserve bank in America while helping other Jews out of Nazi Germany, another used his vast fortune to build great library, preferring Reading to banking.   Chernow has a wonderful way of making us know each of the many family members.  We know much more about them than we do about most subjects of biographies.

The book really gets going toward the end of the 19th century.  The Warburgs were very patriotic Germans.  They helped the Germans Finance the Franco-Prussian War.  Warburgs were in the German Army in World War One.  After the war they did all they could to reduce the harsh demands of The Treaty of Versailles on Germany.  Chernow does a wonderful job working in details about the period.  

As we enter the 1930s Chernow lets us feel the tension among German Jews.  Most German Jews thought or hoped Hitler would “calm down”.  Some knew this was an illusion, others thought their WW One Iron Crosses would save them.  Through a combination of foresight, good luck and a willingness to pay huge penalties, almost all the Family got out before 1939.  To the great credit of the Family, they took many employees and personal servants out with them. The Family entered the private banking business in New York City and became even more wealthy.  

Warburgs tended to marry within the extended family.  (Children of first cousins are only slightly more likely to have Birth defects than orher children though if the practice continues for several generations the risk grows.) An acceptable Warburgs mate had to be Jewish and very rich so the options were limited.  As family members were born in New York City, some did marry rich Christians but they did find some family resistance. We see some of the marriages were long loving relationships, some of the men had mistresses.  The Warburgs supported numerous Jewish causes, had complex feelings about Zionism, were great patrons of the arts in addition to bring powerful business men.  Most were highly cultured and felt a banker should know more than just finance. 

This is a delightful book.  A book as richly informative as the family it teaches us about.

Ron Chernow’s bestselling books include The House of Morgan, winner of the National Book Award; The Warburgs, which won the George S. Eccles Prize; The Death of the Banker; Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Washington: A Life, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; and Alexander Hamilton, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and adapted into the award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton.

Chernow has served as president of PEN, has received eight honorary doctoral degrees, and was awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. From ronchernow.com

Mel u

The House of Rothchild: Volume 1:Money’s Prophets 1798 to 1848, by Niall Ferguson, 1999, 522 Pages

An Autodiactic Corner Primary Pick

The House of Rothchild: Volume 1: Money’s Prophets 1798 to 1848 by Niall Ferguson is close to essential reading for anyone into not just 19th century European history, banking history, Jewish history but much of 
European literature, especially that of Balzac (who fashioned an important character in La Comedie Humaine on James Rothchild), Emile Zola, and Marcel Proust.  

As Ferguson says in his introduction there is a great deal of web space devotrd to the Rothchild’s and it is all pretty much trash.  The Rothchilds are part of the fantsies of the right and the left.  Ferguson’s work gives the truth about the history of what by around 1850 was the richest family in the world. He explains how they became so wealthy in fascinating detail.  We learn of their government contacts, their private information networks, how governments received loans, how the bond market worked and also currency trading.  We learn about how laws dictating where Jews could live impacted them.  Rothchild sons were not permited to marry outside the family.

Ferguson explains how business was run and how politics impact the family.

Volume One covers from 1798 to 1848.  I hope to read Volume Two soon and will post more then.

This is an elegant history, extremely well documented.  My only quinble is that when Ferguson tells us that in 1845 the London Branch made a profit of £1,500,000 I cannot relate that to now.  You can find this through Google but I think a Conversion chart would have been helpful.

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. 

He is the author of fourteen books. His first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001, after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000.  More detail can be found at niallferguson.com

Mel u