ABSTRACT
Between around 1810 and 1836, the five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild rose from the obscurity of the Frankfurt Judengasse to attain a position of unequalled power in international finance. Despite numerous economic and political crises and the efforts of their competitors to match them, they still occupied that position when the youngest of them died in 1868; and even after that their dominance was only slowly eroded. So extraordinary did this achievement seem to contemporaries that they often sought to explain it in mystical terms. According to one account dating from the 1830s, the Rothschilds owed their fortune to the possession of a mysterious ‘Hebrew talisman’. It was this which enabled Nathan Rothschild, the founder of the London house, to become ‘the leviathan of the money markets of Europe’.2 Similar stories were being told in the Russian Pale as late as the 1890s.3 They form part of a complex web of fantasy which has been – and continues to be – woven around the name Rothschild.
