ABSTRACT
The City of London has been one of the leading financial centres in the world for three centuries, sharing its position, successively, with Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, New York and Tokyo. At times it occupied the premier position while at others it was in second or third place. Throughout that period and longer it owed part of its success to successive waves of immigrants, ranging from Italians in medieval times through French Huguenots in the early modern period to nationalities from all countries by the beginning of the twenty-first century. What these immigrants brought were skills, contacts and a determination to succeed which helped to maintain London as a dynamic financial centre and one possessed of the connections that were essential if it was to play an international role.3 Considering the long association of Jews with both commerce and finance it was inevitable that they would number among those immigrants settling in London over the centuries. As Roth reflected in 1938, ‘It is with the field of finance that Jewish economic achievement is usually associated.’4 Consequently, important Jewish merchants and financiers were to be found in the City of London prior to their expulsion in 1290 and again after 1663, when the ban was finally repealed, as well as clandestinely in the intervening years.5 As early as the late seventeenth century the Jew, Sir Solomon de Medina was playing a key role in the interplay between London and Amsterdam as financial centres, and he was among the first of many who made a major contribution to the City of London as a financial centre in subsequent centuries.6 In the centuries that were to follow, other Jews made an important contribution to the City of London as with Samson Gideon in the eighteenth, Nathan Rothschild in the nineteenth and Sigmund Warburg in the twentieth. Through the likes of these, the City of London became strongly
identified with Jewish financiers who were able to exercise enormous power there. To J.A. Hobson, writing in 1902, these Jewish financiers epitomised the capitalist system and all that was wrong with it:
These great businesses – banking, broking, bill discounting, loan floating, company-promoting – form the central ganglion of international capitalism. United by the strongest bonds of organisation, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every state, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, they are in a unique position to manipulate the policy of nations. No great quick direction of capital is possible save by their consent and through their agency. Does any one seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connexions set their face against it?7
