The Rise of the Rothschild Banking Dynasty

This is an extraordinary story. Um, so he

was born, um, in a place called the Judengasse,

which was a

Jewish ghetto, basically. And it was ...

The house that he lived in when he eventually had 13 children

was only

14 feet wide, and he lived there with his very,

very overpowering

and dominant and an incredibly brilliant wife, who was called Gutle.

He was determined to get out of this ghetto. At nighttime, the ghetto

was closed.

You weren't allowed to leave. The street was so narrow that no

sunlight could penetrate. There was no plumbing.

There was no sewage. There was nothing.

So everything you can imagine happened in this street.

And unsurprisingly, he wanted to get out of there.

And he started a small coin business, and that did reasonably well.

But actually, and this is where it ties into legacy,

his great strength

was to send his five sons to the capitals of

Europe at that time. And what they did is they set up, in

effect, the first international banking system.

So whereas everyone used to be in separate different countries or separate

cities until then, these five boys communicated with each

other, sometimes by pigeon, and they wrote to each other

in, um, Judendeutscher, which was a kind of Yiddish-German,

uh, vernacular, and that is why they were so

successful. And this absolute belief in togetherness,

you've got to stand together, you've got to work together,

you've got to work

across borders, you've got to work with rules.

And by 1789, when the last one went, to

1815, so very, very short period of time, it was

said that no government or king would consider

going to war without the Rothschilds supporting them because

that was how incredibly influential and powerful they had become