#197 Founder of the Rothschild Family Dynasty

**David Senra** (0:00)
Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the foul smelling alley in Frankfurt, where in the second half of the 18th century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty.
Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy and ingenuity. He raised five famously gifted sons, veritable money-making machines to carry on his work after him.
Their names overshadowed his own and became synonymous with colossal wealth, extravagant living and hidden political power.
A century after his death, you could still ask in all seriousness if a great war was still possible in Europe if the House of Rothschild set their face against it.
Rothschild's origins were certainly modest. There was little reason to foresee his destiny. The personal circumstances of his life were difficult throughout. They suggest a saga not only political and financial, but also human and dramatic. More dramatic perhaps than that of his flamboyant sons.
The sons, after all, were not persecuted human beings, legally confined to the squalor of a congested ghetto.
The old ghetto where Rothschild lived his entire life was a narrow lane, more slum-like and overcrowded than any other tenement in Frankfurt. A closed compound, it was shut off from the rest of the city by high walls and three heavy gates.
The gates were guarded by soldiers and locked at night and all day on Sunday.
In it lived the largest Jewish community in Germany in conditions of total isolation and apartheid.
That was a description of the unbelievably terrible conditions that the Rothschild dynasty sprang from. And it was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Founder, A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time, and it was written by Amos Elon.
Okay, so just a few things before I jump into the book. One, this is going to be part one of a three part series on the Rothschild dynasty. Obviously we want to start with the patriarch of the family, the founder. So this book talks a little bit about his sons, but almost all the highlights and stuff I'm going to talk to you about today, is going to focus on him. The next two books is more about the continuation of the dynasty that Rothschild laid the foundation for. And I want to read several books on this because I'm obsessed with things that last a long time.
I have a ton of books that I haven't got to yet about other companies that have lasted for hundreds of years, other family dynasties that I think are interesting. And two, I'm also fascinated by this idea of people that are generational inflection points.
Single individuals that change the trajectory of their family forever. When I think of generational inflection points, the two people that come to mind right away are people like Sam Bronfman. This is Founders No. 116 If you haven't gone back and listened to that podcast yet, that's the founder of Seagrams.
It's Cheng Zhu-Yong. That's Founders No. 117 That's the founder of Hyundai. Out of everybody that I've studied so far in the podcast, I don't know if anybody started in a worse position than Cheng Zhu-Yong. His family was so poor that he had to eat tree bark in the winters, and he winds up being, in one lifetime, becoming the richest man in Korea.
There's actually a video that I keep on my phone that I've watched more times than I care to admit. Probably hundreds of times. It's probably not an exaggeration. And it's actually a clip that comes from the show Game of Thrones.
And if you haven't seen the show, if you don't know the characters I'm about to talk about, don't worry. What Braun, the character Braun, says is really the main point and I think describes what a generational inflection point is and where these people usually come from. So in the scene, he's actually holding two Lannister brothers hostage and saying, hey, your sister put a bounty on your head.
She's willing to give me this one kingdom. We made a deal a long time ago that if anybody ever paid me to kill you, you'd give me, you'd double their offer. What is double? And he's, and one of the brothers says, hey, I'll give you Highgarden. Highgarden is just a rich castle and land in the series. And so Jamie says to Braun, the one holding him hostage, temporarily holding him hostage, he says, Highgarden will never belong to a cutthroat. And so he means never gonna belong to somebody like you. You know, you're not a noble person. You came from the bottom. You're, now he's worked his way up. Braun, the character that I'm about to read the quote from, if you've watched the series or read the books, that character had a very advanced understanding of human nature. And he used that understanding of human nature to go from, you know, essentially the lowest rung of society and constantly work his way up to better and better circumstances. Not very different than what we're going to see today in this, with Rothschild in this book. But Braun's response is what I watch over and over again. And he says to Jamie, so remember, Jamie says, High garden will never belong to a cutthroat. And Braun says, No, who were your ancestors? The ones who made your family rich? Fancy lads and silk? They were fucking cutthroats. That's how all the great houses started, isn't it? With a hard bastard who was good at killing people. Kill a few hundred people and they make you a lord. Kill a few thousand and they make you king. And so he's using the word cutthroat. On this podcast, we use the word formidable individual. It's the same exact person. In his day, you get wealthy, you know, invading other lands, killing people. In our day, you do it by founding a successful business.