The World’s Richest Family – You Didn’t Know About (Part 2)

1 June 2011.

A cursory search on google reveals a surplus of accusations against the Rothschilds’ family, including claims that they are running the world through a ‘demonistic cabal’, controlling governments and the most powerful banks.

1 June 2011.

A cursory search on google reveals a surplus of accusations against the Rothschilds’ family, including claims that they are running the world through a ‘demonistic cabal’, controlling governments and the most powerful banks.

We can trace the roots of this antipathy as far back as the 19^th century when the Rothschilds were the supreme financiers of the world. At that time, the family was already being accused of financing wars for their own financial gain. The German writer Friedrich von Scherb wrote in his 1893 history of the family that: [quote]  “The house of Rothschild has arisen from the quarrels between states, has become great and mighty from wars. The misfortune of states and peoples has been its fortune.” [/quote]

This view that wars could not be fought without the support of Rothschild finance was shared by the left-wing English writer JA Hobson, who wrote in his book Imperialism: A Study (1902) that the Boer Wars had been funded by a small group of Jewish-German financiers, principally the Rothschilds, for economic gain. [quote]  “Does anyone 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 their connections set their face against it?” [/quote] he wrote.

These accusations that the Rothschilds were unscrupulous, even amoral, financiers may not shock us too much today. But the claims made against them began to take on a more anti-Semitic flavour in Germany after the 1^st World War.

 

Read the first part of this story: The World’s Richest Family – You Didn’t Know About (Part 1)

 

In 1919, the German National Socialist Dietrich Eckart asked who had provided the Rothschilds with their fabulous wealth. He blamed the German people. “Who does this? You do it. Nobody but you! That’s right it is your money hard-earned through care and sorrow, which is drawn as if magnetically into the coffers of these insatiable people.”

As one might expect, Adolf Hitler was even more explicitly anti-Semitic. In May 1921, he named the Rothschilds as one of a number of Jewish capitalist groups entirely controlling the socialist press.  And in a speech in 1922 he referred to the [quote] “rapacity of the Rothschilds who financed wars and revolutions and brought people into servitude through loans”. [/quote]

The demise of Hitler and the Nazis did not put an end to the slurs against the Rothschilds. In 1991, TV preacher Pat Robertson wrote a book called The New World Order, in which he claimed that the Rothschilds were “polluted by the occultism of illuminated freemasonry”. Robertson said that Paul Warburg, the architect of the Federal Reserve System was a Rothschild agent.

This idea that the Rothschilds are running a shadowy conspiracy to control the world – perhaps through a cabalistic group known as the Illuminati – is among the most common claims. Other common slurs are that the Rothschilds arranged the murder of President Lincoln because his economic policies would have spoiled their commodity speculations; that they financed the rise of Hitler as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and that they are closely involved with the Catholic Church, the Mafia and the CIA.

It is also claimed that their financial power is not limited to the Rothschild holdings. They are said to be the hidden power controlling other huge banks such as Warburg and Co and Lazard, and the secretive presence behind financiers JP Morgan, Rockefellers, Loeb and co, and Lehmann brothers. They also run, it is claimed, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System.

The conspiracy theorists perceive the malign Rothschild hand influencing the destiny of nations. They are blamed for the Boer Wars, the creation of Israel in order to control the oil of the Middle East and the Russian Revolution. They are also plotting, it is said, to monopolise world energy supplies, which explains their holdings in coal, oil and gas.

[break]

Behind The Rumours

What is behind all these rumours? Has the famous Rothschild secrecy allowed the rumours to proliferate? Is it possible that there is a deeper conspiracy at work?

Robert Rothschild, a professor of Economics at Lancaster University, who takes a keen interest in the story of his namesakes, said: “It is pure anti-Semitism. There has always been the idea that there is a global conspiracy run by the Jews, the Communists and god knows who else. Because the Rothschild name is the richest, most conspicuous and long-lived of dynastical Jewish names, it’s the one on which anti-Semites have focused their hostility over the years.

[quote] “The name Rothschild has become a composite way of referring to the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ rather than any individual, or the family itself. With these conspiracy notions comes the idea of a cabal made up of people of hostile intent working away behind the scenes. However, it’s not Rothschild per se, but Jews in general for whom the Rothschilds are deemed to stand by anti-Semites.” [/quote]

Professor Rothschild, however, does not deny that the Rothschilds’ Jewish identity was important to the family and a major factor in their rise in the financial world. “The real problem for Jews was that they weren’t allowed to own property, so they were driven into two fields in which they could still get ahead – commerce and academia, and the Rothschild family excelled in both spheres. You didn’t need property for these professions. You only required your brain. So, if you were expelled at very short notice from your homeland, you could take you financial connections and good intellectual training elsewhere.” 

Professor Rothschild said the Jews – and this was particularly true of the Rothschild family – had always had a strong desire to assimilate. “They wanted acceptance above all. And it was no good assimilating into the poorer parts of society. They wanted acceptance by the most powerful members of society.”

The Rothschilds’ vast wealth helped them to be accepted, and they regularly hobnobbed with Royalty and elite politicians. As a symbol of their status, the English Rothschilds developed a passion for the quintessentially aristocratic pursuit of hunting, forming their own pack of staghounds in the Vale of Aylesbury. 

Their success in English society was possible because England presented fewer barriers to assimilation than many European nations in the 19^th century, said George Ireland, the author of Plutocrats: A Rothschild Inheritance. “England was probably the most liberal country in Europe so far as the Jews were concerned. Of course, there were people who harboured anti-Semitic sentiments, but English Jews were not persecuted. They did not need any special protection and were left to live their lives and to practise their religion unmolested. They were, however, restricted in their choice of career. The professions were closed to Jews principally because they were excluded, as were others, by the religious demands of Oxford and Cambridge – hence the founding of University College, London by a group of Roman Catholics, Quakers, Nonconformists and Jews, including Nathan Rothschild, free of religious entrance requirements.”

Ireland said the Rothschilds took the keenest interest in the long series of parliamentary debates, beginning in 1830, on the removal of Jewish Disabilities. Until Lionel de Rothschild took his seat in the House of Commons in 1858, no professing Jew had sat in the House of Commons because the Christian oath that a new MP was required to swear before taking his seat was unacceptable to a Jew. 

Their Jewish solidarity is undeniably an important family characteristic, though not all the Rothschilds have shared it. In 1938 Nathan’s great-great-grandson, Victor, shocked an audience by saying that in spite of “the slow murder of 600,000 people” on the continent “we probably all agree that there is something unsatisfactory in refugees encroaching on the privacy of our country, even for relatively short periods of time.”

And the family disagreed over the question of a Jewish homeland, with some members supporting the first Zionist settlement in Palestine and others opposing it on the grounds that it would encourage anti-Semites to question the existing national identities of assimilated Jews around the rest of the world.

We are left with the question of whether there was a “secret” behind the Rothschilds’ phenomenal success.

Ireland said: [quote] “In my view it was a combination of brains, hard work and rock-solid family loyalty. But I think ultimately that their family loyalties mattered more than anything. That surely was the key to their success.” [/quote]

Read the first part of this story: The World’s Richest Family – You Didn’t Know About (Part 1)

David Smith

EconomyWatch.com