41845358-Antisemitism

HOMO JUDAICUS ECONOMICUS
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treu (patriotic and loyal) and gloried in their German fatherland and were, as the
proverbial expression had it, more German than the Germans themselves. 53
The first stage in the upward sweep of German Jewry (to 1850) came with
the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the beginnings of German industrialization
in the early nineteenth century. Until about 1820, almost all of
German Jewry made its living as peddlers or petty shopkeepers—in Bavaria 96
percent were so employed. It was principally from this reservoir that the economic
elite was to be drawn. In an age of freer trade, the end of guild monopolies,
freer choice of occupation, and greater geographical mobility, these
semiemancipated Jews began to make their way. Some of the emerging economic
elite descended from the eighteenth-century court Jews, although most
of those families had disappeared from view. The most famous example, of
course, was the Rothschilds, with their headquarters in Frankfurt am Main
and branches in London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples. Of the forty to fifty
prominent Jewish families that emerged as bankers and entrepreneurs in this
period, however, most were new men, by-products of the manifold commercial
and banking operations of that turbulent era when Jews functioned, as in
the past, thanks to their networks of contacts near and far, as military contractors
and financial agents moving money and extending credit across international
boundaries and military conflicts.
The railway age followed for the next quarter century to about 1875. The
demand for capital investment in railways and allied fields like coal and steel
was, as elsewhere, virtually insatiable, and “it was met in no small degree by
Jewish financiers.” 54 More new family banking houses rose from the petty
traders, such as the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Bischoffscheim, Goldschmidt,
Abraham Oppenheimer of Mannheim, and many others. It was the great age
of the Jewish private bank, which flourished, often under the aegis of the
Rothschilds. The Bleichröder bank in Berlin rose from obscurity once it was
taken on as one of the Rothschilds’ agents in the Prussian capital. When, in
1858, the maker of modern Germany, Otto von Bismarck, sought a personal
banker who had to be a Jew because he regarded Jews as perspicacious and
honest, on the recommendation of Rothschilds he chose Gerson Bleichröder.
The double connection to Rothschild and to Bismarck, and thereby the state,
was a tremendous advantage to S. Bleichröder & Co. From “the best informed
man in Berlin,” his became “the greatest banking house in Berlin,” and he,
eventually, “the richest man in Germany.” 55 At the time of the peace settlement
between Germany and France in 1871, it was a matter of widespread antisemitic
comment that the financial expert on both sides was a Jew,
Bleichröder and Alphonse Rothschild.