Word: rothschild
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Wiedersehen, adieu. Parting is such sweet sorrow, but all good things must end someday. "Sanctuary: The 8th International Women's Day Exhibit," co-sponsored by the Women's Caucus for the Arts and the Bunting Institute, may run until Friday, but the closing reception is tonight. Maurine and Robert Rothschild Gallery, Bunting Institute, 34 Concord Ave. 495-8212. 5 to 7 p.m. FREE...
...Frankfurt ghetto where the fortune started, the paterfamilias, onetime coin dealer Mayer Amschel Rothschild, left a last commandment to his five sons: Maintain absolute unity. In later years the brothers quarreled often but obeyed their father. They wrote to one another voluminously in the privacy of almost indecipherable Judendeutsch (German written in Hebrew characters) and bailed one another out. Hard times for James in Paris brought Nathan's London to the rescue, and so on--meaning that the Rothschilds, a power unto themselves, could usually float above the fates of individual nations and regimes...
Great fortune and power breed myths and demonizations. The Rothschilds were called, with admiration and loathing, "the Kings of the Jews and the Jews of the Kings"--sometime pariahs and masters of the universe. The bright version of the Rothschilds--benefactors of progress, multilingual cosmopolitans, patrons of the arts, sponsors of Rossini and Balzac, vintners of Mouton and Lafite--was shadowed by a vicious anti-Semitic twin, the view that culminated in Hitler's speeches about "the rapacity of a Rothschild." The family became an all-purpose and surreal villain. Karl Marx vilified the Rothschilds as a quintessence of capitalist...
Ferguson has had access to all the surviving Rothschild archives, including the family's vast private correspondence, which fills 135 boxes. He sorts through the intricacies of their business deals: financing governments, bill brokering, working the international bullion market, trading in American cotton and tobacco, Spanish mercury and Russian copper. The legerdemain of speculative finance in another century is sometimes occult material, but Ferguson manages it well...
...demigod family had the unthinkable wealth and size to inspire story-tellers. In one of Disraeli's novels a character named St Barbe--a caricature of Thackeray--holds forth in praise of his hosts at an extravagant Rothschild-style dinner: "What a family this is! I had no idea of wealth before! Did you observe the silver plates?" The Rothschilds, however, considered such hospitality an unpleasant duty. Nathan complained to his brothers in 1843, "Here we have stinking balls night after night. You have no idea how sweaty the old French ladies smell after a long waltz...