The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (16 page)

Although he wrote other novels before
Remembrance,
Proust is primarily remembered for the unique slant of his masterpiece. It is related to the reader by a Narrator, not by an all-powerful and all-seeing author. The events and characters of the novels are viewed through the sight and emotions of a fictional person, who is not necessarily Proust, the author. The Narrator appears to be motivated to tell what he remembers for reasons of his own, his judgment entirely his, seemingly divorced from the usually omnipresent opinions of a writer creating a book.

Before Proust, the great novels of Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Zola were narrated by the author as chronicler (even when the story was told by a character such as Pip in
Great Expectations).
One always feels the presence of the creator, the author, guiding and observing the story. Not so in Proust. Although derived from his experiences in upper-crust salons,
Remembrance
is a work of fiction, not autobiography, and fiction, Proust seems to proclaim, demands, a radically new perspective.

He also changed how novels can be structured. Prior to
Remembrance,
novels had clear plots, usually culminating in the protagonist’s death. Proust wrote novels without plots, without climaxes, without abrupt melodramatic shifts or coincidental happenings. In sometimes impossible to follow, seemingly endless sentences, reality is presented the way reality is. Events inexorably follow each other. People and places flow past. Time passes and is lost.

The story of his life is simply told. His mother, Jeanne Weil, was the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker. Marcel’s father, Adrien, was born into modest circumstances, the son of Catholic shopkeepers, but rose to become a respected physician and expert in municipal hygiene. Adrien Proust is largely responsible for creating modern sanitation methods that helped to control in European cities the spread of cholera and infectious diseases. Dr. Proust however could not prevent his son’s developing a severe asthma.

Despite attempts at a normal life (Marcel volunteered for cadet duty and attended law and political science classes), the future novelist preferred to experience the joys of
la belle époque,
the so-called banquet years during the gay 1890s. Supported by his mother’s inheritance and his father’s social standing, Marcel lounged away his early manhood in the private rooms of great hostesses (usually royalty). He established lasting friendships with creative artists such as composer Reynaldo Hahn, poet Anna de Noailles, author Anatole France, and the sarcastic writer Baron de Montesquieu. All of these friends (and some of his countesses) were immortalized as characters in
Remembrance.
His parents vehemently objected to Marcel’s rich, idle life, citing his brother Robert’s acceptable career as a doctor (it was Robert Proust who cared for Marcel in his final difficult years and made sure his works were published posthumously).

By his early thirties he could only show for his life’s work countless hours wasted in salons and two unsatisfactory, derivative, and incomplete novels. The relatively premature deaths of his parents apparently galvanized Proust out of inaction into a life with purpose. Realizing his life might also not last long, Proust cloistered himself in his apartment and began writing his account of what he knew best—fashionable society around the turn of the century. To aid his concentration and ensure the perfect quiet he required, Proust had the walls of his bedroom workroom soundproofed with cork. After writing uninterrupted for thirteen years, he died in 1922 while editing the seventh book of
Remembrance.

Proust tended to writing much as a vintner cultivates vines. In his literary horticulture, conventional plot and character development are irrigated by the great streams of life. How and why men and women love, remember over time, remain happy, or lose themselves in jealousy or hate, are intertwined in flowery, almost verdant prose. The example of the madeleine dipped in mint tea unleashing the odors of the narrator’s youth is the most famous image in Proust’s luxuriant, symbolic garden.

He overthrew nineteenth-century conceptions of reality and time. Earlier writers had conceived of time by observing the progress of recognizable events. In Proust, “real” time was replaced by an examination of the reality playing out within his characters. Proust carefully dissected the development of people’s inner selves over time, not simply their outward appearances revealing themselves in melodrama.

With magnificent sweep, in a tidal movement of impressions and gestures,
Remembrance
ends as the Narrator decides to write a novel telling everything he can remember. The end is as it was at the beginning. The circle closes in on itself.

I
n Judengasse (Jew Street) in the ghetto of the German city Frankfurt am Main, colorful house signs predated numbered addresses, serving as pictorial markers of business and family names. “Rothschild” or “red shield” was derived from such a sign.

Although there is no known portrait of him, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, as few men in history, influenced the progress of world history over a century after his death. With the development of his family as a cohesive unit of economic and political might, he shaped the future not only of the Rothschilds but also of their many countrymen.

Mayer placed his five sons, Amschel, Solomon, Nathan, Kalmann (later Carl), and Jacob (later James), just out of their teens, in five European capitals, establishing the first international banking and clearinghouse system—essentially the first privately owned multinational company. Although the sons lacked their father’s ghetto-trained diplomatic abilities and subservient manner, they possessed instead raw cunning, technical expertise, and a ferocious drive for hard work. Their creation of banking houses in the German confederation, Austrian Empire, Great Britain, Italy, and France led to enormous political influence and a concerted desire by the family to keep Europe at peace. War hindered economic development and upset their carefully planned spheres of control. Although their political power would wane after the First World War as more banking houses rose to prominence and competition set in, the Rothschilds helped shape the political fortunes of many of the great figures of the age, including, but certainly not limited to, Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, Talleyrand, Metternich, Queen Victoria, Disraeli, and Bismarck (and the futures of their countries).

Mayer’s ancestors had been ordinary peddlers for generations in the Frankfurt town ghetto. Although Jews could journey outside the ghetto walls during the day, they were required to wear traditional hats and garb identifying their religion. A Jew wandering outside would invariably subject himself to anti-Semitic toughs. A religious slur was preferred to the beating and robbing a Jew could not safely defend himself against and from which no one would grant any protection.

With his parents’ support, Mayer studied to become a rabbi in the ancient city of Nuremberg. These studies were cut short, however, by their premature deaths. With the help of relatives, Mayer then secured a clerk’s position at the banking house of Oppenheimer in Hanover. Mayer prospered and seemed set on a successful career, but was unsatisfied and quit to seek his fortune back in the ghetto where he was born. Returning to Frankfurt, he was stopped at the river crossing and required to pay the Jew toll. Behind the ghetto gates manacled with heavy chains every night by German soldiers, Mayer planned his future.

He started out as a dealer in old coins and heirlooms. His buyers turned out to be the highest royalty (the only ones interested in so esoteric a hobby). Noticing that the rival German kingdoms had different currencies and no readily available trading method, Mayer established a
Wechseltube
or simple bank in which these monies could be traded at varying rates of exchange. Mayer used the profits from this exchange business to develop his numismatic line, investing in coins of greater value and antiquity and developing a richer clientele.

In 1770 he married seventeen-year-old Gutele Schnapper. She would give birth to five sons and five daughters and live to the age of ninety-six, rarely leaving her ghetto house. In her old age Gutele was a revered figure visited by nobility and people of influence.

Mayer, supported by a growing family, began to sell coins to the richest noble in Europe, Prince William of Hesse. Students of the American Revolution may remember the Hessian soldiers who fought with the British in their losing attempt at subjugating the colonies. These Hessian mercenaries were subjects of Prince William and were sold, like chattel, to the British at immense profits. Prince William and his treasurer (who became a silent partner in the Rothschild businesses) increasingly relied on the respectful and talented Mayer. When William succeeded in 1785 to his father’s throne, Mayer had a reliable sinecure at William’s court at Kassel to develop his international contacts.

Over the next two decades, Mayer would use his connections at William’s court, his noble clients, low prices on his coins (in return for friendship and IOU’s), and his young sons, to build the financial foundation and political network of the Rothschild family. An example of Mayer’s resourcefulness occurred at the time of Prince William’s lending of Hessian mercenaries to the British. Mayer observed that William received British bank drafts in return for the soldiers. At the same time Mayer was engaged in paying for cotton cloth from the textile manufacturers in Manchester. Why not somehow combine both enterprises and make bigger profits? Mayer arranged for the Manchester manufacturers to be paid directly with William’s British bank drafts—and for the discount fees saved to be pocketed by both William and himself. The revolt in the American colonies would be the first of many wars during which the Rothschilds would earn enormous sums.

Mayer inserted Solomon at William’s court as the monarch’s newest financial adviser. Amschel began to serve as William’s mortgage broker, arranging enormous loans throughout the continent with royal borrowers. Nathan went to Manchester to perfect the textile trade—and managed somehow during the French Revolution to send cheap cloth to Mayer’s store in Frankfurt just as prices were sent soaring by rebellious unrest.

An international network of family was formed that would survive revolutions, Napoleonic wars, counterrevolutions, and the industrial age. Even when Napoleon swept away William, sending him into exile, Mayer continued to guide the finances of his prince. Mayer’s sons were spread throughout Europe and were always a step ahead of Napoleon’s secret agents, collecting interest on loans, selling contraband and food in markets stripped bare by the ravages of European war. The Rothschilds communicated through a highly developed system of couriers, letters, and even carrier pigeons, using a bizarre lingo of German, Yiddish, and Hebrew sprinkled with amusing pseudonyms.

The Rothschild sons developed quickly from cotton traders and smugglers into international bankers. From 1810 on they would sell money only. They would use many of the techniques and networks developed by their father in their conquest of Europe’s financial markets. Nathan, for example, knew of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo before anyone else at the London Exchange and used the information to sell English bonds high and then repurchase very low (just as the news arrived of the great victory and prices soared!).

By Mayer’s death in 1812 his sons were firmly in place in their respective European capitals. They would help finance the restoration of the continent after the wars, the development of modern governments during the rapidly developing industrial era, and the building of railroads across Europe. Nathan’s son Lionel after many attempts would become the first unassimilated Jew elected to Parliament, his way paved by Benjamin Disraeli and others. Lionel would not join the Parliament unless he could take his oath of office wearing a traditional Jewish hat and swearing over the Old Testament. In 1858, with his head covered in accordance with Jewish practice, Lionel was sworn in as a member of Parliament.

Despite all their accomplishments, since the late 1800s anti-Semitic perceptions of Jewish financial power and prowess centered on the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds have been viewed by many bigots as the archetype of an “international Jewish bankers’ conspiracy.”

Yet, out of Jew Street, in anti-Semitic Frankfurt, arose a family that would engage the greatest figures of modern European history, change the course of human events—and survive to this day.