The House Of Rothschild Money's Prophets 1798-1848 by Niall Ferguson

The House Of Rothschild Money's Prophets 1798-1848 by Niall Ferguson 

I
Father and Sons

ONE
“Our Blessed Father”: Origins
Yes, my dear fellow, it all amounts to this: in order to do something you
must be something. We think Dante great, but he had a civilisation of
centuries behind him; the House of Rothschild is rich but it has required
more than one generation to attain such wealth. Such things all lie
deeper than one thinks.
—GOETHE, OCTOBER 1828
A traveller arriving in eighteenth-century Frankfurt, as he passed across
the main Sachsenhäuser Bridge leading to the Fahrtor Gate, could hardly
miss the Judensau —the Jews’ Sow (see illustration 1.i). An obscene
graffito on the wall, it depicted a group of Jews abasing themselves
before—or rather beneath and behind—a fierce sow. While one of them
suckled at her teats, another (in rabbinical garb) held up her tail for the
third (also a rabbi) to drink her excrement. The “Jews’ devil” watched
approvingly. If the traveller looked up, he could also see a second and
still more repellent image: that of a dead baby, its outstretched body
punctured by countless small knife wounds and beneath it nine daggers.
“On Maundy Thursday in the year 1475,” read a caption, “the little child
Simeon, aged 2, was killed by the Jews”—an allusion to the case of
Simon of Trent, who had allegedly been a victim of “ritual murder,” the
fictional practice whereby Jews murdered Gentile children in order to put
their blood in unleavened bread.
Such a graphic expression of anti-Jewish sentiment was by no means
unique: the image of Jews worshipping a pig can be found in numerous
woodcut and printed versions dating as far back as the fourteenth
century, while the myth of ritual murder gained currency in Germany in
the fifteenth. What made the Frankfurt pictures remarkable—at least in
the eyes of the city’s most celebrated son, Johann Wolfgang Goethe

The House Of Rothschild Money's Prophets 1798-1848 by Niall Ferguson