The Rothschilds were the most famous bankers of 19th-century Europe. That is history. The claims that they won a fortune by fraud at Waterloo, own the world's central banks and start its wars are not. They are myths, and they turn one Jewish family into a symbol for all Jews.

 

Key Facts

• What it claims: That the Rothschild family made its fortune by trickery at Waterloo, controls the world's banks and central banks, and starts wars and runs governments. All three claims are false.

• First recorded: The Waterloo story was spread by an 1846 Paris pamphlet signed "Satan," written by Georges Dairnvaell.

• How it spread: Through 19th-century pamphlets and caricatures, conspiracy literature, and the Nazi film Die Rothschilds (1940).

• Modern form: Claims that "the Rothschilds" own the Federal Reserve, fund "both sides" of wars or rule the world, often online.

• Why it is false: Nathan Rothschild was not at Waterloo and made no fortune by fraud there. No family owns the Federal Reserve, and the Bank of England has been publicly owned since 1946. The Nazis seized the family's Austrian bank and looted its art.

 

The Rothschilds were real, and they were powerful. In the decades after Waterloo their banks raised loans for many of Europe's governments, and the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 called the family "the Fuggers of the nineteenth century," after the great German bankers of the Renaissance. Saying so is not a myth. It is the history.

 

The myths begin where the history ends. Because the family was rich, famous and Jewish, its name was turned into shorthand for supposed Jewish control of money and power. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes "a longstanding anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" that "a cabal of Jews led by members of the Rothschild banking family" has been "manipulating currency and exerting influence on regional and national events since the early 19th century for the purposes of personal enrichment and/or world domination."

 

This article sets out the real family history first. It then takes the three main myths one at a time: the Waterloo fortune, control of the banks, and control of wars and governments. Each is stated once, marked false, and answered with the evidence. It ends with how the name became a code word, and why that matters.

 

The Real Family History

• Frankfurt: The family's name came from the sign of a red shield on a house in the Judengasse, the walled Jewish street of Frankfurt (Jewish Encyclopedia). Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), the founder of the bank, lived and built his business on that street. He became an agent and banker to William IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who had inherited one of the largest fortunes in Europe.

• Five sons, five houses: His five sons built houses in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Vienna and Naples (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Nathan led the London house.

• War finance: In 1814 and 1815 Nathan's London house helped the British government move money to the armies fighting Napoleon on the Continent, according to the historian Niall Ferguson. The Jewish Encyclopedia reckoned that the brothers moved some £18 million to the Continent between 1814 and 1822.

• Titles: The Austrian emperor raised the brothers to the nobility on September 29, 1822 (Jewish Encyclopedia).

• Government loans: In 1875 the London house advanced the British government £4,080,000 to buy the Khedive of Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal (Jewish Encyclopedia).

• Decline: Other banks grew, and the family's relative weight fell. The Frankfurt house, the original, was liquidated after the death of its last head in 1901 (Jewish Encyclopedia).

• Philanthropy: Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) was known as the founder of Jewish agricultural colonies in Ottoman Palestine (Jewish Encyclopedia). In 1957 the bequest of his son, James de Rothschild, funded a new home for Israel's parliament, the Knesset (Jewish Telegraphic Agency).

• Losses under the Nazis: When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, Louis von Rothschild, head of the Vienna house, was arrested at Vienna's Aspern airfield and held by the Gestapo for 14 months. His art collection was seized and the family bank was taken from him (Lexikon der österreichischen Provenienzforschung). In occupied France, the Nazi looting agency known as the ERR seized Rothschild collections; one album prepared for Hitler numbered the stolen objects with an "R" for Rothschild (US National Archives).

 

Great wealth and influence are facts. "Controlling the world" is the myth.

 

Myth 1: The Waterloo Fortune

The claim: that Nathan Rothschild watched the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, raced through a Channel storm to London, and made a vast fortune by tricking the stock market. This is false.

 

• Where it came from: In 1846 a pamphlet signed "Satan" appeared in Paris: Histoire édifiante et curieuse de Rothschild Ier, roi des Juifs (The edifying and curious history of Rothschild I, King of the Jews). It told how Nathan crossed to England in a small boat and "gagna d'un seul coup vingt millions": he won twenty million in a single stroke. The historian Brian Cathcart identifies the author as Georges Dairnvaell, "a left-wing controversialist" who "made no attempt to hide his loathing for Jews," and judges that the tale "was anti-Semitic in intent." Nathan had died in 1836 and could not answer it.

• How it grew: When it was accepted that Nathan was not at Waterloo, the story changed, Cathcart writes. Nathan was now in London with couriers or carrier pigeons, and he was said to have spread false rumours of defeat, crashed the market and bought at the bottom. The Nazis made the legend into a 1940 film, Die Rothschilds: Aktien auf Waterloo (The Rothschilds: Shares in Waterloo).

• The "evidence" that was not: For years historians cited a line from the London Courier of June 20, 1815, "Rothschild has made great purchases of stock." Cathcart found that those words do not appear in surviving copies of the paper and seem to come from a historian writing in 1848, after the pamphlet. A supposed 1815 diary that described Rothschild's couriers was exposed in 1957 as a fake.

• What happened: Nathan was not at Waterloo or even in Belgium, and there was no storm crossing. The first authentic news of the victory reached London through a man who had heard it in Ghent, and newspapers printed his account at least 12 hours before the official dispatch arrived. Nathan did receive early news, by letter from Ghent, and passed it to the government; he was not the only one. There was no slump in prices that day for him to engineer (Cathcart).

 

On what Nathan actually gained, the two leading accounts differ, and both are worth stating.

 

• Cathcart accepts that Nathan may have profited from some purchases (a contemporary letter told him he had "done well by the early information"), but that in the thin market of the time his gains could not have come near "the millions that Dairnvaell wrote of," and were "dwarfed by those of numerous rival investors."

• Ferguson, in his history of the family, The House of Rothschild (1998), goes further. Nathan's business had been built on a long war, and the sudden peace left the brothers with depreciating gold and half-finished contracts. "It is possible that a series of miscalculations by the brothers led to losses rather than profits in the critical period before and after Waterloo," he writes. "On this occasion, it seems, reality is diametrically opposite to myth." Cathcart observes that Ferguson retold the story "with a very different analysis" from the legend.

 

Whether Nathan made a modest profit or a loss, the verdict is the same: no fortune, and no fraud.

 

Myth 2: "The Rothschilds Control the Banks, the Fed and Central Banks"

The claim: that the family owns the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, or the world's central banks. This is false.

 

• The Federal Reserve: "The Federal Reserve System is not 'owned' by anyone," the Fed states. Its Board of Governors "is an agency of the federal government," and its members are "appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate." Commercial banks that are members of the system must, by law, hold stock in their regional Reserve Bank, but "owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company": the Reserve Banks are not run for profit and pass their net earnings to the US Treasury.

• The Rothschild claim about the Fed: ADL documents decades of claims that "Rothschild banks" own the Fed, and calls the charge "a classic example of the hatemonger's paranoid-style exploitation of legitimate concerns." The Jewish Chronicle notes that Rothschild banks are not members of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and that member banks do not control the Fed in any case.

• The Bank of England: Nationalised in 1946, it has been publicly owned ever since (Bank of England). In the banking panic of 1825 the Rothschilds lent the Bank money to ease a liquidity crisis, and the loan was repaid (The Jewish Chronicle). Helping a bank is not taking it over.

• The fake quotation: Conspiracy material often quotes Nathan, or his father, as saying "I control the British money supply." The Jewish Chronicle reports that the conspiracy researcher Brian Dunning found no evidence either man said it; the line appears to trace to a false attribution in 1939. It is fabricated.

 

Myth 3: "The Rothschilds Start Wars and Run Governments"

The claim: that the family starts wars for profit, funds "both sides," and secretly controls governments. This is false.

 

• Lending is not ruling: In the 19th century governments raised money by selling bonds through private banks. The Rothschilds were the best known of these banks, not the only ones. The Jewish Encyclopedia names other banking families, among them the Lazards, Sterns, Speyers and Seligmans, who followed the same methods. A bank that sells a government's bonds does not decide its wars.

• "Both sides": The houses were based in different countries and dealt with their own governments. That is how cross-border banking worked. It is not evidence that anyone arranged a war, and no document shows the family doing so.

• The family's own losses: In the 20th century the family was a target, not a master. The Nazis held Louis von Rothschild in Vienna, seized the Vienna bank and looted the family's art in Austria and France. The Jewish Chronicle quotes Dunning: the "only seed of truth" in the claim that the Rothschilds "funded the Holocaust" is that the Nazis took their assets. The Holocaust was planned and carried out by the Nazi state.

• The Balfour "proof": The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, is often presented as proof of Rothschild control of Britain. It was a letter from the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, that opens "Dear Lord Rothschild" and asks him to "bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation." Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild, was its recipient as a leader of British Jews. The policy was the British government's, made for its own war aims, and the one Jewish member of the government, Edwin Montagu, strongly opposed it (Foreign Policy). Receiving a letter is not writing it.

 

How the Name Became a Code Word

The mechanism is the same in each myth. One family's real wealth is made to stand for "the Jews," and real economic power is turned into hidden collective control.

 

• Pictures as well as words: In 1898 the French satirical paper Le Rire ran a cover by Charles Léandre titled "Le roi Rothschild" (King Rothschild). It shows a crowned Rothschild gripping the globe with claw-like hands, under a halo inscribed "Dieu protège Israël" (God protects Israel). The image put the "world control" myth into one picture, and similar caricature became a staple of antisemitic propaganda.