Jacob Rothschild, 87; broke from family banking dynasty
Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, patron of the arts and philanthropist with close ties to Israel, who broke with his family’s fabled banking dynasty at a time of radical change in the world of high finance, has died. He was 87.
His death was announced Monday by the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity of which he was chair. It did not specify when or where he died or give the cause of death.
Mr. Rothschild — more formally the fourth Baron Rothschild — was descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a coin trader in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, who sent four of his five sons to Vienna, London, Paris, and Naples, to seek their fortune in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
For most of the 19th century, the House of Rothschild was the biggest bank in the world “by a wide margin,” Jonathan Steinberg, an American scholar, wrote in The London Review of Books in 1999. The fortune of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the son who founded the bank’s London branch, “can be compared to that of Bill Gates today,” Steinberg added.
Most accounts of the Rothschilds’ wealth trace its origins to a decision to finance the British military in the Napoleonic Wars. But the broader dynasty flourished on cementing its family bonds and cultivating what Steinberg called “everybody who was anybody at the top of European society during this period.”
It was against this historical backdrop that Jacob Rothschild joined the London arm of the family’s empire at the N.M. Rothschild & Sons bank in 1963. Until then, he had followed a route familiar to the British elite, educated at Eton College and at Christchurch College, Oxford.
At that time, London’s traditionally cautious, clubby world of high finance was still two decades away from a shift toward freewheeling capitalism that culminated in the so-called Big Bang of 1986, which brought deregulation to the London Stock Exchange.
Mr. Rothschild had long favored merging the London branch of his family’s financial empire with another merchant bank, S.G. Warburg, but the plan was opposed by his cousin Evelyn de Rothschild and his own father, Victor, a scientist and former member of Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency.
He therefore resolved to break away. “We must try to make ourselves as much a bank of brains as of money,” Mr. Rothschild said in 1965.
As long ago as 1810, “family policy excluded female descendants and all sons-in-law from any part in the business,” Steinberg wrote. Each of the initial partners “renounced the rights of his wife to have sight of the accounts and swore to allow only direct male descendants to inherit shares.”
Marriage outside the Rothschilds’ Jewish faith was frowned upon; marriage within the family was not unknown.
Although the family’s rules had softened by the early 1960s, Mr. Rothschild’s proposals for a merger with S.G. Warburg collided head-on with tradition. For Victor and Evelyn de Rothschild, “the preservation of family control took precedence over expansion,” British historian Niall Ferguson wrote in his book “The House of Rothschild” (1998), a voluminous study of the family. The clash represented “a serious rift within the English branch of the family,” Ferguson wrote.
The dispute was resolved only in 1980, when the feuding partners agreed that the family bank, N.M. Rothschild & Sons Ltd., would operate separately from Mr. Rothschild’s breakaway entity, J. Rothschild & Co., whose main assets would be known by their initials: RIT, for Rothschild Investment Trust.
Mr. Rothschild retired as head of RIT Capital Partners in 2019. That year, his personal wealth was estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires index to be more than $1 billion.