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George Lincoln Rockwell – Vote White

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George Lincoln Rockwell – Vote White

In the United States of America there is only one group, only one, with the courage and the guts to face up to the fact that this battle is racial – it has nothing to do with politics, or economy, free enterprise, taxes – it is a question if this country going to be dominated and run by the White Christian people who built it, or is it going to be run and dominated by a bunch of beatnik scum, negroes, jews, communists, aliens and no good people who are trying to take it away from us and tell us that we mustn’t even talk about this because it’s hate. Well I don’t see anything hateful about defending your home and country and family from aliens who are invading and taking it away from you. And that’s what they’re doing.

The same problem happened in Germany, and one man was able to rise up and unite his people as White people. He said the White people are a master race. That’s what Adolf Hitler preached and I believe it. And I think most White Christians in America who have any sense realize that’s true. The jews have been telling us that Adolf Hitler was a monster and he murdered alot of people, and so forth. I learned that that’s alot of garbage. Just like they say the people of Alabama, stormtroopers, and beating negroes, and villains, and heels, and so forth, that’s not true. The same people that lie about Alabama, lie about Germany. In short, Germany was the Mississippi and Alabama of Europe. And they got me and millions of other White Christians like me to go out and try to destroy it. And I think we made a mistake, ladies and gentlemen, I think we should have destroyed atheistic, soviet, race-mixing communism. Which is what Hitler was trying to do.

We didn’t however and now we have it all over us. Grinding[[?]] all over us and destroying us and boasting they’re going to bury us. Well I say to you, it’s just the other way around, we’re going to bury communism. And I believe that only a leader and only a group that’s willing to face up to the whole truth, not part of it, but all of it, is going to be able to bury communism. To do it we need the strength of the enormous masses of the people of America. Not right-wingers, such as voted for Goldwater. We need the White Christian masses. The only group in the country with the courage and the guts to go after these masses is the American Nazi party.

No matter what they call us, no matter what they say about us, we believe in the people – in the ordinary taxi drivers, the construction workers, the ordinary little guys that built this country. We believe that if we go to them with a pitch based on the truth, on the facts about race, on the facts about communism, and tell them the truth as we know it, and don’t try to hide it or disguise it any, we believe we can win political power because those little fellas will go into the ballot boxes and the ballot booths where nobody can see what they’re doing and no matter how much they may be terrorized outside, in that sacred American ballot box they’ll vote for a White man. They did it for Wallace, I believe they’ll do it for me in Virginia. I believe they’ll do it for me or any other leader with the courage to stand up and fight as a White man in this country.

So far, ladies and gentlemen, look at the leaders we’ve had. We’ve had some very great ones. I would have gladly given my life following Douglas MacArthur. And I offered to fight and do anything for Joe McCarthy. And yet not one of these men ever once had the nerve to stand up and say, “I am a White man and I’m gonna fight as a White man.” Even George Wallace today is still saying racism is evil. And I believe that if we keep saying this, for the benefit of the jews, so they won’t call us hate-mongers and racists, we’re going to get whipped.

I believe that time is too short. Time is desperate[[?]]. It is time to stand up and tell the whole truth, and to fight for it. To organize not as conservatives, not as republicans, not as democrats, not as liberals, not as northerners, not as southerners, not as Protestants, or religious or anti-religious, or anything else but as White men. Stand up with all our hearts and souls and unite. For the blacks vote black, the jews vote jewish. Ladies and gentleman, let’s let the White man vote White. Let’s let the White man support the White cause.

If you believe in and understand what I’ve been preaching, please, won’t you support, won’t you enable these young men who go out and risk their lives in the streets fighting communists? Won’t you support them? Keep them alive. Help them pay the bail the way the communists and the jews support their communist jew scum, to get them out of jail, I’ve got alot of men in jail right now, won’t you please support them? Listen to the group leader who has presented this film and give them all the help you can. It will be deeply appreciated by me and every other White American, every White Christian, in this country. I thank you very much and I hope to see you all personally some time.

According to Metapedia:

He ran unsuccessfully for governor of Virginia in 1965 as an independent, polling 5,730 votes, or 1.02 percent of the total vote.

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Some Thoughts on Irmin Vinson

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I bought a new book last weekend. While I have not yet finished it, what I have read so far is absolutely wonderful – a clear, sensible examination of topics that many White advocates consider difficult or imprudent to discuss.

The book is Irmin Vinson’s Some Thoughts on Hitler & Other Essays. The promotional blurb reads:

Why are we subjected to more anti-Hitler propaganda today than during World War II?

Why are white nations blanketed with Holocaust memorials, even countries where the Holocaust did not take place?

Why do most people know how many Jews died during World War II but have no idea how many non-Jews died?

Irmin Vinson’s Some Thoughts on Hitler and Other Essays is a book about propaganda. Vinson explains how the organized Jewish community uses the memory of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust as weapons to stigmatize the patriotism and ethnic pride not just of Germans, but of all whites, including those who fought against Hitler.

Vinson explains how this spurious white guilt and self-hatred has been used to break down white resistance to multiculturalism, miscegenation, affirmative action, and the invasion and colonization of white homelands by non-white immigrants—trends which, if not reversed, will lead to white extinction.

In these clear, rational, and highly readable essays, Irmin Vinson exposes and demolishes this insidious propaganda, clearing the way for the reemergence of white pride and patriotism. Some Thoughts on Hitler will change more than your view of the past; it will also change your understanding of the present—and of our destiny

See also Kevin MacDonald’s Foreword.

Vinson’s long essay titled Holocaust Commemoration forms the core of the book. I do not recall reading this essay previously, but passages like this one made me wonder if I must have:

The public discourse of the Jewish Holocaust is incoherent: it speaks in the universalist language of tolerance and inclusion, while justifying Jewish particularism in Israel; it claims to find in stories of Jewish wartime suffering distinctively Jewish humanitarian lessons, applicable to everyone everywhere, while borrowing them from the historical religion of the West; it teaches human brotherhood, while elevating the suffering of Jews far above all other suffering; it commemorates Jewish powerlessness, while demonstrating Jewish power. But beneath all its deceptions and contradictions lies the message of broad Western responsibility for German mistreatment of Jews, a special culpability which Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, a self-styled Holocaust theologian, has called “the measureless Christian guilt toward the Jewish people.” [6]

Institutionalized Holocaust commemoration in the United States presupposes that White Americans are notably deficient in the various moral qualities that Holocaust remembering purportedly inculcates, whereas Jews, owing to their group experience of nazi persecution, are the appropriate teachers of necessary lessons in racial tolerance. Those peculiar meanings did not, needless to say, arise unaided from stories of German atrocities against European Jewry. The truth of our collective guilt required an aggressive reinterpretation of the Second World War, an assault on the moral legitimacy of the Western nations that fought and won it. Through a remarkable transformation, the Allied victors have become co-agents in the crimes and alleged crimes of the regime they defeated, and the war itself has been reimagined as a Judeocentric moral test, which all of us conspicuously failed. Our measureless guilt, together with the entire edifice of Holocaust commemoration erected upon it, is a doctrine of moral equivalence projected back into the past in order to shape the present.

Vinson fleshes out and hammers home the points I only tersely outlined in A White Guide to the Jewish Narrative. Beside jewish morality and the holocaust narrative, touched on above, Vinson identifies an early example of the generalization of the jewish narrative to “minorities” and the racial aggression behind it:

An Early Holocaust Lesson

In 1944, as the war in Europe was drawing to a close, Jewish playwright Arthur Miller, then in his late twenties, sat down to write Focus, his first and only novel. [7] It would be a critical moral fable about his fellow Americans, for Miller did not share the heroic self-image and traditional patriotism that characterized most other Americans during the war years. Focus, published in 1945, would be an imaginative elaboration of a very simple thesis: being a Jew in Roosevelt’s America was like being a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. In their irrational hatred of the Jewish Other, White Americans, the same White Americans who were then fighting fascism in Europe and the Far East, were no different from nazis.

Lawrence Newman, the novel’s WASP protagonist, is a corporate personnel manager whose quiet bourgeois world is permanently disrupted after he begins to wear eyeglasses, which strangely make him look Jewish, a dangerous liability in the America of Miller’s fertile imagination. Without glasses Newman is a gray-flanneled Episcopalian, a normal White American, despite his ethnically ambiguous surname; with glasses he is perceived and treated as a despised Jew, persecuted and even attacked by other normal White Americans, all of whom are racist and anti-Semitic, as Newman had been before he gained his factitious Jewishness. The novel’s organizing narrative conceit, that eyeglasses can turn an anti-Semitic Gentile into a Jew, conveys an obvious Judeocentric meaning: Lawrence Newman, in his culpable blindness to the intolerance that surrounds him, must first be seen as a Jew in order to see clearly. Thus in his new role as a reluctant Jew, now seeing and experiencing the world through the Jewish lenses conferred by his racial marginalization, Newman gradually discovers that his homogenous New York neighborhood, which had once seemed a benign social environment of communal amity, is in reality, beneath its placid surface, a seething caldron of xenophobia and hate, at least for anyone with the misfortune to be different, or in his case merely to appear different. “Behind these snug, flat-roofed houses,” Newman now perceives, “a sharp-tipped and murderous monster was nightly being formed, and its eyes were upon him.”

The novel’s historical context is central to its subject. In Focus the European war, depicted in our propaganda as a titanic struggle of good against evil, seems little more than a distant contest between two rival groups of pogromists, each nurturing its own “murderous monster” of racial hatred. In Europe German nazis conduct mass hangings of Jews, while at home angry anti-Semites, organized into the Christian Front, part of a large network of patriotic organizations spread across the country, beat Jews and rape Puerto Ricans as they await the return of the American military, who will then assume the lethal role of storm troops in driving Jews from America, beginning first in New York, the center of Jew-hatred. White America’s cleansing war against Jewry will begin, as an activist neighbor informs Newman, “when the boys come home,” since American combatants in the European war are at one with their German enemies in their implacable anti-Semitism.

In the political environment we now all inhabit, nothing in Focus is startling, nothing would be out of place in a sensitivity workshop or an anti-racialist educational exercise. The novel’s vision of a virulently racist America would have appeared radical in 1945; now it is commonplace, especially for young Whites immersed in a rigorous program of multicultural miseducation. Miller, alarmed by the failure of non-Jews to comprehend “the threatening existence of Nazism,” and unimpressed by the fact that many men of his age cohort were then dying in Europe fighting Germans, took it upon himself to teach an early version of what would eventually become the most insidious of the Jewish Holocaust’s numerous lessons, namely that pathological (“nazi”) hatreds lurk behind the West’s superficially civilized exterior. Whereas American wartime propaganda had, naturally enough, presented NS Germany as the moral antonym of the United States in particular and of the democratic West in general, Miller substituted a much different contrastive structure, placing innocent Jews on one side and lethally malevolent Whites on the other, with racial minorities like Blacks and Puerto Ricans in ancillary roles as occasional victims of White intolerance. This structure, which Miller may have been the first to discover, conflated Germans and their enemies in order to nazify White Gentiles as a whole. Focus was a thorough defamation of Euro-America for its endemic anti-Semitism and racial hatred, the purpose of which was to efface any significant moral distinction between ourselves and the propaganda image of the Nazi. Miller’s nazification required the Nazi as the acknowledged representation of evil, but his concrete targets were White Americans, who had not yet seen their own visible racial pathologies.

From this Vinson boldly infers:

An imaginative Jew writing before the liberation of the German concentration camps could arrive at nazifying Holocaust propaganda without the Holocaust, which suggests that the Holocaust does not represent events during the Second World War but rather reveals Jewish attitudes toward their benefactors. The Holocaust, as an idea, was latent Jewish racial aggression awaiting both a symbol and an opportunity to express itself.

Yes indeed. Likewise for the Six Million Holocausts phenomena.

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A White Guide to the Jewish Narrative

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jewish morality

To most Whites morality is an entirely universalist notion. This means that, with some exceptions, if something is right or wrong then it is assumed to be right or wrong for everyone, everywhere, all the time. This notion of morality is reflected in Christian ethics as The Golden Rule. Universalist morality is one of the tenets of Western-style liberalism.

Jews have a more particularist notion of morality: Is it good or bad for the jews? If something is good for jews then it is right, otherwise it is wrong. Jews are also well aware that universalist-sounding rhetoric can bamboozle Whites into serving or at least acceding to jewish particularist interests.

It is this particularist morality that enables jews to unselfconsciously assert that Israel is for the jews but White countries are for everybody. Likewise that the jews are a people, but White is just a meaningless skin color or social construct.

Criticism of jews along these lines is often mistaken, sometimes intentionally, as an accusation of dual loyalty. As Joe Sobran once observed, dual loyalty would be an improvement (from either a liberal universalist or White particularist point of view).

the hate narrative

Jews tend to identify people they hate for specifically jewish reasons as jew-haters.

According to jews, anyone who comes into conflict with the jews must be to blame. Entirely. This blame cannot be explained in any way that leaves blame unassigned, because then some portion might be ascribed, even if only implicitly, to the jews. Thus the tendency to characterize anyone who vexes them as simply mentally or morally defective, driven to hate jews solely for the sake of hating.

the jewish version of history

A one-sided version of history entirely sympathetic to jews. This means that for any historic conflict with other groups or individuals, the non-jews are and always have been entirely to blame. In a nutshell: jews have always been the victims of horrible persecution and oppression at the hands of stupid, crazy, evil haters.

A corollary of this is the anti-White version of history: Whites have always been stupid, crazy, evil haters, persecuting and oppressing everyone else, and specifically jews.

the jewish guilt-trip

The use of any portion of the jewish and/or anti-White versions of history as an accusation, assigning collective responsibility and guilt to Whites. This is a form of psychological aggression – an attack on White self-worth and self-confidence, placing Whites on the defensive.

The purpose of such aggression is to gain concessions benefiting their own group – to promote or defend jewish power and interests.

the blood libel narrative

One specific jewish anti-White libel/story in the larger jewish version of history. This is the jewish claim that on multiple occasions Europeans killed jews who were accused of kidnapping and killing European children for their blood. Since the idea that jews could be guilty of anything is unthinkable, the Europeans must be the ones who were, and still are, guilty.

Oddly enough, according to jews themselves these accusations of bloody kidnap-killing recur across time and space, following jews wherever they go.

the holocaust narrative

Another jewish anti-White libel/story, the most prominent of all. This is the jewish claim that Whites killed (or otherwise aided and abetted the killing of) six million jews in gas chambers between 1939 and 1945. Today this narrative almost completely overshadows anything else that occurred before during or after World War II.

Over time the target of jewish accusations and guilt-tripping has broadened from the Nazis, to Germans (for not stopping the Nazis), to Europeans in general (for not more effectively opposing the Germans), to Whites in general (for restricting immigration, not joining the war in Europe against Germany soon enough, not making the bombing or liberating of prison camps a higher priority). Meanwhile, in an increasing number of Western countries, open dispute of the holocaust narrative is considered a violation of the law, punishable by fine or imprisonment.

the nation of immigrants narrative

Jews in diaspora are the archetypical nation of immigrants, thriving for millenia while regularly migrating from one host country to another. Well aware of this history, jews overwhelmingly favor open borders for all countries, except Israel. Virtually every jew has a story to tell about how their own family benefited from immigration, or was harmed because they couldn’t migrate freely.

In common use the term is an oxymoron used to idealize unrelated, hostile alien tribes colonizing countries founded and formerly controlled by Whites.

the jewish narrative

All together, the phenomena and attitudes described above, and more, constitute the jewish narrative, which is now the dominant narrative in Western society. The pervasiveness of the jewish narrative is a consequence of jewish influence in media, culture, and politics. This is in turn a consequence of jewish wealth and activism.

the jewish question

Prior to the Enlightenment Europe and Christendom were seen, by Europeans, as synonymous. Jews were seen primarily as members of an ancient religious sect who hadn’t yet gotten around to converting to Christianity.

In the late 18th century, with the fig leaf of religion shriveling, European intellectuals began to wonder aloud – Who are these rude, uncivilized, aliens who call themselves The Jews? Why do they behave as a nation within a nation? Whatever shall we do with them?

jewish emancipation

The jewish question was eventually answered by fiat, imposed from above by European political leaders who were sympathetic to and already in the process of assimilating with the jews. These leaders declared jews equal citizens and granted them full political equality. This process occurred in fits and starts, at various times and places in Europe, during the first half of the 19th century. In exchange jews were expected to drop their particularist identity, to stop being jews and assimilate.

Debate on the jewish question dragged on however. Europeans did not generally accept jews as social or racial equals, and jews did not generally abandon their jewish identity. As partially assimilated jewish intellectuals joined the debate, they turned it more and more into an indictment of Europeans.

Today this portion of European history is taboo. Only the jewish version and their guilt-tripping remain in the mainstream. Calling the process jewish emancipation is itself a sign of deference to jewish sensibilities. It was, in retrospect, more of a slow-motion jewish putsch. In the end, jews were free to operate as a particularist team inside a larger, universalist society.

the jewish template and the minority narrative

The struggle for dominance over Western society came to a head in the middle of the 20th century. Whites waged a cataclysmic, fratricidal war on each other and lost. Long before that war, even while Whites still dominated the US politically, jews were already helping blacks found the NAACP and pathologizing White racial identity.

Now, in the 21st century, jewish power and influence increase essentially unchecked. For the last six decades the jews have gone into overdrive, generalizing and adapting elements of their narrative to other “minorities”. Slowly but surely this is what has turned European-founded societies inside out and upside down. When jews and other diversities exclaim, “Diversity is our greatest strength”, they are exactly right.

[Image data source.]

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Jewish Revolutionaries: Good for Anyone Other Than the Jews?

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From the Bastille to the boulevard: The long history of Jewish revolt, by Shuki Sadeh, Ido Efrati, Haaretz Daily Newspaper, 2 Sept 2011:

One hot day in the summer of 1967, a young, frizzy-haired guy named Abbie Hoffman tried to go into the visitors’ entrance of the building in which the New York Stock Exchange is located. When the guard stopped him, Hoffman said: “We are Jews and you are an anti-Semite who is not letting us in.” The disconcerted guard let Hoffman and his hippie-friends go up to the visitors’ gallery.

Jews have traditionally taken a particular interest in the successes of their people in every generation and in every field of endeavor. This Jewish “bookkeeping” is mostly tendentious and usually ignores the circumstantial and environmental conditions that made these success stories possible. Indeed, for the most part, it prefers to attribute these achievements to the genetic makeup of the Chosen People.

“The list of Jews who have been involved in leading revolutions [since the middle of the 19th century] is very long,” explains Prof. Moshe Zimmermann of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s history department. “When a social group is not satisfied with its situation and feels it cannot change it – it will support a revolution. The Jews were not satisfied because they did not have privileges granted to other sectors and therefore the idea of revolution – whether communist or liberal – was attractive to them.

According to Prof. Moshe Zuckermann, a historian at Tel Aviv University, revolution was not the only option for Jews. They had least two other options.

“One was assimilation,” he explains, “as happened in Germany in the 19th century, and the other was going in the Zionist direction, a possibility that arose at the end of that century. If a Jew did not choose one of those two directions, his remaining alternative was to change the society at large – and therefore became a revolutionary.”

Trotsky was surrounded by quite a number of Jews, among whom his brother-in-law, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev stood out. “It is said jokingly,” comments Miron, “that when Lenin would leave the room, Trotsky was able to organize a minyan [prayer quorum].”

In Hungary, in another example, Bela Kun, a young man in his 30s, was among the founders of the Soviet Republic in Hungary in 1919. When it collapsed after 133 days, Kun went into exile in Russia, and was killed in one of Stalin’s purges at the end of the ’30s.

“Kun operated within a reality in ferment: Nearly half of the Hungarian journalists were Jewish, as well as the lawyers and doctors – even though they constituted only 5 percent of the population,” Silber explains. “At the end of World War I, Kun seized power in Hungary. He headed a government of 35 commissars, nearly all of them Jewish, and the impression was that a Jewish government really had been created. This led to a wave of anti-Semitism and terror against Jews.”

“In Germany there were various revolutionary ‘focal points’ dominated by Jews,” says Miron. “Kurt Eisner led the ‘Bavarian Soviet Republic,’ which briefly ruled in Bavaria. In Munich, there were three attempts at a revolution, all of them were led by Jews and all of them failed.”

Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-born Jewess, was one of the founders of the Communist Party in Germany.

“Jewish revolutionaries for the most part live on the margins of Jewish society and sometimes cut off ties with the community,” notes Prof. Avi Saguy, head of the program for hermeneutics and a lecturer in philosophy at Bar-Ilan University. According to him, tikkun olam (repairing the world ) is a profound Jewish ethos – but a conservative rather than a revolutionary one.

“To say that in the Jewish genes there is a revolutionary element is utter nonsense,” says Prof. Zimmermann. “The Jews, by virtue of being a minority and because they were a religious group, adopted various types of behavior – which also explains the support for revolutions. The origin of the demand for social justice is indeed rooted in Jewish tradition, but in modern conditions, it can be said that it lies in revolutionary tendencies.”

Zuckermann, too, says there is no connection between the revolutionaries’ Jewishness and their political choices: “The discourse did not revolve around ultra-Orthodox religious Judaism, but rather around the Judaism that emerged in the period of the Enlightenment. From the moment the Jews integrated into the civil society of the 19th century – which, although it declared that they were emancipated, in fact did not accept them – they had a collective interest in changing society. Bourgeois civil society perceived the Jews in a new light: not only in a religious context, but also in socioeconomic one.”

Emanicipation of society

The most significant expression of the separation between the Jew’s social status and his tradition is found in the writings of Karl Marx, whose philosophy had a crucial influence on the revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in Germany in 1818, Marx came from a family of rabbis but his father converted and became a Lutheran.

In his 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question,” one of his early writings, Marx related to the secular status of the Jews in society and characterized them as a people identified with commerce and the accumulation of wealth.

“Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion,” he wrote, “but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society …

“We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” There are those who saw in Marx’s sharp words an expression of anti-Semitism and a denial of his Jewish past. However, in general he is perceived as a serious social theoretician, who called for the elimination of religious separatism of any kind and for abolishing economic commerce, on the way to creating an egalitarian, classless civil society.

“Most of the great revolutionaries,” says Zuckermann, “did not relate to their Judaism. People like Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg did not talk about emancipating the Jews from their Judaism, but rather about human emancipation, whereby people need to liberate themselves from social structures that create the oppression of various groups in the society, among them the Jews.”

Jews, jews, jews. Jews are so obsessed with themselves that they write stories bragging even about the mass murder and mayhem their tribemates have caused, turning European society upside down, spinning it as good and righteous. Then, perhaps realizing that this story may not fly, they hedge somewhat by lamely claiming it wasn’t really jews as jews.

But of course the story is about jews as jews. That’s what 9/10ths of it is about and that’s why it was published by Haaretz.

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Napoleon, the House of Rothschild, and Jewish Emancipation

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The Rothschild story: A golden era ends for a secretive dynasty, by Paul Vallely, The Independent, 16 April 2004 (my emphasis):

More significant, however, was that in the process the Rothschilds created the world of banking as we know it today. Nathan operated principally as an underwriter and speculator in the early 19th-century bond market. He and his brothers invented, or at any rate popularised, the government bond, which allowed investors, big and small, to buy bits of the debts of sovereign states by purchasing fixed-interest bearer bonds.

Governments liked this because they could use them to raise colossal sums of money. Investors liked them because they could be traded – at prices that fluctuated in relation to the performance of the issuing government – and shrewd investors could make big sums. It brought investment in railways, the industrial revolution and ventures like the Suez Canal. The Rothschilds got a cut of everything.

It was a new kind of power. “I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply,” Nathan said. The family developed a lack of awe for the powerful and important. A pompous aristocrat one day called on Nathan who was head down at his desk. Without looking up, the banker said: “Take a chair.” His caller, affronted, said: “You are speaking to the Prince of Thurn and Taxis.” To which Rothschild replied: “Take two chairs.” At one point he even rescued the Bank of England after a run on gold caused the collapse of 145 banks. In 1885 he was given the hereditary title of Baron Rothschild.

Many of the distinct characteristics of the family can be traced back to the will of the founder Mayer Rothschild. It stipulated that no public inventory should be made of his estate; that key positions in the House of Rothschild were to be held by family members; that the eldest son should inherit unless the rest agreed otherwise; that the family was to intermarry with first and second cousins to keep the fortune together; that anyone disputing these terms would be struck from the will. And that all this should apply in perpetuity.

In part this was about preserving not just their Jewish identity but a self-conscious position as role models for their poorer co-religionists. The Rothschilds expended much effort and money pressing for Jewish emancipation and equality across the continent.

Their Jewish solidarity was not heterogeneous. In 1938 Nathan’s great-great-grandson, Victor, shocked an audience by saying that in spite of “the slow murder of 600,000 people” on the continent “we probably all agree that there is something unsatisfactory in refugees encroaching on the privacy of our country, even for relatively short periods of time.” And the family split over the question of the dream of a Jewish homeland, with some members supporting the first Zionist settlement in Palestine and the Balfour declaration and others opposing it on the grounds that it would encourage anti-Semites to question the existing national identities of assimilated Jews around the rest of the world. None of which has allayed the wild fears of anti-Semites who throughout the 20th century branded the Rothschilds as part of a Jewish plot to take over the world.

The world has changed around the Rothschilds. At one point Nathan Rothschild was the richest man in Britain and probably in the world. In today’s terms he was wealthier than Bill Gates. But they never gained the foothold in America they needed. The world became corporate. Private banking got left behind.

Napoleon and the Jews, Wikipedia:

Napoleon’s indirect influence on the fate of the Jews was even more powerful than any of the decrees recorded in his name. By breaking up the feudal trammels of mid-Europe and introducing the equality of the French Revolution he effected more for Jewish emancipation than had been accomplished during the three preceding centuries. The consistory of Westphalia became a model for other German provinces until after the fall of Napoleon, and the condition of the Jews in the Rhine provinces was permanently improved as a consequence of their subjection to Napoleon or his representatives. Heine and Börne both record their sense of obligation to the liberality of Napoleon’s principles of action, and the German Jews in particular have always regarded Napoleon as one of the chief forerunners of emancipation in Germany.

(Image from Jews and French Grand Opera.)