#197 Founder of the Rothschild Family Dynasty

What I learned from reading Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild by Amos Elon.  ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here.  ---- Riches cover a multitude of woes.Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the dark, foul-smelling alley in Frankfurt where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty.Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy and ingenuity.He raised five famously gifted sons, veritable money-making machines, to carry on his work after him. Their names overshadowed his own and became synonymous with colossal wealth, extravagant living and hidden political power.A century after his death they would still ask, in all seriousness, if a great war was still possible in Europe if the House of Rothschild set their face against it.Rothschild's origins were certainly modest. There was little reason to foresee his destiny. The personal circumstances of his life were difficult throughout. They suggest a saga not only political and financial but also human and dramatic – more dramatic, perhaps, than that of his flamboyant sons. The sons were not persecuted human beings, legally confined to the squalor of a congested ghetto.The old ghetto where Rothschild lived his entire life was a narrow lane, more slum-like and overcrowded than any other tenements in Frankfurt. A closed compound, it was shut off from the rest of the city by high walls and three heavy gates. The gates were guarded by soldiers and were locked at night, and all day on Sundays. In it lived the largest Jewish community in Germany in conditions of almost total isolation, and apartheid.How they managed to survive under these circumstances and at times even to prosper was a mark of human enterprise and ingenuity.Every petty prin