A new book charts the centuries-long history of the Rothschilds and recurring waves of antisemitism.
My first encounter with the Rothschild name happened in a thrift store. I was maybe nine years old and ran across a little wool dress coat just my size. The tag said “Rothschild,” and when I showed my find to my mother, her eyes lit up. “The Rothschilds are very famous and wealthy,” I remember her saying. “That’s probably a very nice coat.”
I don’t remember how nice it was, and at the time I didn’t know enough to wonder whether the Rothschilds, whose company made my coat, were connected to those Rothschilds, the remarkably successful banking family whose name is a longstanding byword among conspiracy theorists and antisemites. I think I wore it under the impression that the child in Rothschild was a family tribute (Roth’s child), or perhaps a nod to their sale of children’s attire.
But the seam in the word is not after the S but before it: roth-schild, from the German for “red shield.” It’s a reference to a marking on the home where Mayer Amschel Rothschild lived as he founded the family dynasty in the 18th century. By day, he served in the court of the princely House of Hesse, and at night, he returned to the cramped quarters of the Judengasse, Frankfurt’s prison-like, one-street ghetto in which Christian authorities literally locked the local Jewish population every night and every Lord’s Day.
That’s but one small piece of the history covered in Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, a new release from journalist Mike Rothschild, who is—as the delightfully clever cover notes—“no relation” of those Rothschilds. The subtitle undersells the scope of the work, which …
