Jacob Rothschild, banker who broke from his legendary family, dies at 87

Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, arts patron and philanthropist with close ties to Israel who broke with his family’s legendary banking dynasty at a time of radical change in the world of finance, has died. He was 87.

His death was announced Monday by the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity of which he was chairman. It was not specified when or where he died, nor was the cause of death stated.

Mr Rothschild – formally the fourth Baron Rothschild – was descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a coin dealer in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, who sent four of his five sons to Vienna, London, Naples and Paris to seek their fortunes in the late 20th century . 18th and early 19th centuries.

For most of the 19th century, the House of Rothschild was the world’s largest bank “by a wide margin,” wrote Jonathan Steinberg, an American scholar, in 1999 in The London Review of Books. son who founded the bank’s London branch, “can be compared to that of Bill Gates today,” Mr. Steinberg added.

Most stories about the Rothschilds’ wealth have their origins in a decision to fund the British army during the Napoleonic Wars. But the broader dynasty prospered by strengthening its family ties and cultivating what Mr. Steinberg called “all those who were at the top of European society during this period.”

It was against this historical backdrop that Jacob Rothschild joined the London branch of the family empire at NM Rothschild & Sons bank in 1963. Until then he had followed a route familiar to the British elite, educated at Eton College and Christchurch College, Oxford. .

At the time, the traditionally cautious, cushy world of London finance was still twenty years away from a shift to freewheeling capitalism, culminating in the so-called Big Bang of 1986, which brought deregulation of the London Stock Exchange.

And Britain’s commercial banks in the City, as London’s financial district is known, seemed dwarfed by the burgeoning financial power of Wall Street, building pressure for new approaches.

Mr. Rothschild had long favored merging the London branch of his family’s financial empire with another investment bank, SG Warburg, but the plan was opposed by his cousin Evelyn de Rothschild and his own father, Victor, a scientist and former member of the British MI5. intelligence service.

That’s why he decided to break away. “We must try to make ourselves as much a bank of brains as of money,” Mr. Rothschild said in 1965.

In a sense, he challenged a culture of familial control and secrecy that had characterized family interactions from the very beginning.

As early as 1810, “family policy excluded female descendants and all sons-in-law from any role in the business,” wrote Mr. Steinberg, the scholar. Each of the original partners “renounced his wife’s right to inspect the accounts and vowed that only direct male descendants would inherit shares.”

A marriage outside the Rothschilds’ Jewish faith was frowned upon; marriage within the family was not unknown.

“Of the 21 marriages between 1824 and 1877 involving descendants of Mayer Amschel, no fewer than 15 were between his direct descendants,” Mr. Steinberg wrote.

While the family’s rules had softened by the early 1960s, Mr Rothschild’s proposals for a merger with SG Warburg clashed head-on with tradition. For Victor and Evelyn de Rothschild, “maintaining control over the family took priority over expansion,” wrote British historian Niall Ferguson in his book “The House of Rothschild” (1998), a comprehensive study of the family. The clash represented “a serious rift within the English branch of the family,” Ferguson wrote.

The dispute was not resolved until 1980, when the feuding partners agreed that the family bank, NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd., would operate separately from Mr. Rothschild’s breakaway entity, J. Rothschild & Company, whose principal assets would be known to 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 at more than $1 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild was born on April 29, 1936, in Berkshire, England, the son of Victor Rothschild, the third Baron Rothschild, and his first wife, Barbara Judith (Hutchinson) Rothschild.

Mr Rothschild studied history at Oxford before joining the family bank. After resigning as head of RIT, he became involved in a series of ventures, including a failed 1989 bid with other investors to acquire British American Tobacco for $21 billion.

He maintained a wide network of international connections, acting as deputy chairman of Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB Television and as an adviser to the then Prince Charles. He served on the International Advisory Board of the Blackstone Group, a leading private equity group, and in 1991 co-founded the J. Rothschild Assurance Group, an asset management company now known as St. James’s Place.

Not all his maneuvers were free of controversy. In 2003, British media reports said so entered into a trust agreement with Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a Russian oil magnate and Putin enemy, to transfer Mr. Khodorkovsky’s stake in the Yukos oil company to Mr. Rothschild in the event of his arrest. Mr Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003 and later exiled. Mr. Rothschild did not confirm the reports.

In addition to his career as a powerful financier, Mr. Rothschild played an energetic if sometimes secretive role in Israel, overseeing his family’s long-running philanthropic activities there as head of the organization. Yad Hanadiv Foundation.

For decades, the Rothschilds have quietly sponsored major projects, including the construction of Israel’s parliament, the Supreme Court and the National Library, none of which bear the family’s name. “We’ve tried not to be in the headlines,” Mr. Rothschild said told The Jerusalem Report in 2012, adding: “Our tradition is that we don’t shout from the rooftops what we do.”

He took over Yad Hanadiv after the death in 1988 of Dorothy de Rothschild, the foundation’s chairman and his aunt. She gave him estates in Buckinghamshire, England.

Ownership of any of the properties, Waddesdon country houseBuilt by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the 1880s in the style of a French chateau, it had already been transferred to the non-profit National Trust in 1957. But Mr Rothschild struck an unusual deal with the trust to manage the mansion as a home for the Rothschilds’ collection of an estimated 15,000 works of art and objects, and for his personal collection of Rothschild wines, mainly from the Bordeaux region of France.

Mr Rothschild was a major benefactor of the mansion’s restoration and played a role in other ambitious projects, including the regeneration of Somerset House, an 18th-century building overlooking the River Thames in London. In addition to many art-related positions in Britain and elsewhere, he was chairman of the trustees of London’s National Gallery from 1985 to 1991.

Mr. Rothschild married Serena Dunn, racehorse owner, in 1961; she died in 2019. He had four children, Hannah, Beth, Emily and Nathaniel, and several grandchildren. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available.

For all his standing among the world’s wealthy elite, Mr. Rothschild was openly critical of some of his colleagues in the international financial system. In 2012, four years after the 2008 economic crisis, he told The Jerusalem Report that he had “a lot of sympathy for people who were protesting some of the excesses in the financial world.”

“After all, here are characters who have made great fortunes, who have presided over a system that has been very damaging to many interests over the last five to 10 years,” he said. “They have had enormous benefits, but the banking system as a whole has had a chilling effect in a number of areas around the world.”

Victor Mather reporting contributed.