SOURCE: “All in the Family,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 21, 1999, p. 5.

In the following review, Hertzberg offers praise for the first volume of The House of Rothschild.

Some years ago, a British journalist surveyed the descendants of the Jews who had been granted hereditary peerages since the middle of the 19th century. He found that the overwhelming majority of these titles belonged to grand-children and great-grandchildren who had converted to Christianity. The Rothschilds were the important and striking exception. To be sure, a number had left the faith. Many of the women had married Gentiles, and they had followed their husbands into the church; some of the men had married out without asking their wives to convert to Judaism. But the mainstream of the Rothschilds has insisted, generation after generation, on remaining Jewish. Very often it was an act of defiance, and always it was an...