SOURCE: “Family Values,” in The New Republic, February 8, 1999, pp. 34-7.

In the following review, Stern offers a positive evaluation of the first volume of The House of Rothschild.

The house of Rothschild had many mansions, but it was one house—and this gave it unique power and allure. The dynasty began toward the end of the eighteenth century in the dank Judengasse of Frankfurt, where Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his wife Gutle Schnapper begat nineteen children, of whom ten lived, five sons and five daughters. The founder, as he came to be called, began humbly, burdened by all manner of disabilities leveled against the Jews, as a dealer in antiquities and coins, and as a creditor to a neighboring spendthrift duke. But his greatest investments were his five sons, the oldest of whom he retained in Frankfurt, the four others dispatched to major cities in Europe. Together they...