The Rothschild Women Led Lives as Full as the Men’s (Published 2022) (2024)

THE WOMEN OF ROTHSCHILD: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty, by Natalie Livingstone

In 1969, Miriam Rothschild, a renowned British zoologist, discovered that she and her brother, Victor, who was also a zoologist, were the only members of their celebrated banking family included in the country’s latest edition of “Who’s Who.” Delighted, Miriam confessed to an aunt that “to have edged the partners out of the limelight is a moment of great malicious pleasure to me.” It’s a moment that also gives evident pleasure to Natalie Livingstone, the author of “The Women of Rothschild,” a commendable if curiously titled book on a splendid subject. (Why not simply “The Rothschild Women”?)

Miriam and her sister Pannonica (named by their butterfly-hunting father, Charles, after a rare moth) are just two of more than a dozen female members of the Rothschild family whose lives are recounted in Livingstone’s book. The sisters seldom stepped out of the limelight: Miriam as a pioneer of “rewilding” and an expert on fleas; and Nica (as Pannonica was known) as a drug-taking “jazz baroness” of New York, in whose hotel suite Charlie Parker died. More significantly, Nica dedicated herself to promoting Thelonious Monk, years before more traditional jazz lovers fully embraced his singular music.

The Rothschild family’s male-made millions certainly helped these independent-minded women forge their careers, as did, in Miriam’s case, her father Charles’s and her uncle Walter’s passion for the insect world. Miriam’s happiest childhood memories were of field expeditions with gentle, depressive Charles, during which she learned to identify butterfly species, while Nica was introduced to jazz when (imagine!) the great Teddy Wilson was recruited to teach piano to the girls’ brother, Victor. But, as Livingstone makes clear, the exceptional spirit and determination of these unlikely sisters was fostered by their indomitable mother, Rózsika, a winner of Hungary’s women’s tennis championship, who, in 1915, joined forces with Dolly, another formidable Rothschild spouse, to promote Chaim Weizmann’s bold demand for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Historians still describe the 1917 Balfour Declaration announcing support for a Jewish state within the Ottoman Empire as though Miriam and Nica’s reclusive uncle Walter (he became Lord Rothschild in 1915) had been the family’s most active member on the issue. Rózsika and Dolly’s considerable endeavors are sometimes granted a nod.

Livingstone’s challenge is to explain the importance of “the women of Rothschild” over 300 years of family history. Setting aside the 20th century’s more adventurous female Rothschilds, what made these wives and daughters special? The answer, in surprisingly large part, lies in the boldness of a handful of Rothschild girls who opted to marry out, though this didn’t happen immediately. Gutle, the matriarch, never left the Frankfurt ghetto from which Nathan, her most successful son, set off for England in 1798. A financial genius, Nathan boasted that “my only pleasure is my business.” Hannah, his more cultured wife, oversaw a musical upbringing for their children and lobbied for Jewish causes. Determined to help emancipate England’s Jews (who, among other restrictions, could not legally serve in Parliament until 1858), she nagged her husband to meet with the Lord Chancellor to discuss the issue. “Hannah said that if he did not, she would,” reported Moses Montefiore, her impressed brother-in-law.