Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, arts patron and philanthropist with close ties to Israel who broke with his family’s storied banking dynasty at a time of radical change in the world of high finance, has died. It was 87.
His death was was announced on Monday from the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity of which he was chairman. He did not specify when and where he died or give a cause of death.
Mr Rothschild – more 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 18th and early 19th centuries.
For most of the 19th century, the House of Rothschild was the largest bank in the world “by a wide margin,” wrote Jonathan Steinberg, an American scholar in The London Review of Books in 1999. Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s Fortune, The Son who founded the bank’s London branch, “can be compared to Bill Gates today,” Mr. Steinberg added.
Most accounts of the Rothschild wealth trace its origins to the decision to finance the British military in the Napoleonic Wars. But the wider dynasty thrived by consolidating its family ties and cultivating what Mr. Steinberg called “everybody who was anybody at the top of European society during that period.”
It is against this historical background that Jacob Rothschild joined the London branch of the family empire at the NM Rothschild & Sons bank in 1963. Until then he had followed a path familiar to the British elite, having studied at Eton College and Christchurch College, Oxford.
At the time, London’s traditionally cautious world of high finance was still two decades away from a shift to free capitalism that culminated in the so-called Big Bang of 1986, which brought deregulation to the London Stock Exchange.
And British merchant banks in the City, as London’s financial district is known, seemed dwarfed by the rising financial power of Wall Street, creating pressure for new approaches.
Mr Rothschild had long favored merging the London branch of his family’s financial empire with another merchant bank, SG Warburg, but the plan was opposed by his cousin Evelyn de Rothschild and his father Victor, a scientist and former member of British MI5. information service.
So he decided to move away. “We must try to make ourselves as much a bank of brains as of money,” Mr. Rothschild said in 1965.
In a way, she was challenging a culture of family control and secrecy that had distinguished her dealings from the start.
As early as 1810, “family policy excluded female offspring and all sons-in-law from any part of the business,” wrote Mr. Steinberg, the scholar. Each of the original partners “waived his wife’s rights to view the accounts and vowed to allow only direct male descendants to inherit shares.”
Marriage outside the Rothschild Jewish faith was frowned upon. marriage within the family was not unknown.
“Of the 21 marriages involving descendants of Mayer Amschel between 1824 and 1877, no fewer than 15 were among his direct descendants,” Mr. Steinberg wrote.
While family rules had softened in the early 1960s, Mr Rothschild’s proposals to merge with SG Warburg clashed head-on with tradition. For Victor and Evelyn de Rothschild, “maintaining family control took precedence over expansion,” wrote British historian Niall Ferguson in “The House of Rothschild” (1998), a voluminous study of the family. The conflict represented “a serious rift within the English branch of the family”, Mr Ferguson wrote.
The dispute was only resolved in 1980, when the 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 with their initials : RIT, for Rothschild Investment Trust.
Mr. Rothschild retired as head of RIT Capital Partners in 2019. That year, his personal fortune was estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at more than $1 billion.
Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild was born in Berkshire, England, on April 29, 1936, to 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 stepping down to lead RIT, he was involved in a number of ventures, including an unsuccessful bid in 1989 with other investors to buy 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 was a member of the International Advisory Board of the Blackstone Group, a leading private equity group, and co-founded the J. Rothschild Assurance Group in 1991, a wealth management firm now known as St. James’s Place.
Not all of his maneuvers were without controversy. In 2003, British media reports said he had entered into a guardianship agreement with Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a Russian oil tycoon and Putin foe, 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.
Alongside his career as a powerful financier, Mr Rothschild played an active if sometimes secretive role in Israel, overseeing his family’s long-standing philanthropic activities there as head of the Yad Hanadiv foundation.
Over the decades, the Rothschilds have quietly sponsored major projects, including the construction of the Israeli Parliament, the Supreme Court and the National Library, none of which bear the family name. “We’ve tried not to be in the headlines,” Mr. Rothschild told The Jerusalem Report in 2012, adding, “Our tradition has been 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 president, and an aunt of his. He bequeathed him estates in Buckinghamshire, England.
Ownership of one of the properties, Waddesdon Manor, built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the 1880s in the style of a French château, had already been transferred to the not-for-profit National Trust in 1957. But Mr Rothschild struck an unusual deal with trust him to manage the mansion as a home for the Rothschild collection of around 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 the main 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. Among many arts-related posts in Britain and elsewhere, he chaired the trustees of the National Gallery in London from 1985 to 1991.
Mr. Rothschild married Serena Dunn, a racehorse owner, in 1961. She died in 2019. They had four children, Hannah, Beth, Emily and Nathaniel, and several grandchildren. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.
For all his standing among the world’s wealthy elite, Mr. Rothschild has been openly critical of some of his peers in the international financial system. In 2012, four years after the 2008 financial crisis, he told The Jerusalem Report that he had “a lot of sympathy with the people who protested some of the excesses in the financial world.”
“After all, here are characters who have made great fortunes who have been at the head of 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 devastating effect on various sectors around the world.”
Victor Mather contributed to the report.
