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. He was 87.
His death was announced on Monday from the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity of which he was chairman. It was not stated when or where he died, nor was the cause of death given.
Mr. Rothschild – more officially 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 18th and early 19th centuries .century.
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. The net worth of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who Steinberg added that his son, who founded the bank's London branch, “can be compared to today's Bill Gates.”
Most accounts of the Rothschilds' wealth stem from the decision to finance the British military in the Napoleonic Wars. But the broader dynasty thrived by strengthening its family ties and cultivating what Mr. Steinberg called “whoever was at the top of European society during this period.”
It was against this historical background that Jacob Rothschild joined the London branch of the family empire of NM Rothschild & Sons Bank in 1963. By then he had followed a path familiar to the British elite, being educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford.
At the time, London's traditionally cautious, clubby world of high finance was still two decades away from a shift toward free capitalism that would culminate in the so-called Big Bang of 1986, which saw the deregulation of the London Stock Exchange.
And Britain's commercial banks in the City, as London's financial district is known, appeared to be dwarfed by the burgeoning financial power of Wall Street, building pressure for new approaches.
Mr. Rothschild had long advocated merging the London branch of his family's financial empire with another merchant bank, SG Warburg, but his cousin Evelyn de Rothschild and his own father Victor, a scientist and former member of Britain's domestic intelligence agency MI5, opposed it the plan from the secret service.
He therefore 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 some ways, he challenged a culture of family control and secrecy that had characterized their business from the start.
As early as 1810, “family policy excluded female descendants and all sons-in-law from any involvement in the company,” wrote scholar Steinberg. Each of the original partners “waived his wife's right to inspect the accounts and vowed to allow only direct male descendants to inherit the shares.”
Marrying outside the Rothschild Jewish faith was frowned upon; Marriages within the family were not unknown.
“Of the 21 marriages involving descendants of Mayer Amschel between 1824 and 1877, no fewer than 15 were between his direct descendants,” Mr. Steinberg wrote.
While the family's rules were relaxed in the early 1960s, Mr Rothschild's proposals for a merger with SG Warburg clashed directly with tradition. For Victor and Evelyn de Rothschild, “maintaining family control took precedence 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,” Mr 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 company, J. Rothschild & Company, whose principal assets would be known by its initials: RIT , for Rothschild Investment Trust.
Mr. Rothschild retired in 2019 as head of RIT Capital Partners. This year, his personal fortune 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, 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 as head of RIT, he became involved in a number of ventures, including an unsuccessful 1989 bid with other investors to acquire British American Tobacco for $21 billion.
He maintained a wide network of international contacts and served 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 J. Rothschild Assurance Group, an asset management company now known as St. James's Place.
Not all of his maneuvers were free of controversy. According to British media reports, in 2003 he had entered into a trust agreement with Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a Russian oil tycoon and Putin foe, to transfer Mr Khodorkovsky's share 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 an influential financier, Mr. Rothschild played an energetic if sometimes secretive role in Israel, overseeing his family's longstanding 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's name. “We tried not to be in the headlines,” Rothschild 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 of Dorothy de Rothschild, the foundation's chairwoman and one of his aunts, in 1988. She bequeathed him lands in Buckinghamshire, England.
Ownership of one of the properties, Waddesdon Manor, built in the 1880s by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the style of a French castle, 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 Rothschild collection of an estimated 15,000 works of art and objects, as well as his personal collection of Rothschild wines, mostly from the Bordeaux region of France.
Mr Rothschild was a key backer of the mansion's restoration and was involved in other ambitious projects, including the refurbishment of Somerset House, an 18th-century building overlooking the River Thames in London. Among many art-related positions in Britain and elsewhere, he was chairman of the board of trustees of London's National Gallery from 1985 to 1991.
Mr. Rothschild married Serena Dunn, a 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.
Despite 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 “great sympathy for the people who were protesting against some of the excesses in the financial world.”
“After all, these are personalities who have made great fortunes and who, over the last five to 10 years, have been at the head of a system that has caused great harm to many interests,” he said. “They have brought enormous benefits, but the banking system as a whole has had a crippling effect in a number of areas around the world.”
Victor Mather contributed reporting.