I recently released my novel BIRTHRIGHT in Kindle and print, in which I wanted to show how the great banking
families, like the one in my novel, the Kronengolds, began in banking and grew
into dynasties . Here’s an excerpt:
The beginning of the nineteenth
century was turbulent and unpredictable. Winds of democracy, unleashed by the
French Revolution, were blowing across Europe, sucking war behind them like
debris, until war in the person of Napoleon became the gale itself. In such
times clever men could do well.
In Frankfurt there was such a man,
Solomon ben Abraham, the only son of the goldsmith Abraham ben Itzakh. He had
grown up with none of his father's superb skill at transforming cold, hard
metal into gleaming beauty, and his father had feared for the boy's future: For
generations beyond memory the family had produced renowned goldsmiths, so
useful to the nobility that their house had been left relatively unscathed by
the butchery that periodically assaulted the Jewish ghetto. Abraham soon
realized, however, that his son had been born with a gift as rare as his own.
He understood money in a way that amounted to a kind of genius. He could
manipulate it with all the dazzling facility of an artist his paints or a
composer his notes. By age ten Solomon could calculate exchange rates and all
the coin values of Europe's profusion of duchies and principalities and nations
at near instant speed. Before his bar mitzvah he had turned the front room of
the family house into a store, from which he sold Abraham's work at prices the
artisan had believed impossible and to which he soon added other goods imported
from all over Europe.
As the years passed the store
outgrew these quarters, and Solomon, now a young man, rented part of the house
next door. He could have afforded to build his own by then, but there was no
empty land left behind the heavy gates that, on Sundays and Christian holidays,
locked Jews into the overcrowded Frankfurt ghetto. For the sign above his store
he chose three golden crowns, the mark his father and those who came before him
engraved on the bottom of their gold articles. Crowns had been chosen to denote
family pride and derived in feeling from the five gold balls that were the
insignia of their former patrons, the Medici, whose goldsmiths the family had
been. The turmoil that followed Lorenzo's death drove Solomon's ancestors from
Renaissance Florence, and they settled eventually in this bustling Teutonic
city on the Main River. Beneath the three crowns—the insignia was reduced from
five to three as a show of respect—Solomon directed the sign painter to write,
not merchant, but money changer, and he took the gold
crowns for a surname: Kronengold. In money itself, he sensed—one of the few
careers permitted a Jew—was his future and the future of the sons his shrewd,
virtuous wife had started to bear him.
If one were then to have picked a
family that would rise to dominate the finances of Europe, surely one would
have skipped the little building with three crowns over its door on a street
only twelve feet wide in a teeming ghetto of outcasts. But Solomon Kronengold
understood money. And his wife bore clever sons. And that was the beginning.
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