The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family

by Ron Chernow

Overview

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning bestselling author of Alexander Hamilton, the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical, comes this definitive biography of the Warburgs, one of the great German-Jewish banking families of the twentieth century.

Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, of German-American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy.

Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525431831
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/15/2016
Pages:	880
Sales rank:	126,203
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Ron Chernow’s bestselling books include The House of Morgan, winner of the National Book Award; The Warburgs, which won the George S. Eccles Prize; The Death of the Banker; Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Washington: A Life, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; and Alexander Hamilton, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and adapted into the award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton. Chernow has served as president of PEN American Center and has received seven honorary doctoral degrees. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, NY

Date of Birth:

March 3, 1949

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, NY

Education:

Yale University; Cambridge University

Read an Excerpt

Jews settled as far north as the Rhineland after the Romans destroyed the Temple in A.D. 70. Far from feeling alien, these winegrowers and craftsmen felt rooted in Germanic soil. But their pastoral idyll was shattered by the religious zealotry of the eleventh century. Butchered by the Crusaders, they were expelled from their farms and forced into moneylending. During the Black Death, roving flagellants cursed the Jews for supposedly causing the bubonic plague by poisoning wells. They were also periodically accused of draining blood from Christian children to bake unleavened Passover bread-the so-called blood libel. Like dark, disturbing figures from a grim fairy tale, the Jews would secretly linger on in the German psyche as ghouls tricked out in civilian clothes. This legacy would lie dormant, but never dead, in the culture.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Warburgs"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Ron Chernow.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

A twentieth-century epic [told] with authority, sympathy, and panache. . . . Important, fascinating, and moving.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Excellent. . . . An enthralling story, told with a novelist’s zest.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Splendid. . . . Chernow does a wonderful job fleshing out the lives of the major characters in this family drama.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“[Ron Chernow] has surpassed himself in this absorbing chronicle.” —The New Yorker
 
“This is grand-scale scholarship. . . . It is all here, along with so much of the painful, tumultuous history of our time, all in one splendid book.” —David McCullough, author of The Wright Brothers

“Ron Chernow’s blockbuster history traces the heart-rending saga of this German-Jewish banking family. . . . Despite his scrupulous documentation of sources, Chernow is never less than readable. A graceful and lucid writer, he offers old-fashioned narrative in the grand style.” —Newsday

“The history of a fascinating family. . . . What we learn about in this book is people. . . . Chernow is very good at bringing them to life. He has a sharp eye for detail. . . . One can open the book anywhere and enjoy it.” —The New Republic

“Ron Chernow . . . has made the stories of these four brothers the cornerstones of a dark, though not quite tragic, family saga. [He is] a graceful writer with an eye for the telling anecdote. . . . The result is a book of considerable pathos and immediacy. . . . Through his portrait of this complex dynastic organism, he sheds interesting light on various larger historical themes.” —The Boston Globe

“Excellent family history. . . . This chronicle of one of the most important banking families in history tells us much about the people. . . . A great, and lengthy, saga.” —The Times (London)

“The Warburgs stand revealed as a family more fortune-kissed, fated and fascinating even than the Kennedys, and . . . just as important . . . and now their story has been ably told.” —The New York Daily News

From the Publisher

In chronicling ``the oldest continuously active banking family in the world,'' Chernow ( The House of Morgan ) tells a rich, sprawling story of personality, commerce and history. From their origins as 16th-Century ``Court Jews'' in North Germany, the Warburg family and its business rose with the unification of Germany and the expanding global economy; two sons married into New York City's German-Jewish ``Our Crowd.'' Both in Germany and in the United States, the Warburgs maintained the ``Panglossian'' outlook of loyalty to country and religion; Kris tall nacht finally pushed them from their bank and from their Hamburg base into the Diaspora. The book encompasses the Warburgs' role in Anglo-American World War II spying, the establishment of a family securities firm in Great Britain and the postwar return of the Warburgs to Hamburg. Granted access to family files, Chernow shifts between continents, telling of many lives with depth and detail. So many mini-biographies, however, sometimes obscure the author's stated goal of limning the evolution of German Jewry through the Warburgs. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Chernow's saga traces the fortunes of the influential German-Jewish banking family from its generation of great wealth, stimulated by the Franco-Prussian War, through the family's defamation and degradation by the Nazis, and its subsequent return to Hamburg following World War II. In the United States, family members married and joined forces with the Schiffs and Loebs at the beginning of the century. While Chernow ( The House of Morgan , LJ 2/1/90) discusses serious, diverse themes such as international finance, the misplaced loyalty of German Jews to a country that betrayed them, and the relationship of succeeding generations of Warburgs to their Jewish roots, the book is filled with trivia and family gossip. Chernow had access to private family papers, and the conflicting descriptions of the numerous personalities of this prolific family confuse and overwhelm the reader. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/93.-- Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., Philadelphia

Library Journal

From the National Book Award-winning author of The House of Morgan (1990): an engrossing history of the Hamburg banking family that explores the love/hate relationship between Germany and its native-born Jews with as much interest as it recounts the lives of those who made Warburg a name to be reckoned with on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on unrestricted access to members of the extended family and their voluminous archives, Chernow offers a start-to- present chronicle. Tracing the line from the mid-16th century, he reviews how canon and secular law shunted the era's Jews into trade or moneylending. By 1773, however, the patriarch's descendants were able to settle in the thriving port of Hamburg, where they put down deep roots and established themselves as world-class bankers. In the meantime, the family tree developed branches whose scions competed as vigorously among themselves as with outsiders. Tracking the varied fortunes of Warburgs through Bismarck's Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and beyond, Chernow documents how intermarriage with Our Crowd's Loebs and Schiffs enabled the Warburgs to make their mark on Wall Street as well as in Europe. A notable case in point was Paul M. Warburg, a driving force behind the FRB's 1913 creation. In like vein, WW II drove Siegmund Warburg to London, where he became a postwar power in The City. Other Warburgs distinguished themselves in the arts, philanthropy, and government service, as well as in business, mingling with the likes of Balfour, Einstein, Gershwin, von Papen, FDR, Kaiser Wilhelm II, et al. In an outcome that affords his panoramic narrative an affecting measure of unity, Chernow details thetransaction whereby a latter-day generation reclaimed the merchant bank where their own story began. A lively, definitive, and thoughtful account of a clan whose star has waxed as that of its Rothschild rivals has waned. (Thirty- two photographs—not seen)

Kirkus Reviews