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This is an extraordinary story about the Rothschild family. He was born in a place called the Judengasser, a Jewish ghetto, and the house he lived in when he eventually had 13 children was only 14 feet wide. He lived there with his very, very overpowering and dominant and incredibly brilliant wife, Gottel. He was determined to get out of this ghetto. At nighttime, the ghetto was closed; you weren't allowed to leave. The street was so narrow that no sunlight penetrated. There was no plumbing, no sewage, and there was nothing. So everything you can imagine happened in this street. Unsurprisingly, he wanted to get out of there. He started a small coin business, and that did reasonably well. But actually, and this is where it ties into legacy, his great strength was to send his five sons to the capitals of Europe at that time.
And what they did is they set up, in effect, the first international banking system. So whereas everyone used to be in separate different countries or separate cities until then, these five boys communicated with each other, sometimes by pidgin, and they wrote to each other in Juden Deutsche, which was a kind of Yiddish German vernacular. And that is why they were so successful. And this absolute belief in togetherness—you've got to stand together, you've got to work together, you've got to work across borders, you've got to work with rules. And by 1789 when the last one went to 1815, so very, short period of time, it was said that no government or king would consider going to war without the Rothschilds supporting them because that was how incredibly influential and powerful they had become.