Christopher de Hamel here offers a remarkable account of the manuscript-collecting activities of the different branches of one of Europe's richest and most successful families. The book originated as four lectures delivered as the Conférences Delisle at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1998. The French version of these lectures appeared as Les Rothschild collectionneurs de manuscrits in 2004; this English version incorporates additional research conducted by the author after the lectures were delivered. De Hamel is in a unique position to treat his topic: during the twenty-five years in which he served as the illuminated manuscripts expert at Sotheby's in London (1975-2000), several Rothschild manuscripts came up for sale and he had opportunities both to meet members of the family and to familiarize himself with the records of their collections. There is no one else in the English-speaking world who could have written this book.
The original founder of the Rothschild fortune was Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1774-1812), whose family took its name from the red shield--rot Schild --that once hung outside their house in Frankfurt am Main. Mayer Amschel's influence waxed through his activities as a money-lender to the landed aristocracy and a broker of government debts; he developed an especially close relationship with Prince William of Hanau, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and in 1800 was named Imperial Agent of the Crown. In the early nineteenth century, he established his five sons in the great business centers of Europe: Frankfurt, Vienna, Naples, London, and Paris. All five branches of the family prospered-within two decades, for example, James Mayer de Rothschild (1792-1868) had become the richest man in France. Because of the persistent Rothschild habit of marrying their cousins, the wealth remained within the family. In line with traditional Jewish practice, the Rothschilds preferred to invest their money in tangible objects rather than land. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in addition to acquiring paintings, jewels, enamels, and tapestries, members of the different branches of the family were starting to turn into avid collectors of manuscripts.
The picture that de Hamel paints of Rothschild activity during the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries is one of a remarkable convergence of means and opportunity. Not surprisingly, the Rothschilds' primary interest was in manuscripts embellished with magnificent artwork; they also leaned toward items that had demonstrable aristocratic or royal connections, and to begin with, they had a clear preference for manuscripts dating from the late medieval and, especially, the Renaissance period. In 1856, in one of the first Rothschild ventures into the market, Adolphe de Rothschild (1823-1900), of the Naples branch, narrowly failed to acquire the most resplendent of all medieval manuscripts, the Trés Riches Heures of Jean, duc de Berry, for which the duc d'Aumale was able to offer a higher price. Thereafter, however, the Rothschilds were not to be outdone, and in subsequent decades, three other magnificent codices connected with Jean de Berry came into their hands: by 1884, Adolphe himself had purchased one of the two volumes of Jean's Trés Belles Heures (now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv. acq. lat. 3093); Adolphe also became the owner of the Hours of Jeanne d'Évreux (now New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, Acc. 54.1.2), originally made in the 1320s and later owned by Jean; and in 1880, Edmond de Rothschild, of the Paris branch, purchased privately from the d'Ailly family Jean's Belles Heures (now The Cloisters, Acc. 54.1.1).
It quickly emerges from de Hamel's account that a majority of the Rothschild acquisitions were Books of Hours and liturgical service books such as Missals--for these were the types of manuscript that attracted the most sumptuous artwork. Initially, however, the purchase of such books, with their explicitly Christian iconography, posed something of a problem for the Rothschilds, given their firm adherence to the Judaic religion. In at least one notable early instance, a dealer responded by doctoring a book accordingly. Perhaps the first manuscript acquired by Adolphe de Rothschild was a portion of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, which entered his collection in the mid-1850s. In preparation for the sale, the dealer unscrupulously divided the book into two volumes, assembling miniatures of the Old Testament, inoffensive to Jewish tastes, in one volume, which went to Adolphe, while the second volume, containing virtually all the illustrations depicting Gospel scenes, went to the Arenberg family. This unfortunate division of the manuscript has had a happy outcome: in the twentieth century, both volumes were acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, where they now stand together under the shelfmarks M.917 and M.945.
De Hamel shows that the Rothschilds acquired Hebrew manuscripts as opportunities presented themselves. Most Hebrew manuscripts, of course, are unillustrated, but the acquisitions of Edmond de Rothschild included a Hebrew Miscellany with more than three hundred miniatures, made in northern Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century (now Jerusalem, Israel Museum, MS 180/51); and an illustrated, northern Italian Haggadah of similar date (now Jerusalem, Jewish National and University Library, MS Heb. 4o. 6130). Among the major acquisitions of Salomon de Rothschild (1835-64), Edmond's elder brother, was a copy of Josephus's Historia de captivitate Iudeorum illuminated for the Medici family by Attavante degli Attavanti (now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv. acq. lat. 2455).
Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is de Hamel's ability to establish which members of the Rothschild family purchased which manuscripts, and who inherited them. This is by no means an easy task: for example, many of the items that are listed in Émile Picot's Catalogue des livres composant la Bibliothèque de feu M. le baron James de Rothschild were actually acquired not by James (1844-81), a descendant of the English branch who was brought up in Paris, but by his widow Thérèse (1847-1931) and their son Henri (1872-1947). De Hamel's success in this regard rests upon his painstaking examination of private records of the different branches of the family as well as little known printed works such as Franz Schestag's Katalog der Kunstsammlung des Freiherrn Anselm von Rothschild in Wien (1866), of which there are very few copies in existence. By linking individual members of the family with specific manuscripts, he is also able to demonstrate their predilections as collectors. Edmond de Rothschild, for example, emerges as a collector of extraordinarily wide-ranging tastes whose one hundred and four manuscript acquisitions spanned Books of Hours, vernacular romances, a volume of Froissart's Chroniques made for King Edward IV, and a splendid Portolan atlas that had belonged to the Emperor Charles V, as well as the Shah Tahmasp Shahnama (the "king's book of kings," the richest of all Persian illuminated manuscripts) and the Akbar-nama , an illustrated history of the reign of the great Mughal Emperor Akbar (1556-1605) made for Akbar himself. By contrast, the interests of James de Rothschild and his son Henri were largely focused on French vernacular manuscripts, as was fitting given that James was one of the founders of the Société des Anciens Textes Français. De Hamel provides a moving account of how James's interests in early French literature and the friendships he was thereby able to cultivate provided him with a means of escape from the pressures associated with his family name and fortune, giving him the opportunity to enter a different world.
The German, Austrian, and French branches of the family were grievously affected by the rise of the Nazis and the outbreak of the Second World War, events which led to the forced appropriation of Rothschild assets. Upon the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, the entire contents of the Rothschild house on the Theresianumgasse in Vienna were confiscated; the manuscripts kept there were earmarked for despatch to the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, but following a counterclaim by the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek backed by the personal intervention of Hitler, they went instead to the national library in Vienna. The fate of the manuscripts kept in France is especially interesting and is untangled superbly by de Hamel in his third lecture. Following the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, manuscripts that Edmond de Rothschild had bequeathed to his children Maurice (1878-1957) and Alexandrine (1884-1965) were seized and despatched to three different destinations in Germany. Some, including Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, went to Berlin; others, among them several of the most sumptuous, went to Goering's private art collection at Berchtesgaden, south of Salzburg on the German-Austrian border; yet others went to Neuschwanstein, the fairytale Alpine castle built in the nineteenth century by King Ludwig of Bavaria and used by the Nazis as a repository for looted art. The story of the recovery, recognition, and restitution of these manuscripts to their rightful owners after the war is a saga in its own right. In May 1945, the Rothschild volume of the Trés Belles Heures was discovered by a French army officer among abandoned belongings at the railway station in Berchtesgaden. In 1956 the officer showed the book to Jean Porcher at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris; Porcher recognized it, upon which it was restored to Maurice de Rothschild, who responded by presenting it to the library in December 1957. Another French officer found the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre at Berchtesgaden and presented it to the abbey of Boquen in Brittany. When the abbey needed money to pay for a new roof, the book was taken to the Bibliothèque nationale and recognized by the young François Avril; by this time, the German government had already paid compensation for the loss of the book, so the Bibliothèque nationale reimbursed the German compensation and kept the book, while the Rothschilds generously paid for the abbey's new roof. At Neuschwanstein, it was an American officer, Second Lieutenant James Rorimer, who in April 1945 discovered three illuminated manuscripts left in a waste-paper basket by the escaping Germans in the hope that they would be overlooked; two of these manuscripts were the Hours of Jeanne d'Évreux and Jean de Berry's Belles Heures . Rorimer later became curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and in 1954, when Maurice de Rothschild was selling off his manuscript collection, Rorimer persuaded the museum to override its usual policy of not purchasing manuscripts and to acquire these same two volumes.
Throughout the book, de Hamel traces the movements of Rothschild manuscripts with great precision. There is, however, one major question that he leaves largely unanswered. During the second half of the twentieth century, Rothschild manuscripts were repeatedly sold off to public institutions and private collectors in Europe, America, and Israel. Institutions in the United States that benefited thereby include the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, as well as the Metropolitan Museum and the Morgan Library. Why was it that a family which for the best part of a hundred years had spent so lavishly and exercised such extraordinary judgment and taste in acquiring manuscripts was now prepared to let them go? Left without further explanation, the piecemeal sale of the manuscripts poses something of a riddle.
Unusually for an author whose habit is to discourse about manuscripts with true gusto, there is a certain flatness about the style in which this book is written, and this should not go unnoted. Repetitious phrasing and several grammatical solecisms scattered throughout suggest a degree of inattention in bringing the book to press as well as a lack of care at the copy-editing stage that is unusual in a book published by the British Library. One may also regret that, in his concern to trace the accurate history of Rothschild acquisitions, de Hamel often fails to give a detailed description of the contents and artwork of individual manuscripts; such descriptions would have been the more valuable given that the number of scholars who have been privileged to see many of these items is few indeed. There is, however, significant compensation for this lack of written detail in the thirty-two pages of color plates that include a total of fifty-eight illustrations featuring forty-nine different manuscripts: these offer extraordinary testimony to the range and sumptuousness of the Rothschild books.
Notwithstanding certain niggling defects, then, de Hamel has once again produced an important contribution that will be welcomed by scholars specializing in the study of medieval manuscripts. The particular value of this publication lies in its careful documentation of private collections of truly spectacular content and in its untangling of the complex and often extraordinary history that the Rothschild manuscripts have undergone.