Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild

Mayer Amschel Rothschild was the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty. Born in 1744 in the Judengasse, the Jewish street of Frankfurt am Main, he trained in Hanover as a dealer in rare coins and medals, then built a business supplying Crown Prince Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel, becoming his court factor in 1769 and eventually managing much of the landgrave's fortune. With his wife Gutle Schnapper he had ten children who reached adulthood. His decisive move was to place his five sons in five European cities, Amschel Mayer in Frankfurt, Salomon in Vienna, Nathan in London, Carl in Naples and James in Paris, so that the family could move money and information across borders as a single house. He died in Frankfurt in 1812.

Amschel Mayer von Rothschild was the eldest son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and head of the family's original Frankfurt bank, M. A. Rothschild und Soehne. Born in Frankfurt in 1773, he took over the house on his father's death in 1812 and ran it for more than four decades, acting as treasurer to the German Confederation and, with his brothers, as a creditor to most of the German states. Ennobled by the Austrian emperor in 1822, he was a strictly observant Jew and a persistent advocate for the civil rights of the Frankfurt community, which made him the first Jew granted the freedom of the city. His marriage to Eva Hanau produced no children, so the Frankfurt house passed to his Naples nephews.

Carl Mayer von Rothschild established the family's Naples house, C. M. de Rothschild e figli. Born in Frankfurt in 1788, the fourth son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, he was sent south in 1821 to manage a loan to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and stayed to run the Italian business, lending to Naples, Sardinia, Tuscany and the Papal States and being received by Pope Gregory XVI in 1832. He married Adelheid Herz of Frankfurt. His daughter Charlotte married her London cousin Lionel, and his sons Mayer Carl and Wilhelm Carl took over the Frankfurt bank after their uncle Amschel Mayer died childless. He died in Naples in 1855.

James Mayer de Rothschild, born Jakob in Frankfurt in 1792, was the youngest son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and the founder of the Paris house, de Rothschild Freres. He arrived in France in 1811 and became the dominant private banker of the Restoration, the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, lending to successive French governments, building the Chemin de Fer du Nord railway and buying Chateau Lafite in 1868. He married his niece Betty, daughter of his brother Salomon of Vienna, and their household in the rue Laffitte and at the Chateau de Ferrieres was a centre of Parisian cultural life. Their sons Alphonse, Gustave and Edmond carried on the French bank. He died in Paris in 1868, the last of the five brothers.

Betty de Rothschild was the hostess of the Paris branch at the height of its influence. Born in Frankfurt in 1805, the daughter of Salomon Mayer von Rothschild of Vienna, she married her uncle James Mayer de Rothschild in 1824 and presided over his house in the rue Laffitte and the Chateau de Ferrieres, where her salon drew Rossini, Chopin, Balzac and Heinrich Heine, who dedicated verse to her. Ingres painted her celebrated portrait in a red gown, completed in 1848. She was the mother of Alphonse, Gustave, Salomon James and Edmond de Rothschild, and after her husband's death in 1868 she remained the senior figure of the French family until she died in Paris in 1886.

Gustave de Rothschild was a partner in the Paris house of de Rothschild Freres, which he ran jointly with his elder brother Alphonse after their father James died in 1868. Born in Paris in 1829, he handled much of the bank's business in Italy and Spain and served for many years as president of the central consistory of French Jews, the community's governing body, as well as supporting Jewish schools and relief work. He married Cecile Anspach and built the mansion on the avenue de Marigny in Paris that remained in the family for generations. His descendants continued in the bank and at Chateau Lafite in Bordeaux. He died in 1911.

Edmond James de Rothschild, the youngest son of James Mayer de Rothschild, was the family's great patron of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Born in Paris in 1845, he was a partner in de Rothschild Freres and a serious collector of prints and drawings, the bulk of which he left to the Louvre. From 1882 he bought land and funded agricultural colonies in Ottoman Palestine, backing Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Yaakov and dozens of other settlements and establishing the winery at Rishon LeZion that still operates. He married his Frankfurt cousin Adelheid, daughter of Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild, and was the father of James Armand and Maurice de Rothschild. He died in 1934.

Edouard Alphonse James de Rothschild led the Paris house through the First World War and the interwar years. Born in Paris in 1868, the son of Alphonse and his English cousin Leonora, he succeeded his father in 1905 as senior partner of de Rothschild Freres and as a regent of the Banque de France. He was a major shareholder in the Chemin de Fer du Nord, president of the Jewish consistory of Paris, and an owner of racehorses whose Brantome was among the best in France. After the German invasion of 1940 he left for the United States, returning after the war to a bank that had been seized and stripped. He died in Paris in 1949.

Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, was a zoologist and the addressee of the Balfour Declaration. Born in London in 1868, the elder son of the 1st Baron, he worked in the family bank for a time but gave his life to natural history, building at Tring a museum and a collection of some two million specimens, including the largest private bird collection ever assembled, and naming thousands of new species with his curators. He was famous in London for the zebras he trained to pull a carriage. As president of the Zionist Federation he received the British government's 1917 letter supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine. He left his museum to the nation and died in 1937.

Dame Miriam Rothschild was a naturalist of international standing who never attended university. Born in 1908, the eldest child of Charles Rothschild and Rozsika, she continued her father's work on fleas, publishing the six volume catalogue of the Rothschild flea collection and showing how the flea's jump is powered, and she worked on butterflies, parasites and the chemical defences of insects. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985. A campaigner for wildflower meadows and for conservation, she lived at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire, married George Lane in 1943, and died in 2005.

Baron Guy de Rothschild rebuilt the French house after the Second World War. Born in Paris in 1909, the son of Edouard de Rothschild, he was decorated for his service with the French army in 1940, escaped to London to join the Free French, and returned to find the bank seized and the family's property looted. He led de Rothschild Freres from 1949, modernised it, and developed the Le Nickel mining company and the Imetal group, before the bank was nationalised by the Mitterrand government in 1981 and the family had to start again. A leading owner of racehorses and master of the Chateau de Ferrieres, he died in Paris in 2007.