The Rothschild family is an Ashkenazi Jewish banking dynasty that originated in the Frankfurt Judengasse, with documented family history reaching back to 1577. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, born in Frankfurt in 1744, built the family's banking business from the 1760s and, unlike earlier court bankers, transferred his fortune and firm to his five sons, who established banking houses in Frankfurt, Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris and built an international financial network that came to dominate European finance through much of the nineteenth century. The Austrian crown granted the family the hereditary title of Freiherr (baron) in 1822, and the British crown created Rothschild baronets from 1847 and the peerage title Baron Rothschild in 1885. At the height of their influence, from the 1820s to the 1870s, the family is described as having possessed the largest private fortune in the world, before the rise of joint-stock banks challenged their preeminence; today only the French and British branches of the family remain active in banking.
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