The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America

As the subtitle suggests, this is the history of some of the wealthy Jewish people of American finance. It concentrates on a few of the big names – Joseph, Seligman, Walter Sachs, Jacob Schiff – and some of the big firms – Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Kuhn-Loeb.

Jews left Europe because they were persecuted. They came to America as traveling merchandise peddlers then gradually migrated into finance. I’m not sure if finance had any inherent attraction to them, or if they just became entrepreneurial during The Gilded Age, so finance was gathering critical mass.

All throughout, they maintain their Jewish identity, and the book talks quite a bit about who they continued to support their brethren during the various pogroms and persecutions.

The book ends around Schiff’s death, right after World War 1. This means that the rise of The Third Reich and the Holocaust are not covered, except an overview in the epilogue.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to figure out where the stereotype of the greedy Jewish moneylender came from, and this book makes a claim that it came from how Jewish financiers loaned Japan money to defeat Russia during the Russo-Japanese War. (There’s an extended quote which I’ll add to the page linked above.)

In the end, the book gets a little tedious. There’s lots of discussion of financial maneuvering (especially around railroads), which I didn’t quite get.

Good book – I got what I asked for. I’m just not sure I was ready to absorb it all.