Gerson von Bleichröder

Origins and early life

Gerson von Bleichröder was born in Berlin on 22 December 1822, the son of Samuel Bleichröder, who had founded the family bank in 1803 and become the Berlin correspondent of the Rothschilds, and he remained all his life a member of the Jewish community of Berlin — the first Jew in Prussia to be raised to the hereditary nobility, in 1872, without accepting baptism, though he had his own children baptized, which this fiche records as it was.

Work and career

He took over the bank in 1855 and from 1859 was the private banker of Otto von Bismarck, whose fortune he managed and whose confidant he became; when the Prussian parliament refused Bismarck the funds for the war against Austria in 1866, it was Bleichröder who found the money by arranging the sale of the state's shares in the Cologne–Minden railway, and after the victory over France it was he who sat at Versailles in 1871 and negotiated the terms of the five-billion-franc indemnity that Germany extracted from the defeated Republic.

In the following decades he was the richest man in Berlin, the banker of the new Empire's railways and of its first colonial ventures, and the channel through which Bismarck sounded foreign courts; at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 he used that position to press, with the Alliance Israélite, for the clause requiring Romania to grant civil rights to its Jews — a clause Romania then evaded. He was also the target of the new political antisemitism, for whom the Jewish banker at the chancellor's ear was the proof of everything, and Fritz Stern's Gold and Iron, published in 1977, made his life the classic study of that ambiguous eminence. He died in Berlin on 18 February 1893.