Abigail Green

There are​ few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses. Or take Ingres’s earlier but equally celebrated portrayal of the Baronne de Rothschild, a woman Heinrich Heine compared to an angel. It is at once lush and restrained....

Youthful​ and moustachioed, he strikes a dashing pose in his plumed helmet, red velvet jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon. He subsequently...

Nissim Shamama​, a Tunisian Jew, became an Italian count and fast-tracked his way to citizenship by royal decree. But he was also a refugee who fled his country of origin in a moment of political crisis, never to return, and lived for the rest of his life in Western Europe, without learning to speak a language other than Arabic. After his death in 1873, the civil court of Livorno declared...

On 8 September 1919, the New York Times reported on a convention being held in Manhattan to discuss the atrocities then taking place in Ukraine. ‘Ukrainian Jews Aim to Stop Pogroms,’ the headline announced. ‘Mass Meeting Hears that 127,000 Jews Have Been Killed and 6,000,000 Are in Peril.’ Six million: we know that number too well.

In Vienna, the Rothschilds remained the ultimate insider-outsiders. Albert may have been ‘the richest man in Europe’, but it took two prime ministers and a foreign monarch to persuade Emperor Franz Joseph that he should be formally received at court. By this time, hate for the Rothschilds had infused the entire political spectrum, appealing variously to Austro-German nationalists, socialists, Catholics and even Zionists.