Frankfurt’s history in this account turns on the Judengasse, a tightly regulated Jewish quarter whose restrictions shaped daily and commercial life, and on the disruption that forced its residents beyond its walls. The French bombardment of 1796 destroyed much of the ghetto and displaced the Rothschild family; outside it, they could pursue opportunities previously barred to them, including a contract to supply grain to the Austrian army.

The Judengasse and its restrictions

On the eve of the French Revolution, Jewish residents of Frankfurt lived under rules dating from the Middle Ages. The city limited the quarter to five hundred Jewish families, confined them to the Judengasse, and prohibited them from leaving at night, on Sundays, or during Christian festivals. The district was a quarter of a mile long but at most twelve feet wide, and narrower still in some places.

Restrictions extended beyond residence and movement. No more than two families could enter the ghetto each year, and no more than twelve Jewish couples could marry annually; both partners had to be older than twenty-five. Jews could not farm or trade in weapons, spices, wine, or grain, and they paid a special poll tax. Until 1726, prescribed markers also distinguished Jewish residents: men wore two concentric yellow rings, while women wore a striped veil.

Rothschild and the opening of opportunity

Mayer Amschel Rothschild had become Frankfurt’s leading dealer in coins, metals, and antiques by the early 1780s. Yet commercial success did not release him from the rules imposed on the city’s Jewish residents: he could neither open a business outside the Judengasse nor live beyond it.

The French bombardment of Frankfurt in 1796 demolished half the quarter and left about two thousand Jews homeless, including the Rothschilds. Their displacement brought them outside the ghetto’s regulatory boundaries. They were then able to pursue forms of entrepreneurship that had previously been prohibited, among them a contract to supply grain to the Austrian army.

Emancipation and the limits of reversal

By the end of the decade, Rothschild was one of Frankfurt’s richest Jews and an established businessman. His rise preceded full emancipation: the French National Assembly had emancipated French Jewry in 1791, but Frankfurt’s formal emancipation came in 1811, under Karl von Dalberg, appointed Grand Duke of Frankfurt in Napoleon’s reorganization of Germany in 1806.

The political settlement after Napoleon brought reverses for Jewish emancipation, particularly at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, but the Rothschilds did not return to the ghetto. Mayer Amschel and his sons went on to establish the largest bank in nineteenth-century Europe, with branches in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Naples, and Vienna. The city’s account therefore links a specific rupture in its urban and political order to durable economic change, while distinguishing the opportunities created by displacement from the later achievement of formal emancipation.