Biography
Meyer Amschel Rothschild was born in 1744 in the ghetto (called "Judengasse" or Jew Alley) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, one of eight children of Amschel Moses Rothschild (d. 1755) and his wife Schönche Rothschild née Lechnich (d. 1756).
The ancestry of the Rothschilds can be traced back to 1577 to Izaak Elchanan Rothschild, whose name derived from the house he occupied in the Judengasse — zum roten Schild ("at the sign of the red shield"). His grandchildren and descendents took this name as the family name and kept it when they relocated in 1664 to another house in the Judengasse — Hinterpfann (literally "house in the back of the saucepan") — which became the family's home and business location through to the early 19th century.
Mayer Amschel's father had a business in goods-trading and currency exchange. He was a personal supplier of coins to the Prince of Hesse. The family home above the shop had a front wall only 11 feet (3.4 m) wide, where more than 30 people lived at that time.
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