Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family » (Reprint)

Ron Chernow's first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award and the Ambassador Award for the year's best study of American culture. His second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the Best Business Book of 1993 and was also selected by the American Library Association as one of that year's best nonfiction books.

Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, of German-American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy.

Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century.

Publishers Weekly

In chronicling ``the oldest continuously active banking family in the world,'' Chernow ( The House of Morgan ) tells a rich, sprawling story of personality, commerce and history. From their origins as 16th-Century ``Court Jews'' in North Germany, the Warburg family and its business rose with the unification of Germany and the expanding global economy; two sons married into New York City's German-Jewish ``Our Crowd.'' Both in Germany and in the United States, the Warburgs maintained the ``Panglossian'' outlook of loyalty to country and religion; Kris tall nacht finally pushed them from their bank and from their Hamburg base into the Diaspora. The book encompasses the Warburgs' role in Anglo-American World War II spying, the establishment of a family securities firm in Great Britain and the postwar return of the Warburgs to Hamburg. Granted access to family files, Chernow shifts between continents, telling of many lives with depth and detail. So many mini-biographies, however, sometimes obscure the author's stated goal of limning the evolution of German Jewry through the Warburgs. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Oct.)