Rozsika Edle von Wertheimstein

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Rozsika Edle von Wertheimstein (1870-30 June 1940), whose family was the first Jewish family in Europe to be ennobled, was born in 1870 at Nagyvarad, Hungary (now the Romanian city of Oradea), the daughter of a retired army officer, Captain Alfred Edle von Wertheimstein.

Rozsika was one of seven children. She was a very beautiful woman with dark brown eyes. Each eye had a purple ring to it, and they could flicker strangely. She was a voracious reader. Every day she had a Hungarian newspaper, a German newspaper, an English newspaper, and quite often a French one, too, and she read all the political articles in these papers. Rozsika had been a champion lawn tennis player in Hungary.

She married Charles Rothschild, a member of the Rothschild banking family of England, on 6 February 1907, and they lived at Tring and in London. Charles, who worked in the family’s banking business was a dedicated naturalist in his spare time: the young couple had met on a butterfly-collecting trip in the Carpathian Mountains.

Charles went to Rothschild's Bank every morning; despite all his interest in science and in natural history, he never missed a day. He was also very interested in the gold refinery operated by Rothschilds and invented all sorts of things for collecting gold, and working on gold from a scientific point of view.

In the evening, the Rothschilds might go together to a concert or a dinner party, but Charles really preferred to sort out his butterflies.

In 1923 Charles contracted encephalitis. His tragic suicide in 1923 when he was 46 years old was a terrible shock to his wife and four children.

Rozsika von Wertheimstein died on 30 June 1940.

[edit] Sources

• The Peerage
• Reminiscences by Rozsika's daughter, Dame Miriam Rothschild, published in the Jewish Quarterly