1744–1812 · German banker, founder of the Rothschild banking family
Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812) was a coin dealer and banker in the Frankfurt Judengasse who built a family firm his five sons extended across Europe. He left a large paper trail — ledgers, business correspondence, a will — and this sentence appears nowhere in it. His name was attached in 1935, more than a century after his death, by an author writing about hidden financial control, and the line has circulated ever since as shorthand for a conspiracy theory rather than as anything he said. Treating it as a quotation gives a fabrication the dignity of a source.