The origin of the Guggenheim family is uncertain, but it is possible that they originally came from what is now called Jügesheim, to the south-east of Frankfurt-am-Main. By the end of the seventeenth century the Guggenheims had moved to Switzerland from Germany, where the treatment of the Jews was harsher. In Switzerland the Jewish community enjoyed a monopoly on moneylending; but as commerce grew and money increasingly began to be used as capital for ventures, the advantages of lending it on interest began to be seen as sound business practice, and the Church’s prohibition on Christian usury was relaxed at the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512–18. The principal function of Jews in Switzerland thus became superfluous, and, with a growing Christian population, the cantons began to expel them. By the end of the eighteenth century the Jewish population of the entire country was reduced to two small communities, in Ober Endingen and Lengnau.
It was in Lengnau, a small village about twenty-five miles north-west of Zürich, that the Guggenheims settled. The earliest of Peggy’s ancestors on her father’s side whom we can trace for certain was a man called Jakob. Jakob Guggenheim was an elder of the synagogue and a respected local scholar of the Talmud, whose acquaintance was sought by a relatively enlightened Protestant Zürich pastor called Johann Ulrich, who had taken his arthritic wife to the nearby spa town of Baden in about 1740. As a result of their meeting Ulrich, already interested in Judaism, became a friend, but unfortunately the pastor’s proselytising zeal led him to persuade one of Jakob’s sons, Josef, to convert to Christianity. The procedure took sixteen tormented years as the sensitive and intellectual Josef struggled with his conscience. It broke up the friendship; but the Guggenheims had had their first brush with the politically dominant religion. Jakob’s protest at his son’s conversion was so angry that he incurred the wrath of the Christian community, which obliged him to pay a massive six-hundred-florin fine in order to remain in Lengnau. That he could afford it shows how prosperous the family was.
Jews were still allowed to lend money, and another of Jakob’s sons, Isaac, displayed a particular gift for the business. When he died in 1807 at an advanced age, he left 25,000 florins in coin, plate and goods; but life continued to be hard for the Jews of Lengnau, and by the time Isaac’s grandchildren reached maturity his patrimony had all but disappeared.
One of them, Simon, worked as a tailor in the village for thirty years without any significant financial gain to show for it. He lost his wife in 1836, and had to bring up a son, Meyer, and four surviving daughters alone. By 1847 Meyer was nearly twenty and worked as a peddler, travelling in Switzerland and Germany. The younger daughters, though, presented a problem: Simon didn’t have enough of the money required by Swiss law (as applied to Jews) to provide them with dowries (which would then be taxed), so they were not allowed to marry.
The problem of matrimony touched Simon personally. He was fifty-five in 1847, but had become attached to a widow, Rachel Weil Meyer, fourteen years his junior. She had three sons and four daughters, but she also had a reasonable amount of capital. This, together with the value of Simon’s home and contents, should have been enough, they hoped, to persuade the authorities that they themselves had sufficient money to get married. But the authorities were unimpressed. Simon and Rachel had had enough. They began to look for a solution away from home.
In 1819 the Savannah, built at Savannah, Georgia, the first steam-assisted sailing ship designed to cross the Atlantic, had made the passage from her home port to Liverpool in twenty-five days. The ship had a full rig of sails, and only used her steam-driven paddles for the small proportion of the voyage when there was no wind; but her successful crossing suddenly brought the young republic of the United States much closer to Europe, and foreshadowed an era of relatively cheap, quick and reliable crossings of the ocean. Other, more sophisticated ships soon followed. America sought talent, labour and immigrants to bolster its still comparatively small European population, and to people its huge virgin territories. For the Jews of Europe the country had one massive attraction: there were no ghettos, and no discriminatory restrictions – unless, of course, you were a native American.
Jews from rural Germany, especially rural Bavaria, a very hard-pressed region, started emigrating early on, and their letters home carried nothing but praise for the New World. It was a huge step for Simon and Rachel, by the standards of the time already both well advanced in years, and rural Swiss-Germans with no other experience of the world; but repression at home offered them little alternative. Here was a place where they could live freely, not as barely tolerated and exploited ‘guests’, even though their family roots reached back centuries. They sold Simon’s property, pooled their resources, and set off with their children overland for Koblenz.
From there they continued to Hamburg, where they spent only a short time before taking steerage berths on a sailing ship – the cheapest passage they could find – bound for America. The voyage took eight weeks, the conditions were cramped and the travellers had to share them with a flourishing population of rats. Although dried fruit was supplied, the food was basic – chiefly hard-tack – and water was rationed very strictly. There was no privacy.
For Simon’s son Meyer and Rachel’s fifteen-year-old daughter Barbara, however, the discomfort of the journey was eclipsed by something far more important: they fell in love. By the time the American coastline rose on the horizon, they had decided – as soon as they could afford it – to marry. This strengthened Meyer’s resolve to do well. He was a small, energetic man, with strong features and a bulbous nose which many of his descendants, including his granddaughter Peggy, would inherit. Capable of kindness, and not averse to the finer things in life (good cigars and fine white wine featured in his later prosperity), he had a liberal side and a certain sense of humour. As a businessman, however, he was habitually mistrustful, cold and acute. He was obsessed with making money, and though he had an aptitude for it, he also worked at it relentlessly.
The joint families’ destination was Philadelphia, where they may already have had friends or relatives – it was the usual method for second- or third-wave immigrants to follow to where cousins or neighbours from the old country had already established bridgeheads, one reason being that few immigrants spoke the language of the new country when they arrived. Away from the north-east, the United States in 1848 was still more or less unexplored: the rapid colonisation and urbanisation of the next seventy years or so was only just getting under way. Philadelphia, however, founded by William Penn in 1682, was by now a prosperous and important city of some 100,000 people, including 2500 Jews. The Jews were integrated into the local community, but only held positions of minor social and financial standing.
Once they had disembarked, organised their modest baggage and adjusted to the unfamiliar, exciting and frightening environment, the large family set about finding a place to live. They rented a house in a poor district outside the city centre, and immediately Simon and Rachel married. The next thing to do, before their slender savings were exhausted, was to find work. Rather than seek employment, Simon and Meyer decided to work for themselves. As it would take more capital than they