Four Inherited Disorders

In 1936, Walter Rosenthal of the eponymous banking empire began searching urgently for a way to smuggle his family’s fortune out of Vienna. To carry it out as cash or gold, stocks or bonds, was impossible. At last, according to a family chronicle written by Rosenthal’s great-grandson, he hit upon the notion of smuggling it out as human capital. Rosenthal liquidated his banks and purchased humanistic educations for his four sons at the Sorbonne. One son studied Spinoza, another Romanticism, another Romanesque architecture, and the last Greek tragedy. Within a few years, all of his economic capital had been converted into wisdom, subtlety, irony, and prestige, which were then stashed (in the form of humanities professors) at four different American college campuses.