The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

theory, warning against a Communist takeover of power in Southeast Asia. The Korean War had ended the previous July with the permanent partition of the country.
    Rich had been reluctant to accept an apprenticeship at the world’s largest and most highly regarded commodities trading company. He had just turned nineteen when he began working in the mailroom for forty dollars per week. “I’m a postboy now. This is beneath my dignity,” he thought to himself when he was assigned the tedious task of sorting telex messages. “After all, I have a high school diploma, and I went to university.” He had no alternative. Anybody who wanted to work at Philipp Brothers began in the mailroom, regardless of whether he had only attended elementary school or had graduated from college. There wasvery little indication on that spring morning that Marc Rich would soon become one of the most successful university dropouts of all time.
    The tried and tested German tradition of the apprenticeship has hardly changed since the Middle Ages. The
Lehrling
(apprentice) is taught the trade from scratch by his experienced
Meister
(master), and in return for this on-the-job training he works for a modest wage. In times gone by the apprentice was effectively a member of the master’s family, with the older man taking on the role of guardian or father figure for the younger.
    “It’s a family business” was how one veteran trader explained the advantages of the traditional system to me. “Who gives a damn about diplomas? We all knew each other. The boss at the top knew the youngest apprentice. You quickly got to know who had particular strengths and weaknesses, and who had a talent for what. Your father or a family friend could get you in through the door, but then you had to prove that you were good, in fact even better than the others. There was no patronage system that would let a dud rise up through the ranks; it was all based on your own performance.”
    Philipp Brothers functioned according to this principle. The company was founded by the German brothers Oscar and Julius Philipp, who began trading metals in Hamburg in 1901. Oscar Philipp set up a branch of the business in London in 1909, and in 1914 a cousin risked the move across the Atlantic to the United States. The company headquarters was later moved to New York in the wake of the world wars, and it was not long before Philipp Brothers became the largest commodities trading company in the world.
A Jewish Tradition
     
    European Jews—particularly German Jews such as Oscar and Julius Philipp—had dominated the trade in metals since the nineteenth century. For centuries Jews in Europe had suffered from discrimination. They were unable to become farmers, as they were forbidden from owningland. As they were excluded from the craft guilds, they were unable to become craftsmen. The Catholic Lateran Council of 1215 stated that Jews were barred from taking on official functions. In other words, Jews were not allowed to carry out the most important economic activities of the time. They were, however, permitted to perform one function that was proscribed for medieval Christians: making loans with interest.
    Thus the Jews became moneylenders and traders in the absence of any other options. “That is the malice of the anti-Semites,” a strictly devout commodities trader explained to me. “We were forced into trading, and now we are denounced as the greedy Jews, who only care about money.” Trading had one further, sad advantage for the Jews, the trader said. “If you don’t have land, a farm, or a fixed profession, you can pack quickly if someone comes along tomorrow to send you away, if they’ve really got it in for you.” If it starts again.
    Gradually, those who were more successful started importing and exporting precious metals and stones, frequently over large distances. The demand for metals and other commodities from distant countries increased along with the growth of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This meant that the metal trading business was primarily in Jewish hands because Jews had the necessary know-how and international connections. Jews were also well represented in the important traditional mining regions, which were mainly situated in German-speaking Central Europe, in eastern Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Austria, and Hungary.
    It is one of the ironies of history that the persecution and expulsion of the Jews is what made such an