Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership
by Naomi W. Cohen
Brandeis. 320 pp. $35.00
When the financier and philanthropist Jacob Schiff died in 1920, his funeral was held at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, the Reform synagogue favored by the wealthy and cosmopolitan German-Jewish community of which he was a singular example. But Schiff’s upper-class peers were hardly the only ones in attendance. Tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets outside, most of them East European Jewish immigrants who, unwilling to ride the subway because it was the holiday of Sukkot, had walked more than 60 blocks from the Lower East Side, determined to pay their respects to a man who for more than a generation had been their benefactor and protector.
As these final rites suggest—and as Naomi Cohen emphasizes in her absorbing new study—Schiff personified a crucial moment of transformation in the character of the American Jewish community. The acknowledged leader of that community from 1890 to 1920, he was at once an old-fashioned European shtadlan—a prominent and dignified intercessor with the Gentile world—and a harbinger of the modern Jewish activist, relying on the growing electoral clout of his co-religionists to promote their interests. Indeed, for Cohen, a retired professor of history at the City University of New York and a distinguished chronicler of the Jewish experience in America, Schiff is most interesting for the contradictory styles of leadership that made him successful in his own day and inimitable thereafter.
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Jacob Schiff was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1847 to a prosperous and well-connected family. Rebellious enough to insist on coming to America at the age of eighteen—he was the only member of his family to do so—he went to work on Wall Street and soon founded a small firm of his own. Several years later he joined the new investment house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, eventually marrying Loeb’s daughter. By the late 1890’s, he had built the firm into a financial power second only to J.P. Morgan.
As his wealth grew, Schiff began to donate considerable sums to every sort of Jewish cause, from the Semitic Museum at Harvard to relief efforts for Jewish refugees abroad. The primary objects of his largesse, however, were the East European Jews who were arriving in New York City in ever larger numbers around the turn of the century. Wishing both to improve their living conditions and to speed their integration into American society, Schiff founded Montefiore Hospital, gave generously to the Hebrew Free Loan Society, and oversaw the creation of the Henry Street Settlement House.
Nor was he content simply to write checks. Schiff was unique among the German-Jewish elite in the amount of time he spent with the poor and uneducated beneficiaries of his giving. Sunday mornings often found him in the wards at Montefiore, and he was a frequent visitor on Henry Street. As Cohen writes, “The banker became a familiar and trusted figure on New York’s Lower East Side,” and its residents “reciprocated with loyalty and affection.”
But Schiff’s intimate involvement with his charitable projects also carried a price tag. Considering it his responsibility to offer not just his money but his judgment, he practiced what Cohen calls “paternalism in the grand manner,” presiding like a “benevolent despot” over the institutions he supported. This autocratic manner, she argues, was deeply at odds with his declared aims. Though he “constantly preached Americanism to his fellow Jews,” he was “loath to see the application of American democratic precepts to Jewish communal affairs.”
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If Schiff’s style of patrician command rankled at times, it was also an invaluable asset in his dealings with the world outside the Jewish community, especially on matters of public policy. “Unafraid,” in Cohen’s words, “to call attention to specific Jewish interests,” Schiff was also unafraid to fight for them in the political arena.
Foremost among those interests was American policy toward Russia, where millions of Jews were suffering under czarist oppression and officially sponsored anti-Semitism. As a friend of prominent politicians like Theodore Roosevelt, Schiff lobbied privately for the U.S. to intervene with the czarist regime and to keep its own door open to refugees. During the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, he also deployed the considerable financial power of Kuhn, Loeb, blocking Russian access to American capital markets while arranging large loans to Tokyo.
Still more noteworthy in Schiff’s campaign against Russia was his resort to diplomatic pressure of a kind unprecedented among American Jews. He not only demanded the firing of hostile officials but impressed upon unsympathetic politicians the growing voting power of the Jewish community. Working with the American Jewish Committee in 1911 to abrogate a U.S.-Russia commercial treaty supported by the Taft administration, he led the first effort of any Jewish organization to lobby against the policies of a sitting President. Thanks in large part to Schiff, Cohen writes, the “earlier timidity of Jewish supplicants was gone.”
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In at least one area, Schiff stood radically apart from the sentiments of the East European Jews he championed: namely, in his long-standing opposition to Zionism. On this issue, Schiff adopted the classic position of German Reform, accusing Zionists of dual loyalty. As he put it in an 1880 statement that created a scandal, “Speaking as an American, I cannot for a moment concede that one can be at the same time a true American and an honest adherent of the Zionist movement.” In a more personal vein, according to Cohen, Schiff was unhappy about the threat to his leadership posed by the rising influence of Zionist groups.
Still, although he never supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, Schiff did eventually come to see the critical importance of establishing a Jewish community there. He contributed large sums to settlement efforts and to what would later become the Technion in Haifa, and a few years before his death declared that “the Jewish people should at last have a homeland of their own,” a “great reservoir of Jewish learning in which Jewish culture might be furthered and developed.”
As Cohen is quick to point out, Schiff’s reluctance to support Zionism was never based on a desire to see Jews disappear in America or become secularized. An observant Jew who recited morning prayers each day, pronounced grace over meals, and attended Sabbath services, he opposed all efforts to strip Judaism of its specifically religious content, finding participation in the secularist Ethical Cultural Society “particularly distasteful.” Much more to his liking was the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, to which he provided substantial backing. Though Reform in affiliation, he firmly hoped that his coreligionists would find a way, in Cohen’s words, “to reconcile Jewish traditionalism and American modernity.”
By the last years of his life, Schiff’s influence had begun to wane. Slowed by age and creeping deafness, he was a reluctant combatant in the unfolding battle over who would lead American Jewry. The German-Jewish elite, atop which he stood, was slowly giving way to officials chosen from the bottom up and representing the East European Jews who by 1920 had become the overwhelming majority in the community.
Indeed, under Schiff’s stewardship, American Jewry had grown too large, varied, and politically assertive to be governed by any one man or small group of men. Professional managers would soon take over the key positions at the largest and most important Jewish organizations, ushering in an era that in most respects has lasted to this day.
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Like its subject, Naomi Cohen’s volume is a bit old-fashioned, and in a way that is to be welcomed. Presenting the facts, describing the world in which Schiff operated, she has resisted the temptation to play either psychiatrist or muckraker. Though one misses certain touches—it would have been instructive, for example, to know more about Schiff’s descendants (are there still Jews among them?) and the actual amounts he gave away—Cohen’s study remains a model of historical scholarship.
It is also timely. American Jewry is now undertaking one of its periodic reorganizations, wondering once again about the institutions it has built and the men and women who run them. Jewish charitable giving also seems to be shifting, from central agencies like the United Jewish Appeal to a proliferating group of private foundations. Though there will be no returning to the Schiff era, we seem to be seeing a partial restoration of the unmediated influence once wielded by the wealthiest individuals.
What has not changed since the turn of the last century is the central dilemma of the American Jewish experience: how to strike a balance between full participation in national life and a separate religious identity. The dilemma affects organizations of every kind no less than it does individuals; in this as in much else, the example of Jacob Schiff, so well set forth and interpreted in Naomi Cohen’s book, remains worthy of reflection.
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