Schiff, Jacob Henry b. January 10, 1847; Frankfurt am Main d. September 25, 1920; New York City
Eminent German American Jewish financier and philanthropist. Schiff used his enormous wealth not only to contribute to a vast array of philanthropic and educational institutions for American Jews but also to help his oppressed and impoverished coreligionists abroad.
In addition, Schiff extensively supported a host of civic and cultural activities beyond the Jewish fold. His status, influence, and scope of communal activities brought him recognition as the most prominent figure of his time in American Jewry. Still, during his twilight years Schiff and the established American Jewish leadership (mostly of German origin) came under mounting criticism from groups that mainly represented Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.Born into a distinguished family of a rabbinical background, Schiff received a modern orthodox education that gave him a thorough grounding in both Jewish and German culture. Schiff ’s father, Moses, was a dealer in shawls who became a successful stockbroker associated with the Rothschild banking firm. Jacob followed his father and entered his brother-in-law’s banking firm, where he worked until he was eighteen. Meanwhile, his desire to go to America intensified, and at the age of eighteen (1865) he emigrated to the United States. Initially hired as a clerk by a brokerage firm, Schiff was soon known for his ability to drum up trade and became a partner in the brokerage firm of Budge, Schiff & Company before his twentieth birthday.
In 1875 Schiff married Theresa, the daughter of Solomon Loeb, head of the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, and entered that firm. The young man’s extraordinary financial abilities were acknowledged when he became head of Kuhn, Loeb & Company in 1885. The firm profited from the rapid industrialization and the booming American economy of the last third of the nineteenth century.
Schiff’s firm achieved phenomenal success through its business with railroads and the financing of companies such as Westinghouse Electric and American Telephone & Telegraph. By 1900 Schiff’s firm was one of the two most powerful investmentbanking houses in the United States; the estimates of his personal wealth ranged from $50 million to $100 million (Cohen 1999, 23, 256n).Together with other members of German Jewish families in America (Guggenheim, Lehman, Lewisohn, Seligman, Strauss, Warburg), Schiff was part of a cohesive group of bankers and businessmen, often bound by blood or marriage, who worked, socialized, and worshiped together. Schiff’s breadth of involvement in Jewish affairs, however, was second to none. He generously helped to maintain a range of Jewish institutions such as the United Hebrew Charities, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), and the Montefiore Home and Hospital for Chronic Diseases. Yet all other philanthropic efforts by the Jewish elite were eclipsed with the arrival of a tidal wave of more than 2 million Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe in the four decades following 1880.
Equally concerned with the newcomers’ cultural as well as their physical condition, Schiff embarked on a philanthropic endeavor. Besides aiding the immigrants with lodging, food, and medical relief, Schiff helped to establish institutions that would teach them English and the duties of citizenship (the Educational Alliance); provide them vocational training (the Hebrew Technical School); and disperse them across the country to relieve New York’s overcrowded Jewish quarters (the Industrial Removal Office, and later turning Galveston, Texas, into the entry port for some 10,000 Jewish immigrants). Schiff also assisted institutions of Jewish learning regardless of their affiliation. Although a member of a Reform synagogue in New York, Schiff’s orthodox background was evident in his support for the Jewish Theological Seminary from its inception in 1886.
The philanthropist hoped the seminary would offer an attractive and modern form of Jewish orthodoxy to the eastern European Jews, who were largely alienated from Reform Judaism.Yet beyond philanthropy, Schiff saw himself as a guardian of Jews, whether in America or abroad. In the wake of a deadly wave of pogroms in tsarist Russia (1906) Schiff joined other leaders of the established Jewish community (Mayer Sulzberger, Louis Marshall, Cyrus Adler) to
form the American Jewish Committee, aimed at defending the rights of Jews in the United States and elsewhere. Schiff was particularly enraged by the Russian authorities’ indifference toward (and even encouragement of) violence against Jews in Russia and thus became committed to fight the tsarist regime. Aside from helping Russian Jews with food and medicine, Schiff aided Jewish self-defense groups. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904—1905) Schiff largely financed Japan while using his influence to prevent other banks from underwriting Russian loans; and later he played a crucial role in a successful campaign (1911) to terminate a Russo-American commercial treaty, following Russia’s refusal to admit American Jews. With the outbreak of World War I (1914) Schiff helped to establish the Joint Distribution Committee to provide relief for suffering Jews in war-ravaged Europe.
Whereas Schiff was determined to defend Jews in need, he strongly opposed the Zionist movement and once even claimed that a Zionist could not be a “true American.” During World War I, Zionist, orthodox, and Socialist groups that represented mostly eastern European Jews (by then the overwhelming majority among American Jews), attacked Schiff and other German Jewish leaders for ruling American Jewry as “autocrats”; emptying Judaism of its national dimensions; and hampering the efforts to form a democratically elected American Jewish Congress. During his last years, however, Schiff underwent a change of heart toward Zionism: he aided agricultural projects in Palestine and the Technical Institute in Haifa and in 1917 he endorsed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Gil Ribak
See also Frankfurt am Main Citizens in the United States; German Jewish Migration to the United States; New York City: Warburg, Felix Moritz
References and Further Reading
Adler, Cyrus. Jacob H. Schiff: His Life and Letters. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran, 1928.
Cohen, Naomi W. Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.
Friesel, Evyatar. “Jacob H. Schiff and the Leadership of the American Jewish Community.” Jewish Social Studies 8 (Winter/Spring 2002): 61-72.
Supple, Barry E. “A Business Elite: German- Jewish Financiers in Nineteenth-Century New York.” Business History Review 31 (Summer 1957): 143-178.