Jacob H. Schiff and the Leadership of the American Jewish Community

There is an age-old debate among historians about the mutual influence between a leader and the society being led. Nobody doubts that an interaction exists, but opinions vary about the relative import of each factor. The approach adopted in this article, despite its biographical focus, stresses the major weight of the social environment--namely, that leading figures are the product of the conditions and reflect the possibilities of their society, although they certainly contribute to the never-ceasing shaping of these conditions and possibilities. In the case of modern Jewry, we have to cope with an additional intricacy: the influences affecting the community and its leaders are both Jewish and non-Jewish. A given Jewish leader, then, represents and expresses these various components that mold the profile of his community, though he may be able to influence that profile, up to a point. And he certainly adds his own flavor to the leadership of the community.

In the case of Jacob H. Schiff, that personal flavor was very personal indeed, and Naomi Cohen tells much of it in her very interesting biography. ¹ Schiff is a delight for the biographer with a feeling for the caricature, as Steven Birmingham (Our Crowd, 1967), Ron Chernow (The Warburgs, 1993), and, rather unintentionally, Schiff's own daughter, Frieda Schiff Warburg (Reminiscences of a Long Life, 1956), have shown. In spite of the careful balance of Cohen's biography, every stroke of black evened by a dash of white, Schiff comes through as a man with whom it must have been exceedingly hard to live and work: imperious, short-tempered, opinionated. A fatherly figure for two generations of Jewish new immigrants, Schiff was a difficult father for his own children. He was that impossible combination of a man open-handed with money in one situation and quite stingy in the next. Considering that he lacked any formal education in finances and economics, Schiff obviously made the most of his native intelligence, a natural sense for business well served by a mind attentive to detail, and, above all, a capacity for work that astonishes the latter-day reader of his biography. Could it be that, in an age when the means of communication were less developed, when there was no telephone, no fax, and no e-mail, people actually had more time available and were able to accomplish more?

Schiff was a typical member of the upper class Jews of German origin, the dominant Jewish element in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the words of Cohen, "Jewish bankers in Schiff's day formed a cohesive group whose members worked together, socialized together, and worshiped together" (12). Schiff's lifestyle conformed to the accepted norm among his peers: most of them lived in the same New York neighborhood, in the same rich but not ostentatious style; their children went to the same schools; and they belonged to the same synagogues. The great German-Jewish families structured themselves in clans: Schiff, the leading figure of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, married Therese, Loeb's daughter. Loeb himself was married to Kuhn's sister. Paul Warburg--a younger partner in Kuhn, Loeb, a scion of the great German-Jewish banking family, and later an important figure in the American financial system--married Therese Loeb's sister and became Jacob Schiff's brother-in-law. Warburg's younger brother, the colorful Felix, who also settled in America, married Schiff's daughter, Frieda. And so on.

Kuhn, Loeb & Company, the investment firm where Schiff became, by the late 1880s, the leading figure (interestingly, he did not have his name included in the firm's title), ranked by the end of the nineteenth century, according to Cohen, second only to the House of Morgan. It is somewhat odd, then, that Cohen tells us almost nothing about the banking operation of the firm. Kuhn, Loeb must have employed...