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American Jewish History 87.4 (1999) 400-401



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Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership. By Naomi W. Cohen. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. xiv + 320 pp.

Naomi W. Cohen has made her academic career writing about the German Jewish elite in American Jewish history and the institutions they founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In that sense her book on Jacob Schiff is a logical continuation of a number of her studies, including A Dual Heritage: the Public Career of Oscar S. Straus (1969); Not Free to Desist (1972), a history of the American Jewish Committee; and Encounter With Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830-1914 (1984). In many cases, the reader familiar with her previous work will already be acquainted with the events and people described in this new book, since Cohen has written from other perspectives about the world in which Schiff lived.

Her choice of Schiff as the focus of a book-length study is well-founded. He was one of the dominating figures in American and international financial circles for roughly half a century (1870-1920), a period which saw the rise of the United States as a financial power of the first rank. As arguably the most prominent Jew in American public life in this era, his life and times would have been an important enough subject had his relationship to Judaism been merely tangential. However, Schiff was not Jewish by descent only; Judaism informed his world view in a fundamental way. Moreover, he consciously parlayed his business leadership into a leadership role in an American Jewish community beset by the rise of anti-Semitism and forced to bear the brunt of a massive Eastern European Jewish migration which utterly transformed the nature of the community. Never one to take center stage when he did not deem [End Page 400] it necessary, Schiff consistently worked behind the scenes through valued associates, such as Cyrus Adler and Louis Marshall, to activate his social, cultural and religious agenda for the American Jewish community.

This Schiff biography, the first since the 1920s, is not comprehensive except with respect to Schiff's Jewish activities. For the most part, it remains faithful to the subtitle "A Study in American Jewish Leadership". One chapter devoted to his business career provides essential information on Schiff's financial empire, a necessary background to his Jewish commitments. While hardly exhaustive, it sheds considerable light and makes one wish for a truly comprehensive biography. As it is, the book gives the reader a nuanced portrait of a man who, although opinionated and imperious, learned both from his subordinates and from his opponents. This is particularly true when it comes to Schiff's relationship with American Zionism. As Cohen indicates, he had the wisdom to change his positions on Zionism from adamant opposition to considerable sympathy in a way that preserved a leadership role for himself and his group, concentrated in the American Jewish Committee, at a time when others in his circle, notably Cyrus Adler, remained unwilling or unable to bend.

Previously, Schiff had been the subject of the biography Jacob H. Schiff: His Life and Letters, written by Cyrus Adler at the family's behest. Adler's 1928 effort, which Cohen dismisses as "adulatory and uncritical" (p. xiii), was nonetheless of crucial importance to her work. As she indicates in her notes, the bulk of the documentary material which enabled her to write the book came from drafts of Adler's book and from the "countless" Schiff letters selected by Adler and Schiff's son for the biography (p. 251). A detailed comparison of the Cohen and Adler biographies of Schiff would tell us a great deal about differences in the fashions of biographical presentation in the 1990s and the 1920s.

In her introduction Cohen presents this book as an attempt "to rescue Schiff from undeserved oblivion" (p. xi). Those who read her analysis of Schiff's Jewish activities can testify that she generally achieves this objective. Certainly, this solid study...

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