Complicating the Zionist Narrative in America: Jacob Schiff and the Struggle over Relief Aid in World War I

When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Henry Morgenthau, the United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, contacted Jacob H. Schiff, New York City banker and Jewish philanthropist, pleading for money to assist Jews in Palestine now under duress since the outbreak of war had dramatically curtailed exports. Morgenthau persuaded Schiff to send aid. Together, Schiff and other prominent American Jewish leaders, including Louis Marshall, Oscar Straus, Judah Magnes, Louis Brandeis, Felix Warburg, Julius Rosenwald, Mayer Sulzberger, and others helped form one of the largest and most successful international humanitarian organizations—the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (later called “the Joint”). The Joint combined three organizations—the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering through the War, the American Jewish Relief Committee, and the People’s Relief Committee—into a single umbrella group in order to efficiently distribute funds to Jews abroad suffering from the war. Meanwhile, in the same year that Morgenthau encouraged American Jewish leaders to organize funds for suffering Jews, the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs (P.E.C.) organized, with future Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis as its chair. While many of the members of the P.E.C. also belonged to the Joint and saw the Joint’s assistance to the Jews in Palestine as an opportunity to further the Zionist cause there, not all members of the Joint agreed on what constituted the best way to distribute funds. The Joint included American Jewish leaders with a wide range of perspectives on Zionism, including decided anti-Zionists, thus complicating the motives, means, and methods of aid distribution for suffering Jews.

Between 1914 and 1918, the Joint managed to raise twenty million dollars for overseas aid, but tensions quickly arose between Zionists and non-Zionists over relief efforts in Ottoman-controlled Palestine.¹ With the Balfour Declaration and the British conquest of Palestine in 1917, these disagreements grew increasingly acute and reinforced divisions over attitudes toward Zionism per se. While Schiff and others were already reluctant to support political Zionism, their disagreements with the Zionists over the use of relief funds in Palestine and their concern that non-Jews would perceive their activities as unpatriotic during a time of war further entrenched their opposition to the political platform of the P.E.C.² Given the paramount position that Schiff, along with Louis Marshall and others of their circle held in the American Jewish community before and during the war, their conflict with the American Zionist movement over relief distribution in Palestine and the raising of the question of Jewish political sovereignty in a time of war deepened the fracture in the American Jewish leadership and delayed unified American Jewish support for political Zionism.

Some historians have argued that Jacob Schiff slowly became a Zionist, albeit a reluctant one, over the course of World War I. This paper argues, however, that he did not embrace Zionism, and would eventually distance himself from any connections with the movement in the United States. Evyatar Friesel, for example, claims that by 1917, Schiff had adopted a cultural Zionist stance, incorporating support for building “Palestine as a Jewish spiritual center,” along with “opposition to non-religious Jewish nationalism” and the use of “Zionism as an instrument of Jewish survival.”³ Friesel argues that Schiff’s unwillingness to embrace the Basel Program (specifically the endorsement of a political state), prevented Zionist leaders, including Brandeis, from welcoming him into the Zionist camp. As a result, Schiff’s “intention of joining the Zionist movement was never consummated.”⁴ But Friesel does not fully address the tension caused by the P.E.C.’s policies in Palestine or Schiff’s expressed fear that support for political Zionism would result in accusations of Jewish lack of American patriotism as motivating factors for his failure to accept political Zionism, despite the desire by many in the P.E.C. that he throw his money and influence behind the movement.⁵

In the largest, most comprehensive biography of Jacob Schiff to date, Naomi Cohen...