Yesterday’s newsletter mentioned the play The Lehman Trilogy, based on the story of the founders of the Lehman Brothers banking firm, and cited a review calling attention to its thinly veiled anti-Semitism and serious departures from the truth. For the actual story of some of America’s great Jewish financiers and the roles they played as leaders of U.S. Jewry, one might turn to The Money Kings, by Daniel Schulman. In his review, Allan Arkush focuses on one in particular: Jacob Schiff, who in his day was one of the foremost Jewish philanthropists:
In tandem with his efforts to help migrants, Schiff sought to alleviate the conditions that motivated them to leave the tsarist Empire for the United States in the first place. Already in 1891, he was meeting with President Benjamin Harrison (together with Oscar Straus and Joseph Seligman’s brother Jesse) to seek his administration’s support for Russian Jewry. Twelve years later, in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, he unsuccessfully badgered Theodore Roosevelt to take punitive commercial action against Russia if it didn’t cease to discriminate against American Jews traveling in its territory.
Soon thereafter, during the Russo-Japanese War, Schiff played “a decisive financial role” by taking up half of a Japanese bond issue at a time when other financiers were unwilling to do so. He spent $25 million (the equivalent of almost a billion dollars today). Schiff took this action at least in part to punish Russia for its treatment of its Jews and received from the Japanese emperor the “Second Order of the Sacred Treasure” for his investment.
Schiff continued to hammer away at the regime he loathed and eventually enjoyed a limited measure of success. In 1911, after failing to convince President William Howard Taft to break the U.S. commercial treaty with Russia, he launched a public campaign through the American Jewish Committee “to mobilize public opinion behind a legislative effort to invalidate the treaty.” It worked. Congress voted overwhelmingly to do so, and the president’s hand was forced. On January 1, 1912, he pulled the U.S. out of the treaty.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/16649/their-crowd/