area of settlement of all the immigrants; some made their way to Harlem
and to the other boroughs. But the section of Manhattan south of Four-
teenth Street became the quintessential ghetto and one that horrified the
Jewish stewards. A “worse hell than was ever invented by the imagination
of the most vindictive Jew-hater in Europe,” said Leo Levi, president of
B’nai B’rith; “a disgrace to the name of Jew,” said Schiff. The appalling
conditions of the ghetto, which have been described countless times, al-
tered the scope and direction of Jewish philanthropy beyond recognition.
Any previous guidelines on what the community had to budget annually in
the way of relief were rendered totally useless by the magnitude of the situ-
ation. The representative of the Alliance Israélite Universelle reported in
1901 to his organization in Paris that there were more needy Jews in New
York than there were Jews in France and England combined.^3
The needs of the newcomers, largely impoverished and drained of ma-
terial and emotional resources, became evident immediately upon their ar-
rival at Castle Garden and later (1892) Ellis Island. To counteract the
blandishments of zealous missionaries and to protect young women who
were lured into prostitution rings, the immigrants had to be met; decisions
by local officials who frequently denied them entry had to be monitored
and, if need be, contested. When the immigrants found their way to the
squalid ghetto tenements, cases of the hungry, the homeless, the deserted,
the sick, the orphaned, and the unemployed assumed first priority. Besides
those elemental needs, the ghetto spawned problems of social deviancy.
Jewish crime, for example, emerged for the first time as a major problem. It
was “horrifying,” Schiff wrote in 1901, to find that 23 percent of delin-
quents in reformatories were Jewish, especially when Jews constituted only
14 percent of the city’s population.^4
The burden of the new immigrants fell most heavily on the established
German philanthropists. They expanded existing agencies and created new
ones. Duplication was unavoidable, but in some areas a rough division of
labor emerged; for example, the National Council of Jewish Women
worked to shield women from prostitution, and the Board of Delegates of
the UAHC kept tabs on cases of unfair or illegal deportations.^5 Although
the costs were lightened somewhat by subventions from the Baron de
Hirsch Fund and by the eastern Europeans who quickly established their
own self-help organizations, the perceived horrors of ghetto life continued
to plague communal leaders until World War I. Jews, as traditional city-
dwellers, would hardly have shared established American beliefs about
urban centers as the root of social decay. But ironically, the same indict-
ments of the city’s nefarious influence and its need of moral uplift reso-
nated in German Jewish charges against the urban Jewish ghetto. Jewish
critics went even further and insisted that the ghetto problem could not be
measured in physical terms alone. First of all, it lent “proof” to immigration
84 Jacob H. Schiff