concerned with the plight of the eastern Europeans, ranked the thirty-five-
year-old Schiff alongside two European philanthropists roughly twenty
years his senior, Frederick Mocatta of England and Maurice de Hirsch of
Germany.^7
The Russian problem joined the American one directly with a fellow
member of the “triumverate,” Baron de Hirsch. The story began in 1887 in
Constantinople where Hirsch, scion of a wealthy banking family and
builder of railways, met the American minister, Oscar Straus. By then the
baron’s original plan to raise the status of the Jews in Russia through the
creation of elementary and agricultural schools had failed. Convinced now
that any future for the eastern Europeans lay in large-scale emigration, he
envisaged the physical and moral regeneration of the Russian Jews as pro-
ductive citizens, primarily farmers and craftsmen, in Western countries.
He was prepared to establish a relief fund in the United States, and he
asked Straus to recommend individuals to serve as trustees and to apprise
him of their ideas on assistance to immigrants. At Straus’s request, Michael
Heilprin, a well-known literary figure in New York who had been en-
grossed in the immigrant problem since 1881, suggested a plan that jibed
with the baron’s views and was endorsed by Straus, his brother Isidor, and
Schiff. Serious negotiations began, and in 1891 Hirsch signed over $2.4
million for a relief fund controlled by nine American trustees.^8
Several months later the baron gave $10 million for the creation of the
European-based Jewish Colonization Association (ICA). Through the
ICA, whose purpose was to establish Jewish settlements in various parts of
the world, major attempts were made to develop Jewish colonies in Argen-
tina. Since the American trustees refused to take shares in the organization
or participate in its direction, they were promised a portion of ICA’s in-
come. The arrangement, however, often bred resentment, for control of
the purse strings permitted the Europeans a decisive vote on many Ameri-
can relief policies.^9
The stimulus from Hirsch and Heilprin forced Schiff and his circle to
face a question larger than immediate relief giving: How could the immi-
grant masses be absorbed most efficaciously in ways that balanced the
needs of the country, the established Jewish community, and the immi-
grants themselves? The Jewish philanthropists knew what they did not
want—congested ghettos seemingly impervious to Americanization, de-
pendent groups converted into a pauper class by charitable handouts, the
image of the Jew as unproductive and unassimilable—but they were vague
about the remedies. Hirsch’s endowment steered them to the implementa-
tion of specific ventures, an agenda prompted by their perceptions of what
Americans expected of the immigrants: (1) classes in English and the duties
of citizenship, (2) training in mechanical and agricultural skills, (3) encour-
agement of agricultural settlement, and (4) dispersal of the immigrants
86 Jacob H. Schiff