Did the blueprint of the stewards mean the school to be merely transitional,
that is, until proper Americanization was achieved and the eastern Euro-
peans were made ready for Reform? Where did ultimate power lie, in the
hands of the donors or in the faculty and academic heads? How long would
or should Reform Jews, unconcerned and uninterested in the development
of a Conservative religious movement, support a seminary that competed
with theirs, the Hebrew Union College (HUC)? Schiff and his associates,
all practical men, did not anticipate future problems. Their primary con-
cern, at least for their own generation, remained Americanization.^37
Although the German stewards preached to the immigrants on the bless-
ings of integration, they never called for a renunciation of religion. Schiff,
for one, maintained that Americanism and Judaism were inseparable, that
the Jewish religious faith supplied the “moral stamina” necessary for out-
standing citizenship. The banker and his associates feared the secularists
and atheists—or worse still, the socialists and anarchists—as much as they
despised the eastern European brand of Orthodoxy. A secularized Jewry of
any sort reduced Jewishness to an ethnic or racial category that challenged
their belief that religion was the core, if not the sole meaning, of Judaism.
It also threatened to confirm the teachings of anti-Semites, for whom a
Jew, with or without religion, remained a Jew. Since Americans accepted
religious distinctions but frowned upon radicalism and ethnic separatism,
the stewards felt justified in judging the modern religious Jew unquestion-
ably preferable to the secular Yiddish culturalist, socialist, or atheist.^38
When labor leader and Zionist Joseph Barondess once asked Schiff to
support a Jewish National Radical School, the banker flatly declined. Bris-
tling at the words nationaland radicalas well as at the idea of a Yiddish edu-
cation, he offered a rare explanation of his beliefs:
The Jewish Nation, hardly any one will deny, was called into existence for
the express purpose of becoming the bearer of a great religion and later be-
came dispersed among the Nations... to carry the Word of God into the
wide world. Those who deny the dogma of the Jewish religion... should be
the last to have any justification for seeking the reestablishment of a Jewish
Nation [in Palestine].... Nor is it, in my opinion, justified to seek to perpet-
uate the use of the Yiddish language in this country,... and the proposition
that there is wanted a new type of school, “National instead of religious, Yid-
dish instead of English or even Hebraic,” is too unreasonable to deserve con-
sideration. I do not know what is meant by a “radical” school. I do not like
radical measures. Social justice must be reached by evolutionary and not by
revolutionary methods. I have every respect for the honest and serious so-
cialist, but if the creed of the Jewish Socialist includes a denial of the JewishThe New Immigrants 97