religion and seeks to supersede the Public School by Yiddish instead of En-
glish schools,... then I shall prefer to have none of it.^39To preserve a Judaism palatable to Americans and to shield immigrant
youth from dangerous “isms,” the German Jews had to co-opt rabbis and
teachers—”missionaries,” Schiff and others called them—in their drive for
Americanization. For several years the banker toyed with the idea of estab-
lishing a People’s Synagogue on the Lower East Side. “I felt that the
younger element of the Eastside down-town population were losing their
moral hold,” and, alienated from Old World Orthodoxy, they became
“ready adherents of every other ‘ism’ rather than of Judaism.” He sought a
rabbi, preferably one who would live among the Eastsiders, who was “a
thorough Jew” and “thoroughly American”—and who was “neither an ex-
treme orthodox, nor extreme reformer”—to teach religion and a modern
form of worship. He was prepared to invest heavily in the project, but nei-
ther of his candidates, the young and charismatic rabbis Stephen Wise and
Judah Magnes, was willing to assume the responsibility.^40
Although many of the stewards were Reform Jews, the goal of Ameri-
canization transcended denominational loyalties. They understood that
Reform temples, which showed a blatant distaste for the newcomers and
which highlighted the socioeconomic differences between the old and new
Jewries, were utterly alien to the eastern Europeans. The latter, whether
observant or not, usually perceived Reform as the penultimate step to total
assimilation. They could swallow neither Reform’s wholesale disregard of
custom and ritual nor its repudiation of Jewish ethnicity. In time, accultu-
ration and economic mobility would prepare the eastern Europeans for
Reform rabbis trained at HUC, but the Americanizers were unwilling to
wait a generation or more. Those who, like Schiff, realized that control of
the community would soon pass to the more numerous newcomers, sought
through Americanization to perpetuate their own values and communal vi-
sion. If a compromise between Reform and shtetl Orthodoxy was necessary
to produce religious leaders, modern but sufficiently traditional for immi-
grant tastes, so be it.
From its inception in 1886 under the leadership of Rabbis Sabato Mo-
rais and Alexander Kohut, JTS focused on Americanization and on the
spiritual needs of the eastern Europeans. An appeal for support from the
first president of the seminary’s lay association declared that the immi-
grants “need ministers who will also be missionaries, to refine their lives,
elevate them and maintain that high standard of moral character which has
always been the boast of our race.” However, since the school would also
serve to counter the tide of Reform, its attraction for Schiff, an affiliated
Reform Jew, was all the more interesting. He gave money for a new build-
ing and for the library, and he gave time, even serving as judge of student
98 Jacob H. Schiff