debates. If not for his donations, Schiff said, the institution would have
been ruined. Nonetheless, the school rapidly declined. At the turn of the
century, when plans were laid to reorganize JTS and invite a world-
renowned scholar, Dr. Solomon Schechter, to be its head, the banker’s in-
volvement escalated. He became a major fund-raiser for the seminary as
well as its largest contributor. To Schechter he was identified as “theYehudi
of New York.”^41
Why a Conservative seminary became a favorite project of a Reform
Jew, second only to Montefiore in his affection, sheds light on both the
man’s social vision and his personal conduct. Americanization was always a
primary impetus. “The solution of the Jewish question in this country,”
Schiff said, “depends largely on the success of the Educational Alliance [the
major settlement house on the Lower East Side, of which he was a founder
and one-time president] and of this seminary.” The mission of its graduates
was to harmonize the religion and the “often peculiar” habits of the eastern
Europeans with American customs. Since the main stumbling block was to
find rabbis acceptable to the Russians, an appropriate seminary had to be
created. In the words of one JTS supporter (and the syntax strongly sug-
gests Schiff), “if to the seminary there can be attracted young men from the
tremendous colony, who will be educated up town, and then return to the
Ghetto, it is believed Russians there will accept them for guidance.”^42
There were other reasons, too. First, Schiff desired the seminary to be
the fountainhead of a vibrant American Jewish scholarship. He always
hoped that the United States would become a flourishing center of Jewish
religious and cultural creativity. His friend Mayer Sulzberger explained
that am-harazim(ignoramuses—and Sulzberger included himself) needed
to support schools. Second, as one who wished that the United States
would be the melting pot for different forms of Judaism, Schiff entertained
hopes for an institution that might reduce denominational wrangling.
What really was the difference among believing Jews, he once asked, as
long as their watchword was Sh’ma Yisrael?^43
On both scores the banker thought that HUC, the Cincinnati-based Re-
form seminary and one to which he generously contributed, fell short. Most
important, it had produced no prominent scholars or teachers like the Re-
form pioneers of nineteenth-century Germany. Moreover, its very location
was wrong, for Cincinnati lacked “an academic atmosphere.” Instead of
growing into “a high seat of learning,” HUC merely “vegetates,” he wrote to
the chairman of the board in 1900. Moreover, by the mid-1880s the college,
originally planned for the training of all American rabbis, had become a par-
tisan Reform institution that alienated non-Reformers. Schiff continued to
support HUC, but he defended the existence of Orthodoxy as well as Re-
form on the American scene. Reform, a “healthy liberalism,” saved many
Jews from leaving the fold, while Orthodoxy preserved the heritage that
The New Immigrants 99