Visitors to his home saw a mezuzah on the door; non-Jews were impressed
by the recitation of grace after meals. Younger members of the family
found his religious code too rigid for their tastes, but his friends recognized
a God-fearing man who discerned the finger of Providence in the lives of
individuals and nations.^47
Schiff had rebelled as a youth against the Orthodox discipline of his
home, but as he matured away from his father’s influence, he was able to re-
late more sympathetically to traditionalists. His willingness to accept “rea-
sonable” in place of what he called “uncompromising orthodoxy” may have
reflected his German background, at least in part. Professor Gotthard
Deutsch of HUC, a contemporary who traced Schiff’s antecedents, wrote
that the banker was understanding of Frankfurt Orthodoxy, an Orthodoxy
that signified “men of good secular education, of high standing in the com-
munity, and perfect social manners” who were at the same time strictly ob-
servant Jews. It was Schiff’s belief, Deutsch continued, that the eastern Eu-
ropeans could develop into the Frankfurt type. There is no evidence that
the banker tried consciously to replicate the Frankfurt experience, but
some similarities surfaced in his American Jewish agenda. The statement
on objectives formulated in 1850 by the Frankfurt Israelitische Religions-
gesellschaft (IRG), for example, called not only for the protection of Juda-
ism as it developed but for a synagogue, school, and other institutions that
combined reverence for tradition with “a sensitivity” to the “progressive
demands of the times.” Moreover, thanks to his upbringing, Schiff was
mindful of Orthodox sensibilities. He disapproved of Saturday meetings
for Jewish communal agencies, and he refused to attend if written notes
were taken on the Sabbath.^48
An officer for many years of the UAHC, the lay arm of the Reform
movement, Schiff loyally supported Emanu-El and Beth El. Nonetheless,
he missed a religious vibrancy and a knowledge of Judaism in those citadels
of Reform. It was “mortifying,” he said, that Emanu-El’s members were
unequipped to use the Judaica library that the congregation owned. For a
while he tried, albeit futilely, to foster a “renascence of Judaism” at the
temple that might spark a deeper religious commitment among the young
adults. Schiff also missed learned congregational rabbis. After one Yom
Kippur service he confided to fellow congregant Marshall: “Fortunately, I
understood little of what Dr. [Joseph] Silverman said in the pulpit.” Nor
did Reform temples satisfy him when he commemorated the deaths of his
parents. On those occasions he sought out traditionalist settings for recit-
ing the Kaddishprayer.^49
Like post-Emancipation Jews in general, Schiff fashioned a personal ec-
lectic code of religious behavior that drew from both traditionalism and Re-
form. His ethnic sentiments differed from classical Reform, but he never
clearly defined how much ethnicity or Jewish “groupness” was inherent in
The New Immigrants 101