Dropsie College in Philadelphia, a postgraduate school that offered ad-
vanced courses in Judaic studies. Incorporated in 1907, Dropsie was a bet-
ter endowed school and looked like a serious competitor. Schiff was pre-
pared to move the seminary to Philadelphia, but legal obstacles prevented
any serious negotiations. The directors also sought financial aid from the
Orthodox of the Lower East Side. It was a logical move, since most of the
students were of east European origin and their training at JTS was to be
used on behalf of the immigrants. Schiff and Marshall personally canvassed
the synagogues in the ghetto, asking for one dollar from each member, but
the response was chilling. The Eastsiders were suspicious of a seminary
sponsored by Reform Jews, where English had supplanted Yiddish as the
language of instruction and where the old ways of training rabbis had been
discarded. The Reform American Israelite, amused at the spectacle of
wealthy American Jews appealing for aid, correctly pointed out that if the
Eastsiders responded they would demand a say in the seminary’s govern-
ance. Opposition from the secularists as well as the Orthodox, however,
precluded any grass-roots support and made the issue of governance a
moot point. Attempts at popular fund-raising, except for appeals by the
school’s graduates, were soon abandoned, and the anomaly of a Conserva-
tive institution supported largely by Reform donors persisted.^60
One appeal by Schiff to the Lower East Side drew criticism from Hen-
rietta Szold, a close friend of the seminary circle. Although she too op-
posed rigid Orthodoxy, she thought it in “abominable” taste, as well as
inaccurate, for the banker to have claimed that more “true” Judaism had
existed in New York City before the immigrants arrived. Furthermore,
who was he to urge Jews to renounce Orthodoxy? Even if Szold’s opinion
of Schiff and “Schiffian Judaism” was overly harsh, her words were
doubtless voiced by many immigrants.^61 Schiff ignored such criticism; a
school accredited by him was beyond reproach. Neither he nor the East
Side deemed the issue important enough to test his leadership by a vote
of confidence.
The firm foundations set by Schiff and his associates enabled the seminary
to outlive most other institutions for Americanizing the new immigrants.
In time, as the suspicions of the Eastsiders were allayed, the school’s appeal
to the children of immigrants grew. JTS turned out rabbis and teachers
who mediated the extremes of Reform and Orthodoxy and, in opposition
to secularism, offered the second generation a comfortable way of blending
traditional faith and ethnic loyalties with American life. Fast becoming a
pillar of Zionism cast in religious terms, the seminary in turn subtly influ-
enced men like Schiff and Marshall to a more positive stand on Jewish na-
tionalism. At the same time, the school developed into the source of Jewish
The New Immigrants 105