Although American Jews had risen to the defense of their foreign brethren
ever since the Damascus Affair of 1840, their early methods reflected an
immature community whose occasional appeals to the government were
timid if not obsequious. The Jewish establishment had become more so-
phisticated by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Germany
considered the rescission of Jewish rights in 1881 and when France tried
and convicted Captain Alfred Dreyfus of high treason in the 1890s. In
those instances, however, Jewish leaders chose to stay aloof. Still the junior
partners in the relationship with western European Jewries, they would not
intervene unless requested to by their fellow Jews abroad. Furthermore,
the “new” anti-Semitism in western Europe confounded the Americans as
much as it disturbed them. It belied their optimistic faith that Jewish his-
tory had turned a corner with the Enlightenment and that prejudice and
bigotry would fall before the inevitable progress of mankind. Preferring to
interpret the eruptions as isolated aberrations, they sensed that interven-
tion on their part would be tantamount to an admission of spiritual bank-
ruptcy. In the Dreyfus case, Schiff and other prominent Jews opposed
protest meetings and, attempting to deny that race prejudice was involved,
looked to the civilized world for expressions of resentment. Privately,
Schiff fumed at French injustice and could not bring himself to visit Paris
during those years, but he held his tongue.^2
Czarist oppression, however, which was seen as a carryover of medieval
barbarism, elicited a markedly different response. The American stewards
believed that modern Jews fought the good fight by challenging the reac-
tionary forces in Russia that blocked the advance of civilization and with it
the well-being of Jews. Intervention was unlikely to worsen the lot of the
Russian Jews, and since the latter were hardly the equals of their emanci-
pated western co-religionists, their consent to such intervention was un-
necessary. Just as Schiff played guardian to the new immigrants on the
Lower East Side, so did he and his associates adopt the Jews in Russia as
their wards.
Schiff harnessed his wealth and political influence on behalf of Jewish
liberation in Russia. Making good use of his far-flung network of European
contacts—from his brother Philip in Frankfurt to Ernest Cassel in Lon-
don, from sources in Russia to officers of the Anglo-Jewish Association
(England), the Alliance Israélite Universelle (France), and the Hilfsverein
der Deutschen Juden (Germany)—he became the virtual nerve center of
all news relating to the Russian situation. The banker functioned as lobby-
ist and diplomat as well as philanthropist, and he fast gained universal rec-
ognition as the champion of eastern European liberation. A Jew from Rus-
sia once recalled that as a youngster he had known of Schiff. “He belonged
not only to the American Jewry but to the Jewry of the entire world.”^3
Captivity and Redemption 125