communal rifts, the stewards of the American Jewish Committee (AJC)
held meetings with other groups and even consented to public rallies. Such
conciliatory moves were necessary both to preserve their own leadership
and to show politicians, who were becoming increasingly sensitive to the
immigrant vote, the unified stand of the Jewish community.^1
Fortified by opposition on the part of organized labor, patrician activism
in the Immigration Restriction League, and the popularity of racism par-
ticularly in the South and Far West, restrictionists pushed for legal barriers
to immigration, notably the literacy test. Their pressure reinforced the
Jewish resolve to defend unrestricted entry. It was one thing for Jews to
criticize immigration privately or to argue with their European counter-
parts about saddling America with a disproportionate share of the burden,
but quite another when non-Jews and the government made the same
points. Selected immigration presented a feasible option only if the selec-
tion was done by the Jews themselves. Were America to close its doors
even partially, hope for victims of future and perhaps graver crises would
be dimmed. Legally mandated restriction, particularly in a popular racist
garb, not only impeded the entry of foreign Jews but threatened to set off
acculturated American Jews, by association, as a less than desirable ele-
ment. Thus, security for themselves as well as responsibility for their fel-
low Jews led the normally hyperaccommodationist minority leaders to an
open challenge of regnant public opinion.^2
Business had long defended immigration as a source of cheap labor, but
Schiff approached the issue not as a businessman but as a Jew. To be sure,
before the turn of the century he too supported systematized and selected
immigration (i.e., a preference for the hardy and industrious), and he too
was concerned with the horrors of ghetto blight. But unlike some of his
contemporaries he suggested neither an end to immigration nor deporta-
tions. He once remarked that Russian Jews who were sent back for what-
ever reason “are sent back to hell.” Nor, despite an occasional allusion to
increased social prejudice spawned by the problems of the new arrivals, did
he blame the Russians for causing American anti-Semitism. He constantly
warned European Jewish leaders to avoid stimulated or assisted immigra-
tion that ran afoul of American law, but he sought liberal construction of
existing regulations by sympathetic immigration authorities. On one occa-
sion in the 1890s he charged the assistant secretary of the treasury, who was
in charge of immigration, with obstructive and oppressive tactics against
new arrivals. He called for the official’s removal, and the latter’s superior,
Secretary Charles Foster, complied. In 1892 the banker complained di-
rectly to President Benjamin Harrison about the obstacles put in the way
of immigrant admissions. His remarks applied to all immigrants, he said,
154 Jacob H. Schiff