Making its mark in finance and merchandising, the affluent Jewish com-
munity contributed generously to both civic causes and their own religious
and charitable institutions. Within that community the prominent Schiff
family had been rooted for several hundred years (dates for the first ap-
pearance of the family in Frankfurt range from 1370 to 1600). According
to one source, almost every third Schiff was a rabbi, dayyan (religious
judge), or parnas (lay head of the community). The most famous of Jacob’s
ancestors were the seventeenth-century talmudic scholar Meir ben Jacob
Schiff (the Maharam) and the eighteenth-century dayyanDavid Tevele
Schiff, who became rabbi of the Great Synagogue in London. For many
years the early Schiffs shared ownership of a two-family house with the
Rothschilds. Located in the old Jewish quarter, the house was marked on
the Schiff side by a ship and on the Rothschild side by a red shield, symbols
from which the surnames of the two families had originally derived.^3
While the revolution of 1848 hastened Jewish emancipation and the
grant of full civic rights in 1864, liberalism was also challenging conserva-
tism on the religious scene. Here the conflict for control of the Jewish
community pitted the young Reform movement against entrenched Or-
thodoxy. After the Frankfurt synagogue fell to Reform, Orthodox forces
countered by organizing a new congregation, the Israelitische Religionsge-
sellschaft (IRG; Jewish Religious Association). The group, whose founders
included Moses Schiff, represented the oldest and wealthiest families in the
city. With its eye on “the progressive demands of the times,” the IRG
called for a traditional but modern synagogue, a school that taught secular
as well as religious studies, and a rabbi who combined knowledge of Jewish
tradition with a gymnasium and university education. An exemplar of
modern Orthodoxy, Samson Raphael Hirsch was engaged by the IRG as its
rabbi in 1851.^4
The school established by Hirsch was ranked by the government as a
model of its kind. Young Jacob attended classes there from 1853 to 1861
and came away with a thorough grounding in secular and religious subjects
and a rare appreciation of the need to synthesize German and Jewish cul-
ture. According to his close friend and biographer, Cyrus Adler, Schiff
knew Hebrew well and could freely quote the Hebrew Bible. Calling the
Bible the book that had the greatest influence on him, he read biblical
commentaries and kept up with developments in biblical studies. Jacob
may have resisted Orthodox discipline, but Hirsch’s training, in tandem
with his father’s influence, left him with an abiding love of Judaism and an
interest in Jewish learning. Although his formal education ended when he
was but fourteen years old, his serious reading and travel as an adult broad-
ened his general knowledge. “Self-polish,” one journalist explained, ac-
counted for Schiff’s familiarity with economics and history.^5
Jacob shared the legendary pride of Frankfurt’s Jews in their city. He re-
2 Jacob H. Schiff