apolitical refuge. In Schiff’s calculations, Zionism, inherently wrong,
undercut the chances of other refuges. Not only did it strengthen restric-
tionist sentiment against the immigration of Jews to America, but it weak-
ened the appeal to Jews of any territorialist solution.
The banker’s stand on Zionism underwent significant modification be-
fore the outbreak of World War I. Although he remained opposed to the
idea of statehood or any form of Jewish political autonomy, a growing
interest in Palestinian cultural and philanthropic institutions turned him
into a non-Zionist. Slowly, he came to see a positive good in a Jewish Pal-
estine. Meanwhile, his antipathy to political Zionism was fueled by an en-
tirely different matter, that of leadership. Since American Zionists linked
the aim of nationalism with democracy, they soon posed an increasingly se-
rious challenge to his control of the Jewish community.
The idea of a Jewish return to Palestine was familiar to nineteenth-century
Americans. Restoration figured in the theology of evangelicals and millen-
ialists; some Christians suggested that world Jewry purchase Palestine
from the Turks.^52 In 1891, William Blackstone, a religious Christian busi-
nessman of Chicago, circulated a mass petition that asked for the restora-
tion of Palestine to the Jews by international agreement. Schiff refused to
sign. Along with other Jewish and non-Jewish critics he called the idea im-
practical and undesirable.^53 Only after the founding of the Zionist Organ-
ization in 1897 did Schiff explain his opinions in greater detail.
Among the repeated arguments that Schiff mustered against Jewish po-
litical nationalism, religion was the most important. Calling himself a
“faith Jew” rather than a “race Jew,” he adhered to the classical Reform po-
sition adopted by the two major arms of that movement, the Central Con-
ference of American Rabbis and the UAHC. The Reformers proclaimed
that Judaism was only a religion and that Jews, the priest people, had been
scattered among the nations by divine purpose to teach the unity of God
and brotherhood of man. Ingathering into Palestine contradicted the very
raison d’être of Jewish existence and, as Schiff thought, threatened the es-
sence of Judaism. He decried the secular cast of the movement as well as its
leaders—“phantasists” and adventurers, if not demagogues and agitators,
who preached a pernicious “ism.” But as a man who genuinely believed
that “from Zion shall come forth the Law,” Schiff was hard put to square
that belief with Reform teachings. His image of Zion was murky, more a
holy land of the past than a source of present or future Jewish creativity. In
one early letter he interpreted the traditional verse to mean the Jews came
forth with the Law from Zion. Exiled from Zion and dispersed among the na-
tions, they set upon their divine mission to disseminate the land-free tenets
of the Jewish faith: “Surely the inspired seer... would have added the
In Search of a Refuge 175