words: ‘to return to it,’ if his inspiration had not told him that the law of
God went forth from Zion and its bearers became distributed among the
nations, to remain and to become part and parcel of them, so that they
might forever promulgate Israel’s great mission.”^54
Neither his grounding in Orthodox tradition, where a return to Pales-
tine was central, nor his acceptance of Jewish colonization, whether in the
United States or Mexico or Mesopotamia, was sufficient to elicit his en-
couragement of Zionism. Yet the universalist argument trapped him in a
seeming contradiction. Logically, Reform’s definition of Judaism as a relig-
ion put it on a par with American Catholicism and Protestantism, but the
banker’s own behavior as the consistent champion of the Jewish people
rested on the basic premise that Jews were more than a religious group.
Schiff admitted as much. We are a people with its own culture, he wrote to
the president of the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ), “but we are
not a Nation.”^55 Inconsistencies on issues like peoplehood and the meaning
of Zion reflected his own personal dilemma on how best to combine an
Orthodox background with Reformist principles.
Central to Schiff’s antinationalist brief was the fear that Zionism would
spark accusations of dual allegiance against American Jews. Jewish nation-
alism was a myth, the banker told an audience of college students, and
American Jews never hoped for a future in another country. But the goal of
Zionism was not totally invalid. Inconsistent yet again, he admitted that
unemancipated Romanian and Russian Jews were perhaps justified in seek-
ing a land of their own, but Jews who enjoyed political rights were not. “As
Americans, or where Jews are [equal] citizens of other nations... , we
should have no right to complain of attempts on the part of anti-Semites to
curtail such rights, if we ourselves proclaimed that we consider ourselves
only temporary dwellers in the land, and that our ultimate desire and pur-
pose is to return to Palestine and to there re-establish a Jewish nation.”
Zionists retorted that the patriotism of emancipated Jews had failed to pre-
vent anti-Semitism in Germany or the Dreyfus affair in France. Neverthe-
less, while they mouthed Herzl’s principles, the general consensus within
American Zionist ranks was that those axioms applied not to American
Jews but to their less fortunate European brethren.^56
Since Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists frequently invoked the bogey
of dual allegiance, one of Schiff’s own circle, Cyrus L. Sulzberger, was
prompted to counter the charge. Sulzberger wrote in 1904 that patriotism
was not exclusive and that just as Americans had fought for Cuban inde-
pendence without besmirching their patriotism, so too could they justifi-
ably sympathize with Zionism. Schiff disagreed; in his eyes political Zion-
ism was at odds with loyalty to the United States and it reinforced the
anti-Semitic images of Jews as unwelcome aliens or as Orientals who
should return to the Orient. Not only would Zionism alienate Americans,
176 Jacob H. Schiff