he fired a major salvo in a public letter to Schechter. To be sure, Schechter
had the right to join the Zionist movement without incurring public abuse,
and he, Schiff, shared Schechter’s yearning for a return to Jewish ideals.
But, he insisted categorically, Zionist calculations paid little or no attention
to religion, and nationalist aspirations of whatever stripe flew in the face of
the Jewish mission.
The core of the statement, however, was Schiff’s charge that Zionism
was at odds with patriotism:
Speaking as an American, I cannot for a moment concede that one can be at
the same time a true American and an honest adherent of the Zionist Move-
ment.... The Jew should not for a moment feel that he has only found an
“asylum” in this country; he must not feel that he is in exile and that his
abode here is only a temporary or passing one. If those who come after us are
to be freed from the prejudice from which this generation is, not unnaturally,
suffering we need feel that politically no one has any claim upon us but the
country of which, of our own free will, we have become citizens; that even if
we are Jews in faith, there is no string to our citizenship.^65The Jewish and secular press pounced on Schiff’s letter; friends praised
the banker, and critics vilified him. Henrietta Szold, for one, called it “the
greatest piece of Rishus [Hebrew for “evil” but used by German Jews as a
synonym for anti-Semitism] ever perpetrated.” At a mass meeting the
Zionists, by formal resolution, repudiated Schiff’s charges, affirmed their
loyalty to the country, and called upon anti-Zionists to desist from such
harmful accusations. Schechter too was enraged. As Schiff pointed out,
Schechter would not have agreed to published letters if he had known in
advance what Schiff intended to include. The president of JTS confided
privately that he would continue to interpret Judaism in traditional fashion,
under which he included Zionism. If those doctrines upset “Wall Street”
and the seminary’s Schiff-dominated board, he was prepared to resign.
Schiff felt impelled to retreat. In a second published letter his tone was
more moderate. He had no quarrel, he stated, with Zionism insofar as it
aroused a return to Jewish ideals, and he denied having said that Zionism
was incompatible with patriotism. Using different words that conveyed the
same meaning, he now wrote that political Zionism put a “lien” on citizen-
ship, “the enforcement of which the Zionist, if he is honest, must seek to
accomplish by every legitimate means.” He added privately that Jews were
obligated to keep faith with America.^66 The words were well suited to
American hypernationalists, but from the leader of a minority group they
were, at the very least, impolitic.
Throughout the episode, which reverberated over several months,
Schiff was more keyed up than disturbed. He thought his letters proved
180 Jacob H. Schiff