rights might be saved: “Publication of this work will serve to show the
world the enormous stride towards civilization which is certain to result
from the abolition of the special laws against the Jews.”^60
The March revolution and the emancipation of Russian Jewry did not end
American Jewish concern for their brethren. Looming on the horizon as
the Bolshevik revolution in November drew closer were the problems of
continued anti-Semitism and the charge heard round the world that Jew
meant Bolshevik. For Schiff personally, Jewish rights in Russia contributed
to a dramatic change in his attitude on an unrelated issue. The man who
had always believed that legal equality promised the most security for dias-
pora Jewry now drew closer, in part because of legal equality in Russia, to
the Zionist cause.
Questions of Leadership
While Schiff was coping with the problem of multiple loyalties, his power
as a Jewish leader was increasingly challenged. He now confronted a rap-
idly maturing American Jewry, far different from that before the turn of
the century. The once submissive and cowed immigrants had gained re-
markable strength through numbers and economic mobility that enabled
them, despite countless differences in beliefs and customs, to resist author-
itarian tutelage from the established Germans. To be sure, they were ever
sensitive to discrimination abroad and at home. Echoes of the notorious
Beilis affair in Russia (1913) still reverberated, and the Leo Frank case in
Georgia (1913–15) dramatically testified to ongoing Jewish vulnerability.
Nevertheless, although they may have depended on the philanthropic and
defense networks of the stewards, their first recourse was to the ever pro-
liferating institutions of their own. Similarly, their primary fealty went to
men from within their ranks, like labor leaders, Yiddish journalists, and
Zionist activists. Not that Schiff lost his influence, but the power that he
had long wielded in areas of philanthropy, immigrant adjustment, and aid
for Jews in Russia did not extend automatically to war-generated commu-
nal concerns. At a time when new problems faced American Jewry, he, its
foremost leader, failed to win unquestioned allegiance on the major issues
of Jewish wartime relief and the American Jewish Congress. Between 1914
and 1918, as tests of his leadership multiplied, his long-sought goal of
American Jewish unity under elitist domination grew ever more elusive.
Schiff neither abdicated his leadership of the community nor was it
called for, but more than ever before he was forced to learn that an effective
leader was one who moved with the times and who did not resist change or
The World at War 209