the AJC turned to the problem of relief. All recognized that unity among
American Jews was essential to meeting the staggering needs, and they
agreed with Schiff that Jews could not look elsewhere for assistance. An ap-
peal to non-Jews, the banker said, would mean a loss of Jewish dignity and
self-respect. The committee also considered a message from Brandeis. Ask-
ing for the AJC’s cooperation in raising $100,000 for the support of inter-
national Zionist institutions, the message took the stewards by surprise.
They had automatically assumed that the committee would handle foreign
relief, a familiar issue that had proved their expertise, for both Europe and
Palestine. Besides, they could never agree that relief be limited to support
of Zionist work. Although suspecting, as did Marshall, that the Zionists—
“self-advertisers,” “fanatics” who considered themselves above the ordinary
rules of decency—desired outright control of relief in order to concentrate
on Palestine, Schiff immediately spoke up for cooperation but on the
committee’s terms. He made it manifestly clear who was to lead the com-
munity and who was to be led. “Mr. Schiff stated,” the minutes read, “that
... the American Jewish Committee, the Zionists and any other organiza-
tions which are willing to do so, were to join hands.... He thought that the
American Jewish Committee, being the representative Jewish body in
America, ought to lead this movement for the amelioration of the condition
of the Jews throughout the world, and not the Zionists.... [He] declared
that the Committee should guard and maintain its identity and leadership,
because it represents all Jews—Zionists as well as non-Zionists.”^62
The committee won the first battle with the Zionists when at subse-
quent community-wide meetings it established the American Jewish Relief
Committee (AJRC) under its domination. Overall unity was undercut,
however, by ongoing Zionist–non-Zionist divisiveness and by competing
relief groups, notably the Central Relief Committee (Orthodox) and the
People’s Relief Committee (labor). By the end of the war the Joint Distri-
bution Committee (JDC), a loose union of the different groups under the
chairmanship of Felix Warburg, had collected some $15 million. But along
the lines set a decade earlier, when relief for the victims of Russian po-
groms forced the stewards to raise funds from the rank and file, the very es-
tablishment of the JDC proved that exclusive elitist control had slipped an-
other notch.^63
In a front-page story the New York Times described a dramatic mass
meeting for Jewish relief at Carnegie Hall in December 1915. Judah
Magnes, the major speaker and a man dubbed “Billy Saturday,” had raised
the crowd to a feverish pitch, and gifts literally poured in—checks, pledges,
cash, and jewelry. “The very first person to make a gift... strode down a
long aisle to the stage, turned his trouser’s pocket inside out and deposited
several bills and some silver at the speaker’s feet. He turned away, but in
doing so put a hand into another pocket, and, finding money in it, turned
The World at War 211