press for Jewish rights in postwar Europe, but sharp differences flared over
who would formulate and present those demands to the peacemakers. The
well-known story, whose genesis lay in the movement for a congress in
1905–6, renewed the debate on matters that had always separated Zionists
from anti- or non-Zionists: Jewish peoplehood and Jewish loyalties. Louis
Marshall added still another point. He told Lord Reading that the congress
movement was supported, except for Schiff, by Jews who were sympathetic
to Germany.^73
At bottom, however, the issue was a struggle for power between the ste-
wards and the Zionist-led congress partisans. The former, represented by
the AJC, favored control by the committee, which would conduct private
and discreet diplomatic negotiations; they shuddered at the thought of
“agitators” and “hotheads” engaged in open diplomacy that might well
boomerang at the same time that it conjured up the image of the separatist
and nationalist (and hence patently un-American) Jew. Schiff and his circle
insisted on a democratic America, but they refused to condone democratic
governance within the Jewish community. Their opponents, on the other
hand, stood for a democratically elected body of representatives to draw up
and submit the Jewish demands at the peace conference. They boldly chal-
lenged the rule of the “autocrats,” specifically the AJC, which, as on the re-
lief question, had assumed that it would direct Jewish postwar planning.
The congress partisans were not out to eliminate the stewards from com-
munal affairs; indeed, they would in all likelihood choose the stewards to
represent them. Rather, they sought to share power within a democratic
framework. A downtown circular, for example, supported the AJC—a re-
formed committee, to be sure, and one that heeded the voice of the people
but the AJC nonetheless.^74
Privately and publicly, the two sides traded harsh insults, and attempts
to achieve Jewish unity in the fight that raged from 1914 to 1917 repeat-
edly broke down. Judah Magnes, for one, concluded unhappily that the
Jews were a sick, individualistic people. As the clamor for a congress grew
louder, the committee was forced to plot a counterstrategy. It still had the
advantages of expertise and money, but its rivals were in a far better posi-
tion than in 1906. They commanded the numbers, the popular Yiddish
press, and the prestigious leadership of Louis Brandeis and his associates,
men like Stephen Wise, Felix Frankfurter, and Horace Kallen. Forced to
compromise, the AJC suggested a conference of national organizations. A
conference would be more broadly based than the AJC itself, but under
the committee’s direction it promised to avoid the populistic dangers of a
congress.
The committee’s scheme ultimately failed, in large measure because it
was unable to counter the ideological appeal of a congress. Not only was
the congress idea a confident assertion of Jewish peoplehood within the
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