He said that only as representatives of a religious group, not as a national
entity, would Jews command a hearing at the peace conference. Doubtless,
the banker was also personally offended. He had talked of the need of post-
war planning as soon as the war broke out, and although some, like a writer
for the Yiddish Wahrheit, agreed that he, Schiff, was the logical choice to
start the planning process, the congress upstarts were bent on repudiating
him.^78
The congress people also fully recognized that communal leadership
was at stake. Schiff, who theoretically favored aristocratic assimilation, or
the empowerment of acculturated new immigrants under the direction of
the stewards, angrily deplored the distrust of old leaders and the substitu-
tion of new, democratically chosen ones. Claiming that “leaders need to
develop and come forward by their own deservedness,” he warned that
democratic selection of leaders often brought forth demagogues. Proper
leadership was based on responsibility, and again he found a biblical prece-
dent that hinted at his identification with Moses. If the committee ignored
its responsibility to European Jews, its foes who danced around the
“golden calf” (the congress) could rightly proclaim that “this man Moses
[the Schiff-dominated AJC] is dead, these are your gods, O Israel.” The
banker admitted that the AJC was not sufficiently representative, but he
thought that a small conference of national organizations would resolve
the problem.^79
Congress supporters took an antithetical stand. In the words of Rabbi
Stephen Wise: “The time is come for a leadership by us to be chosen.... Are
we forever to suffer men to think and act for us, not because we have chosen
and named them, but because they have decreed that we are not fit to be
trusted with the power of shaping our own destiny?” Privately Wise added:
“Our ‘leaders’ I loathe—self-seeking insincere toads and vermin many of
them.” Despite the wide chasm that separated them, both sides drew on
American principles; the congress people called for democratic control,
while their opponents objected to “un-American” ethnic separation.^80
In the middle stood Judah Magnes, often the liaison between Zionists
and non-Zionists. He listed the faults of both sides in frank letters to
Schiff—uptown’s “ignorance and apathy,” downtown’s “politics and talk,
talk, talk”:
It must be said of [the Zionists] that they have zeal, and that Jewish affairs are
to them of primary importance. They have an organization, built up after
much sacrifice. They have a devoted following. What is of greatest impor-
tance, they look at the Jewish question as a whole and... as affecting the Jews
as a minority People. What do we find on the other side? A handful of serious,
large-minded, exceedingly busy men of affairs, for whom, to be sure, Judaism
is a primary concern. But as for their followers, almost complete indifferenceThe World at War 217