Schiff’s change of heart has been analyzed by historians. Evyatar Friesel
notes several important reasons for it: the growing respectability of Zion-
ism after the Schiff–Schechter dispute, the emphasis on cultural Zionism
by the FAZ during the tenure of Harry Friedenwald, the common social
background of the Schiff and Brandeis groups, and concern, triggered by
the emancipation of Russian Jewry, over the disintegration of Judaism
under the forces of assimilation. Yonathan Shapiro emphasizes yet another
factor, the desire of both the Brandeis circle and the non-Zionists to lead
their fellow Jews away from the “misguided” or extreme nationalistic ideas
of the eastern European immigrants. Schiff himself explained publicly that
his conversion to Zionism stemmed from his worry about the evaporation
of Jewish culture after the March 1917 revolution in Russia. Calling Russia
the “reservoir of Jewish culture,” he tacitly admitted, sooner than his con-
temporaries did, that Jewish culture even in the United States had de-
pended largely on eastern European Jewish creativity^101
The validity of those explanations notwithstanding, a deeper study of
Schiff points to other influences as well. First of all, kindlier sentiments on
his part toward Zionism had surfaced well before the Russian Revolution.
In 1912 he described himself as sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish cultural
center in Palestine. Two years later he discussed the subject in an address
to the Menorah Society of City College. Although he again raised the issue
of the incompatibility of Jewish nationalism with Americanism, he evalu-
ated Zionism more positively than ever before. After a sympathetic ac-
count of Herzl’s response to anti-Semitism, he explained the spread of the
movement and his own position:
We know how [Zionism] has spread like wildfire—how it took hold of the
Jews of every shade of belief and unbelief, how it brought under its banner
old and young, and we may concede, how it awoke a new Jewish conscious-
ness and self-respect. I am not a Zionist, if the term is used to designate the
Jew as a national separatist ... but I do not wish for a moment to belittle the
unifying force Zionism has proven to possess. ... It has proven to the Gentile
world that the Jew has not lost his self-respect, [and] ... it has more than pos-
sibly anything else... shown the [Jew] the value of his own heritage. It has
quickened the efforts to rehabilitate Palestine and even if it cannot... re-
establish there a Jewish State, it is at least effectively leading in the reclama-
tion of the land of our birth from the slough and degradation into which it
... has fallen. ... In this sense we can, wherever our own homes may be, be-
come supporters of Zionism.A Zionist of whatever variety would hardly have quarreled with those
sentiments.^102
The World at War 225