clashed with Philipson’s Reform views on the blessing of dispersion, but it
flew in the face of the typical Jewish response to political emancipation
ever since the French Revolution.^111
Assuming that he had joined their ranks, the Zionists pounced on
Schiff’s April address and congratulated him “upon having seen the light at
last.” But Schiff assured Philipson and other Reform critics that the re-
sponse was premature. He wrote that he would not become a Zionist so
long as nationalism, or the movement for a state, was synonomous with
Zionism. Calling himself a non-Zionist, Schiff continued to distinguish
between Zionists and nationalists. The latter were the dangerous agitators
who rejected the Jewish religion and whose call for a Jewish state or Jewish
national rights compromised Jewish loyalty to the lands in which they
lived. The former were the cultural Zionists who, very much like Solomon
Schechter, wanted to see Palestine as the center of Judaism. To be sure,
Schiff’s statement and his involvement in Palestinian affairs, predicated on
a definition of Jews as an ethnic rather than solely religious group, moved
him closer to cultural Zionism than ever before. But his long-standing crit-
icism of religion-less Zionism endured. In the end it proved to be the
stumbling block that prevented his formal affiliation with the ZOA.^112
Elisha Friedman, a young Zionist and economist stationed in Washing-
ton during the war, followed up Schiff’s April speech. His initial letter to
the banker began a seven-month period during which the latter’s affiliation
with the Zionist movement was debated by leaders of the ZOA. At first, in
a seemingly endless stream of letters and meetings, Friedman, the interme-
diary between the banker and the Brandeis group, attempted to win Schiff
over. He played down statehood and national rights and, encouraged by
Schiff’s printed letter to Philipson, emphasized the similarities between the
banker’s position and Zionism. Arguing that Jewish homelessness caused
religious decay, he defined Jewish nationalism as a spiritual force. Non-
Zionism, he added, was an empty concept that connoted only staying put.
For his part, Schiff insisted that his quarrel had never been with Zionism
but with Jewish nationalism, and he stuck by points he had raised previ-
ously. A state was an “absurdity,” and citing resistance to conscription on
the part of the Zionist eastern Europeans, he still maintained that Jewish
nationalism clashed with patriotism. His criticism of the antireligious char-
acter of the movement persisted too. In an address at the end of 1917 he
called for a “Jewish revival,” saying that just as disregard of the true faith
had led to the destruction of the biblical commonwealth, so too would a
new Jewish nation fail unless Jews first returned to their God.^113
At the same time, Schiff began speaking, albeit vaguely, of the reestab-
lishment of an “autonomous commonwealth,”^114 a term that linked him
still closer to Zionism. Thus, his stand was riddled with contradictions and
conditions—a commonwealth but no state, political autonomy but only for
230 Jacob H. Schiff