tions that flew flags at half staff, merchants and pushcart peddlers who
closed their shops or packed up their wares, those who flocked to syn-
agogues to say Kaddish(the prayer for the dead), Orthodox women with
bright brown wigs who walked to Fifth Avenue the day before the funeral
to maintain a silent vigil in front of his house, those who displayed placards
reading in English and Hebrew: “The East Side Mourns the Loss of Jacob
Henry Schiff,” and those who simply wept. Like the rabbis who dedicated
their Sukkoth sermons to Schiff, they all paid tribute to the man who was
recognized as the “greatest Jewish leader of the age.”
If confirmation was ever needed of the strong rapport between Schiff
and the eastern European masses, it was more than amply supplied at his
death. He himself would have been touched by the genuine outpouring of
respect and affection that his forty years of communal service had earned.
“The world will never be the same again,” Schiff had gloomily observed at
the onset of the war. Although his focus then was on the international
scene, his words well suited the postwar condition of American Jews. Not
only did his death mark the end of the “Schiff era” (1880–1920), a phrase
coined by his successor at Montefiore,^23 but never again could a Schiff era,
in the generic sense, be replicated. To be sure, some echoes of Schiff’s lead-
ership resonated in the activities of Louis Marshall and Felix Warburg, but
neither wielded the same influence on both American and European Jew-
ish issues. Marshall’s immersion in Jewish affairs approximated Schiff’s,
and the quip that in the 1920s Jews lived under “Marshall law” was emi-
nently appropriate; but the attorney lacked the power of wealth and the
network attendant upon international banking. Warburg had the wealth
but not the all-encompassing understanding of or sympathy with Judaism
or Jews. Neither one displayed the combination of personality traits that
underlay Schiff’s leadership—aristocratic but businesslike, forceful but
sympathetic, aggressive but kindhearted, arrogant but hurt by harsh criti-
cism, boldly innovative but respectful of expert advice. Nor did either man
share Schiff’s almost religious belief that his leadership was ordained by a
higher power.
The totality of Schiff’s activities—a seamless web of Jewish defense, phi-
lanthropy, and diplomatic lobbying—brought the age of individualism in
American Jewish communal affairs to a dramatic climax. His pioneering ef-
forts on behalf of a minority group, newly exposed to freedom and moder-
nity and buffeted by the forces of assimilation, aimed at ensuring Jewish se-
curity and survival in a democratic nation. Schiff had few precedents on
which to draw, for the American experience differed greatly from that in
western Europe. Yet the essence of his overall plan—defense, integration,
and unity—and the tactics he used were not unheard of in Jewish history.
The End of an Era 247