One medieval historian’s description of the power and communal vision of
Jewish notables in the golden age of Spanish Jewry fits, with but minor em-
endations, Schiff’s views on leadership. The description reads:
Much of their [the notables’] power was owing ... to the ability of the Jewish
leadership to mobilize the Jewish community in support of the causes which
their Gentile masters espoused. This meant that they could “deliver” the
Jewish community, which in turn depended on their ability to keep the Jew-
ish community loyal to themselves. The leadership depended on a Jewish
community that could look to them with admiration and gratitude for ensur-
ing their community a security and sense of distinction... a sense of great-
ness and a sense of collective vision. By endowing institutions and creating
agencies through which people of ability could find the means to give expres-
sion to their talents, they created a communal fabric where people of the
most diverse pursuits felt related one to the other, to the community at large,
and to the Jewish people as a whole.^24The way in which Schiff usually pursued the “collective vision” did not,
however, fit post–World War I realities. As in the prewar economic scene,
where bankers had flourished in a largely laissez-faire society, so too in
Jewish matters, whether charities or problems of discrimination, initiative
and control rested primarily with wealthy individual volunteers who were
accountable only to themselves. And just as the early captains of industry
steadily lost ground to government control during the Progressive era and
the war, so too were the “captains” of national communal institutions in-
creasingly eclipsed by faceless, centralized organizations and federations.
The managerial revolution that accompanied economic concentration was
experienced in communal affairs, too. In both areas the power to shape
policy was shifting from the owners of corporations or, in the case of the
community, from individual and charismatic stewards to executive manag-
ers and paid professionals. More and more, the Jewish agencies they ser-
viced abandoned the Schiff-era practice of organization from the top
down. The American Jewish Congress, for example, which became a per-
manent organization in 1922, boasted a democratic base and a commit-
ment to antielitism. Four years later, the president of the Philadelphia Fed-
eration stated unequivocally that “there must be... a democratization of
the Federation as to make it wholly representative of the people who sup-
ported it.” Simultaneously, the banker, who in Schiff’s day stood at the top
of the economic ladder, lost much of his prestige, first in the Pujo investi-
gation of the money trust in 1912–13 and later in the wake of the market
crash in 1929.^25
The new style of leadership kept pace with the radically changed face of
American Jewry. In 1920 the Jewish population was 3.6 million or more
248 Jacob H. Schiff