money as making it.” The sums Schiff disbursed set standards for giving,
and the causes he supported won him popular commendation.
Generous with his time and his money, Schiff was quickly absorbed into
the governing councils of numerous communal agencies. In many in-
stances his voice became the decisive one. His influence spread to larger
matters of Jewish public policy; and before long, Schiff the New York phi-
lanthropist had become Schiff the defender of both American and Euro-
pean Jews. As early as 1901 a visitor from the Alliance Israélite Universelle
in Paris reported that the banker was at the center of all that transpired on
the Jewish scene.^40
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a time when organized
charity still depended on the private sector and was usually linked with spe-
cific religious groups, the network of Jewish philanthropic agencies in New
York rapidly expanded. Scores of synagogue-affiliated and secular Jewish
institutions for the needy—the poor, the orphan, the sick, the aged, and the
unemployed—took root, largely in response to the swelling tide of eastern
European immigration. Mandated by age-old religious teachings that had
withstood the inroads of assimilation, philanthropy was a norm of proper
Jewish behavior that promised the givers both worldly and spiritual re-
wards. For some it served as a surrogate for religion; for others, a path to
social status. How well the community cared for its own instilled group
pride. Non-Jews commented enthusiastically, especially since the same do-
nors contributed to non-Jewish relief drives as well. According to one esti-
mate, American Jews in the mid-1880s gave $2 million in charity annually,
of which one-third went to non-Jewish causes. Twenty-five years later the
overall expenditures of Jewish philanthropic agencies had risen to $10 mil-
lion. Thus, while philanthropy permitted Jews to act out their separate
ethnic identity, it simultaneously added luster to the Jewish image.^41
Until the 1880s the numbers and problems of the Jewish needy were
comparatively modest. “A few private gentlemen,” Schiff recalled, “were
able to deal with [them] with the help of only a few paid workers.” Al-
though the flow of immigrants in the last two decades of the century
stretched the resources of the community to a virtual breaking point, insti-
tutions both new and old remained private ventures that depended primar-
ily on the largesse of the wealthy. Donors had their pet charities, but for
the most part they all contributed to numerous agencies. The same men
who sat on the board of Mount Sinai Hospital were more than likely to run
the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, the United Hebrew Charities, and the
YMHA as well. A self-constituted interlocking directorate, they often in-
cluded members of the same family. They exacted time and effort from
themselves and each other, and they made philanthropy a requisite compo-
nent of communal leadership. Jews of means who failed to live up to that
behavior did not escape criticism. Why, the American Hebrewasked on the
56 Jacob H. Schiff