have admitted that any of the three clashed with the others. The war years,
however, particularly between 1914 and 1917, raised troubling questions.
When foreign affairs touched Americans more closely than ever before,
when hypernationalism engulfed the nation, and when Jews blatantly stood
out as a hyphenated American group, it became more difficult for Schiff to
reconcile all three loyalties in a comfortable fashion.
The banker’s activities during the period of American neutrality illus-
trated the problems of melding disparate attachments into an indivisible
pattern. Called upon to rethink priorities and readjust his behavior, he
wrestled for the first time in his life with problems of self-identification. At
times he spoke as the integrated American-German-Jew; at other times he
was one or another. Now an elder statesman whose power was acknowl-
edged by fellow Jews and by the American and foreign governments, his
behavior was carefully scrutinized and analyzed by Jews and non-Jews alike.
At the onset of hostilities, Schiff cut short his summer vacation and re-
turned to the city. The man who had confidently asserted during the Aga-
dir crisis of 1911 that it was “inconceivable” that Germany and England
would resort to war was taken by surprise. In the fall of 1914 the New York
Times ran a full-page interview with Schiff that probed his views on the
world conflict. More than questions and answers of a philanthropist or
prominent businessman, it testified to the banker’s renown within the
larger community. Schiff openly admitted that his sympathies lay with
Germany, who, he claimed, had not instigated the war. He also denied that
he was anti-England, but for obvious reasons (the Jewish problem) he was
anti-Russia. The heart of his message emphasized a speedy end to the war.
He said that an unqualified victory for either side would bring only unnec-
essary slaughter and utter devastation. America could not live comfortably
were either side to destroy the other, nor did the United States recognize
the hardships and dangers ahead if it were forced to join the fighting. He
suggested that properly mobilized American public opinion could bring
about a conference able to mediate the conflict.^3
The banker amplified his opinions a few weeks later in a lengthy pub-
lished correspondence with Charles Eliot; but although the latter was
strongly anti-German, the interchange was friendly. Far different were
comments from London, where Schiff’s interview with the Times was called
a “brief for Germany” and a German stratagem to capture American sym-
pathies from a man who was one of the “apostles of German Kultur.” So
cutting were the remarks that Israel Zangwill felt called upon to defend his
friend as a noble philanthropist and a patriotic American who “speaks not
as the mouthpiece of Berlin but with the voice of Jerusalem.” Zangwill suc-
ceeded only in fanning the flames of resentment further and in evoking
190 Jacob H. Schiff