avoid compromise for the sake of rigid principle. Less concerned with the
aggrandizement of personal power, he spent the latter years of his life in ef-
forts to adjust himself and his fellow Jews to changed world realities. In
some instances prior roles were reversed; the directives came from the
community, and Schiff followed suit.
The Zionist effort for an American Jewish Congress was the most bla-
tant test of elitist leadership. Prior struggles with the Jewish nationalists
looked insignificant when measured against the popular call for a represen-
tative body under Zionist leadership to present the case for European Jew-
ish rights at the postwar peace conference. The growing assertiveness of
the ethnic-minded immigrants had received an unexpected boost when
Louis D. Brandeis assumed the chairmanship of the Provisional Executive
Committee for General Zionist Affairs (1914). The “people’s attorney”
and adviser to President Wilson and a man who moved comfortably in the
upper echelons of WASP society, Brandeis put a seal of respectability and
attractiveness on the American Zionist movement. Infused with determi-
nation, the Zionists pressed for a congress. The issue was not Zionism ver-
sus anti- or non-Zionism but rather the nature of communal governance.
Representatives of the far-flung Zionist network of lodges and local soci-
eties advocated a democratic structure, a goal impossible to achieve inde-
pendently as long as the stewards controlled the American Jewish purse. In
the inevitable clash that ensued, Schiff and his circle were forced to yield.
They preferred a compromise on power to total abdication.
Jewish Wartime ReliefThe clash over leadership was presaged in the more immediate problem of
wartime relief for Jews in Palestine and the European war zones. Seventy-
eight thousand Jews then lived in Palestine under the Turks, and three and
one-half million resided in divided Poland, the scene of the bloodiest fight-
ing. In Palestine the economy of the yishuv, dependent largely on the ex-
port of its crops and on donations from abroad, was stopped by the Anglo-
French blockade of the eastern Mediterranean. A Palestine Oranges
Committee informed Schiff that Jaffa oranges merely rotted while waiting
for shipment. In central and eastern Europe, directly in the path of the
contending belligerent armies, Jews suffered atrocities at the hands of both
sides. Horrified by reports, Schiff gloomily concluded that in such condi-
tions the dead were better off than the living. The banker protested to Max
Warburg and to the Austrian ambassador to the United States. Protests
proved futile, however, and since the war made emigration an unrealistic
option, the trapped victims depended solely on relief from abroad.^61
At an emergency meeting immediately after the eruption of hostilities,
210 Jacob H. Schiff