charge of Zionism’s incompatibility with Americanism, reminiscent of his
letters to Schechter in 1907, Schiff infuriated the Zionists. Rabbi Gustav
Gottheil of Temple Emanu-El charged that Schiff’s statement was “worse
than anything said by an anti-Semite of the purest dye”; Brandeis called
Schiff an “unworthy” son of American Jewry.^88 Schiff never acknowledged
that his attacks compounded the divisiveness that he so deplored. Nor was
he deterred by the likelihood that his remarks could well undermine his
own popularity within the community.
His denunciations of a congress made Schiff the chief target of the con-
gress supporters. In April 1916, the Zukunft, a left-wing Yiddish journal,
ran a character sketch of the banker by Yiddish writer Sholom Asch. Asch’s
scathing attack had been prompted by the congress issue, but the sketch in-
cluded more. Asch said that Schiff’s importance, predicated on American
standards, lay only in his wealth. A dictator rather than a leader, the banker
neither understood nor loved his fellow Jews. His philanthropy, which
aided non-Jewish causes at the expense of Jewish needs, ignored the real
interests of the recipients. Just because Schiff thought of himself as Moses,
Asch sneered, did not mean that he ranked alongside true Jewish leaders
like Sir Moses Montefiore and Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
Since the sketch was distributed by the thousands in leaflet form, Schiff
deliberately set out to mend his fences. His first public response came in an
address to the Jewish Publication Society in May, where again he attacked
the Zionist power-hungry “agitators” who were Jews “only for question-
able nationalistic machinations.” Alluding more directly to Asch, albeit not
by name, he also took issue with the eastern European immigrants for
clinging to Yiddish, “not a modern language, if a real language at all.” “En-
slaved” by the Yiddish press, the new arrivals were saddled with obstacles
to their Americanization. Schiff drew criticism from Yiddishists, and even
Cyrus Adler, who dismissed the importance of the Zukunft piece, pointed
out that Schiff had erred in attributing Asch’s views to the eastern Euro-
peans as a whole.^89
Shortly thereafter, Schiff invited Asch to a private meeting. Explaining
that Asch had undermined Jewish confidence in his, Schiff’s, leadership, he
succeeded in securing an admission that the writer had done him an injus-
tice. In a total about-face, Asch now praised Schiff’s leadership, charity, and
“good heart.” Mollified only in part, the banker answered that he would in-
deed be a poor leader if he didn’t publicly condemn the fatal mistake of a
congress. He promised to continue serving his people no matter the criti-
cisms and attacks and—as a parting shot at Asch, who had been in the
United States for less than two years “by those who have not yet reached an
understanding of what it means to be an American Jew.”^90
Asch’s article continued to rankle, and Schiff’s determination to counter-
attack exacerbated the differences between the stewards and the masses.
220 Jacob H. Schiff