by organizational affiliation, he capitalized on the personal loyalty he had
won from the community by his philanthropy and his war against Russia.
His vindication by the kehillah stemmed precisely from that loyalty. At the
same time, however, he was taught that popular support could not be taken
for granted. He may have acknowledged the rapid maturation of the eastern
European immigrants,^99 but he interpreted the call for democracy, at least
in part, as a personal insult. Preferring the role of benevolent despot who
could sway an obedient community to his way of thinking, he was wounded
by the popular revolt, especially since it was directed by the Zionists. Nev-
ertheless, his threat to retire from Jewish politics proved empty, and until
his death in 1920 he remained a dominant force in American Jewish affairs.
Questions of Zionism and Unity
A Shift toward ZionismThe war years witnessed major changes in the American Zionist move-
ment. Under the leadership of Louis Brandeis, membership increased al-
most twentyfold. An expanded budget and structural reform tightened the
administration of the FAZ, which in 1918 became the Zionist Organiza-
tion of America (ZOA). By the end of the war, the organized Zionists, still
basking in Brandeis’s fame and in the Balfour Declaration (England’s
promise in November 1917 to aid in the establishment of a Jewish national
home in Palestine), had emerged as a weighty force in communal affairs
and a more serious threat to the Jewish establishment.^100
Ironically, at the same time that Schiff was attacking the Zionists on the
issues of the Technikum, wartime relief, and an American Jewish Congress,
he was inching toward affiliation with the Zionist organization. The man
who had lashed out against Zionism in letters to Schechter (1907), who had
said that Palestine could hold no more Jews (1908), and who lost no oppor-
tunity to vilify the Jewish nationalists became receptive in 1917 to the idea
of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. To be sure, officially he remained an
antistatist, but the differences that separated him from Zionist ideology
were noticeably fewer. Turning away from the teachings of classical Re-
form, he openly supported the need of a Jewish cultural and religious cen-
ter in Palestine. Jews were a people as well as a religious group, and disper-
sion and exile could not guarantee that people’s survival. Why Schiff
adopted a new posture and how far he went in patching up differences with
the Zionists also reveal his ongoing preoccupations with American Jewish
unity and communal leadership. Had he affiliated with the Zionists, it
would have been the first time that he joined a major communal enterprise
in whose establishment or direction he had played no part.
224 Jacob H. Schiff