than to show that Jews and Jewish thought had influenced the development
of American culture and indeed of modern civilization? Imbued with a
faith in enlightened public opinion as the answer to irrational bigotry,
prominent Jews considered ways to disseminate “scientific” knowledge of
the significance of Judaism and Jewish history.
Two of Schiff’s friends took important steps in that direction. In 1885
Oscar Straus published the Origin of the Republican Form of Government in
the United States,a historical work that emphasized the Old Testament
roots of the American government. Three years later, Cyrus Adler, along
with several others, broached the subject of an American Jewish historical
society, an institution that would document the uninterrupted involve-
ment of Jews in the development of the United States. As Americans made
plans to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage,
ideas of legitimating American Jewish belonging assumed greater attrac-
tiveness.^103 Sympathetic to such ideas, Schiff became interested at that
very same time in securing a niche for Judaic studies in universities and li-
braries. The venture had a pioneer quality about it, and here too philan-
thropy provided the wherewithal for achieving his purpose. When he
underwrote the acquisition of Judaica by the Library of Congress, he
wanted a “dignified” collection that would honor both the library and
Jewish “literature and civilization.”^104
More unusual was the university project that enjoyed his greatest sup-
port, the Semitics Museum at Harvard.^105 Brothers of Therese Schiff at-
tended Harvard, and through one, James Loeb, the banker was intro-
duced in 1888 to Professor David Gordon Lyon of the university’s newly
enlarged Semitics department. Lyon fired the philanthropist’s imagina-
tion and secured his endorsement of a program in Semitics and a Semitics
museum. Schiff too looked forward to 1892, which was also the four-
hundredth anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and he
sought an appropriate way of vindicating Jewish honor. Before any money
changed hands, he was invited to serve on the visiting committee to the Se-
mitics department, a post that he held for twenty-five years. In short order
he gave $10,000 and the promise of more toward the acquisition of a Se-
mitics collection, as well as $25,000 for the construction of a museum. He
envisioned the museum as “an honor to our race,” something “to convince
Christendom in general that its adherents are indebted to the Jewish peo-
ple for more than at this time the Gentile world is ready to acknowledge.”
Ideally, the first step in reaching that end required involvement by non-
Jews, and Schiff made his $25,000 donation contingent upon the receipt of
a matching sum. In no way was the venture to be known as a “Jewish enter-
prise,” nor were Jews to predominate on the visiting committee. Only if
Protestants, New Englanders and Harvard backers specifically, lent their
support could the purpose be realized. Their acknowledgment that both
76 Jacob H. Schiff