contributed to a wide variety of schools—from Talmud Torahs for young-
sters to seminaries and institutes for the training of rabbis and teachers.
The Jewish Chautauqua Society, which popularized the knowledge of Ju-
daism through home reading courses and summer assemblies, also received
his blessing. He appreciated its work, especially for Jews who lived in small
communities without the benefits of synagogues and schools. Schiff be-
lieved that the dissemination of a knowledge of Judaism, whether to large
or small audiences, was essential for inculcating high moral standards and
for assuring the survival of Judaism in America. Nor did Judaism conflict
with Americanism: “The Jew of the future will be as good a Jew as he is an
American and as good an American as he is a Jew.”^114
Schiff was hardly a learned Jew, but his respect for Jewish learning, in-
stilled by his Frankfurt upbringing, underlay his efforts to root the schol-
arly tradition in American soil. Alert to suggestions for worthwhile publi-
cations, he assisted individual scholars who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish as
well as English. He also supported the Jewish Publication Society (JPS)
and the publication and distribution of the monumental, multivolume Jew-
ish Encyclopedia,ventures that would keep alive both Jewish writings and the
story of the Jews in history. His subventions helped make possible two
major undertakings of the JPS, a new English translation by Jews of the
Bible and the Library of Jewish Classics, a series of postbiblical literary
works. The classics in English, Schiff said, “would open up to the Jew his
great inheritance, of which unfortunately present Jewry knows so little.”
Calling that project a “great gift” of the Jews to the English-speaking world
and second only to the Bible, he optimistically foresaw a revival of Jewish
literature in America that would eclipse the golden age of Spanish Jewry.^115
A Reform Jew by affiliation, the banker cared little for denominational
labels or whether the scholarly and educational projects he endorsed were
under Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox auspices. When he learned in
1886 of plans to establish a Conservative rabbinical seminary, he asked if he
could participate. He wished to contribute to the library and thereby aid in
the development of Jewish scholarship. Nor did he object when the Ortho-
dox Uptown Talmud Torah accepted his donation on condition that it
would in no way alter the school’s religious policy. In that case, Schiff stip-
ulated that in exchange for his taking over the mortgage the school would
modernize and Americanize (i.e., include physical development, hygiene,
and pedagogy in its curriculum). On a visit to the school he was surprised
to see that Jewish history, for example, was not taught. What he observed
and objected to—how young boys of ten to fourteen argued abstruse tal-
mudic passages—convinced him that the youth would eventually revolt
against Judaism. Impatient with resistance to educational change, he also
made his support of the Orthodox Rabbi Isaac Elhanan rabbinical seminary
conditional on the modernization of its methods and program of studies.^116
80 Jacob H. Schiff