The Money Kings
By Daniel Schulman
Knopf, 592 pages, $35
"For American Jews, the period from the 1880s up to World War I was heady but full of foreboding. While German-Jews amassed fortunes on Wall Street, Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe poured into Ellis Island fleeing lethal pogroms. German-Jews organized philanthropy for their brethren, many of whom were squeezed into tenements; they also pleaded with the government to intervene with the Russian czar on their coreligionists' behalf. But even wealthy Jews were fearful of jeopardizing their fragile standing in gentile America. As surging immigration led to calls for restrictions, Jews were caught in a bind, desperate to help their fellows but fearful of arousing homegrown antisemitism.
This is the story told by Daniel Schulman in "The Money Kings," an illuminating group portrait of the German-Jewish immigrants who (as the subtitle has it) "transformed Wall Street and shaped modern America." With U.S. campuses today being shaken by anti-Israel demonstrations and American Jews fearing a renewed antisemitism, "The Money Kings" sounds a disquieting and timely note.
Mr. Schulman's tale begins with pushcart peddlers in the 1830s who rose within a generation to become titans of finance. The wave of German-Jewish emigres coincided with a railroad boom. Capital was needed as never before, and Jewish bankers supplied it, gaining a foothold in the previously gentile bankers club. "The opportunity here is enormous," 27-year-old Jacob Schiff wrote to his mother in Germany in the 1870s, when he made partner at the banking firm Kuhn Loeb.
Yet even as Jews ascended in business, they remained outcasts socially. Mr. Schulman, a writer at Mother Jones, recounts a painful scene in which Joseph Seligman, dubbed "the most prominent Hebrew in this City," was refused a hotel room in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., a playground for the rich. "No Israelites," the hotel's manager informed him. When his rejection led to public criticism, the hotel boss doubled down, telling the New York Times: "Should the Seligman Jew be excluded from first class hotels? I say emphatically yes."
Mr. Schulman's narrative -- which darts among multiple generations of Seligmans, Lehmans, Loebs, Goldmans, Sachses and more -- is not as fluid as, for example, Ron Chernow's single-family saga, "The Warburgs" (1993). Fortunately, his most interesting character, Jacob Schiff, all but takes over the story.
Schiff was the most important Jewish financier of the pre-World War I age and the community's unofficial statesman. He was more devout than many German-Jews, who were in the vanguard of the new "Reform" Judaism. But like other German-Jews, he was strongly assimilationist. At first he opposed the nascent Zionist movement for fear that a separate political entity would make Jews seem less than full American citizens.
Impulsive and tyrannical, Schiff married the boss's daughter, Therese Loeb, and implanted himself as heir to Kuhn Loeb, which came to rival J.P. Morgan & Co., the establishment banking king. Mr. Schulman runs through Schiff's railroad deals, including his jousts with Morgan; these tales are familiar Wall Street set pieces. His narrative comes to life when he takes up Schiff's remarkable role in civic affairs.
Philip Roth, in "The Plot Against America" (2004), imagined an antisemitic scheme to resettle Jews from the Eastern Seaboard to the Midwest and thus dilute Jewish culture. Schiff actually undertook such a mission, attempting both to resettle metropolitan Jews on farms and direct new immigrants to far-flung cities, in particular Galveston, Texas. Although the plans sputtered, Schiff's idea that assimilation was the best prescription for a polyglot society was miles ahead of the current obsession with ethnic distinctions.
The breadth of Schiff's philanthropy -- hospitals, aid societies, cultural institutions -- was staggering. Mr. Schulman likens him to a Moses figure and notes that hardly any Jewish philanthropic or educational effort was launched without Schiff weighing in. He financed the Henry Street Settlement in New York, a touchstone of Progressive reform, and lavished contributions on the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University despite the policy of each barring Jews from its board. Schiff was intimately involved in his bequests, personally vetting applicants to Montefiore Hospital. He embodied the credo, Mr. Schulman says, that charity was "not just to give but to lead."
For Schiff, a more virulent antisemitism in Russia sparked "a new phase of political engagement," Mr. Schulman writes. With the start of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, Schiff, acting on the theory that his enemy's enemy was his friend, underwrote critical loans to Japan. The pogroms only worsened (800 Jews were killed in Odessa in 1905). Schiff lobbied Theodore Roosevelt to pressure the czar for better treatment of Jews. Though initially sympathetic, the president eventually bristled: "Does he want me to go to war with Russia?"
Jewish bankers, like other bankers in the Progressive Era, leaned Republican. When Woodrow Wilson, barnstorming for the White House in 1911, embraced the cause of Russian Jews, he helped to set in motion a tectonic shift of Jews toward the Democratic Party, an affiliation that President Joe Biden is laboring to preserve.
Nothing would test the loyalties of newcomers like World War I. Many German Americans retained strong ties to the homeland, including Paul Warburg, who became a governor of the newly established U.S. Federal Reserve as the war erupted. Schiff refused to subscribe to Allied war loans due to Russia's inclusion, with Britain and France, in the Triple Entente. (This was before 1917, when America entered the war.)
Postwar, the Russian Revolution and global economic turmoil spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists who blamed Jews such as Warburg and Schiff for everything from Lenin to fictitious central-banker plots. The plight of Schiff and his peers will surely echo with American Jews today, suddenly feeling their standing fragile again.
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Mr. Lowenstein is the author of "Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War."" [1]
1. After Success, An Uneasy Feeling. Lowenstein, Roger. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 14 Dec 2023: A.17.
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