The Jews in America Trilogy (4 page)

Today in New York, when members of the crowd get together, long hours can be spent arguing about which of the great German Jewish families is the greatest, or grandest, or has accomplished the most, or contributed the most. Which is the grandest of the families Cleveland Amory has labeled “The Jewish Grand Dukes”? Several think the Schiffs and the Warburgs, on the basis of their philanthropies alone, should receive the palm. Others champion the Strauses, who, though their money was made “in trade” (some Strauses branched out into banking), have not been idle as philanthropists either, and have also contributed notable figures to the worlds of American diplomacy, publishing, and public service. Others argue that, if one is going to talk about public service and government, one must give first place to the Lehmans, who have contributed a New York Governor and U.S. Senator (Herbert), a prominent jurist (Irving), a major American art collector (Robert), and a promising young politican in the fourth generation (Orin).

But there are always the Seligmans. With their “social distinction,” they set the tone of German Jewish society in New York for many years. They occupy an anchoring position in the crowd. Without them it is possible that there might have been no crowd at all.

*
Whose own marriage is a mixed one.

PART II

OUT OF THE WILDERNESS 1837–1865

2

“MOUNT SELIGMAN”

In the late summer of 1964 a small item in the obituary page of the
New York Times
carried the news that “James Seligman, Stockbroker” had died at the age of seventy-four in his Park Avenue apartment, following a heart attack. A few perfunctory details followed. Mr. Seligman had been born in New York City, had graduated from Princeton, maintained an office downtown in Broad Street, and was survived by his wife and an elderly sister. No mention was made of the once great eminence of his family in financial circles, nor of the Seligmans' still considerable prestige. No note was taken that Mr. Seligman's grandfather, the first James Seligman, had been one of eight remarkable brothers who had composed J. & W. Seligman & Company, once an international banking house of vast importance and power. Nor was it noted that Mr. Seligman's great-uncle, Joseph Seligman, the firm's founder, had been a personification of the American success story. In slightly more than twenty years' time, he had risen from an immigrant foot peddler to a financial adviser to the President of the United States.

The news item, however, contained one note that may have struck readers who knew the Seligman story as ironic. The Seligmans had
once been known as the leading Jewish family in America. They had been called “the American Rothschilds.” The deceased's grandfather for many years had been president of the board of trustees of New York's Temple Emanu-El. (The office was supposed to be an annual one, but every year the first James Seligman got to his feet and said, “Nominations for vice president are now in order.”) Yet the obituary advised that funeral services would be held at Christ Church, Methodist.

The Seligmans may not have started everything, exactly, but they certainly started something. They also started early—proverbially an auspicious time. Few great American fortunes, furthermore—and few banking houses—have started from such unpromising beginnings. The base of Mount Seligman was humble indeed.

Baiersdorf is so small that it does not appear on most maps of Germany. It lies on the banks of the Regnitz River some twenty kilometers north of Nürnberg, near the edge of the Bohemian Forest. Old David Seligman was the village weaver. He was not technically “old,” but at twenty-nine he seemed so. A small, stooped, dour man, he was given to complaining about his lot.

There had been Seligmans in Baiersdorf for over a century. Theirs had been a family name long before Napoleon had decreed that Germany's Jews no longer needed to be known as “sons” of their fathers' names—Moses ben Israel, and so on. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tombstones in Baiersdorf's Jewish cemetery recorded the upright virtues of many of David's ancestors, all named Seligman (“Blessed man” in German). To later generations in New York, this would become a fact of some importance. Families such as the Seligmans did not just “come” from Bavaria. They had been established there for many, many years.

None of the Baiersdorf Seligmans had been wealthy, but David seemed the poorest, most discouraged of the lot. He enjoyed poor health, made frequent trips to the cemetery, and from the words on headstones of departed Seligmans drew a kind of solitary comfort. He particularly admired one inscription from 1775:

HERE LIES BURIED

ABRAHAM SELIGMAN

IN RIPE OLD AGE, AN UPRIGHT MAN

HE WALKED THE WAY OF THE DOERS OF GOOD

JUST AND UPRIGHT HE ATTACHED HIS SOUL TO

RIGHTEOUSNESS

AND BUSIED HIMSELF WITH THE TEACHINGS OF

GOD AND WITH WORKS OF CHARITY

NIGHT AND DAY, FOREMOST AMONG MEN WHO

ARE BENEFACTORS

Such words did not apply to David. He was lonely and withdrawn. His boyhood friends were married and raising families, but David seemed resigned to bachelorhood. His little house in Baiersdorf's
Judengasse
, or “Jew Street,” had begun to sag and leaned disconsolately against the next building. Business was terrible. Nevertheless, one morning in 1818, David returned from the neighboring village of Sulzbach with a plump, young girl named Fanny Steinhardt as his wife.

It was whispered on the
Judengasse
that David Seligman was incapable of fathering children. Fanny's condition during the next few months was watched with more than usual interest. One year after the marriage, Fanny bore David a son, Joseph. Over the next twenty years Fanny presented David with seven more sons and three daughters: William, James, Jesse, Henry, Leopold, Abraham, Isaac, Babette, Rosalie, and Sarah.

Child-bearing took its toll. Two years after the birth of her last child, at the age of forty-two, Fanny died. She had done her duty to the world. She had created the foundation of an international banking house.

But Fanny had given David more than eleven children. As her dowry, she had brought from Sulzbach a stock of dry goods—laces, ribbons, two feather beds, two dozen sheets, twenty pillowcases, and ten bolts of homespun cloth. These, she had cannily suspected, might appeal to the women of Baiersdorf. She had set up shop on the ground floor of David's house, and soon David, the weaver, had been able to call himself by the grander title of “woolen merchant,” and had started a small side line selling sealing wax.

Joseph, her first-born, was Fanny's favorite child. As soon as he could see over the counter, he became his mother's assistant in her little shop.
In the 1820's there was no German national monetary system. Coinage varied from region to region, and eight-year-old Joseph, at the cash drawer, was quick to notice this. As an accommodation to travelers passing through Baiersdorf, Joseph became a moneychanger—accepting out-of-town coins in exchange for local currency, and selling out-of-town money to men planning trips outside Bavaria. He made a small profit on each transaction. At the age of twelve he operated a miniature American Express Company. Foreign currency, including an occasional American dollar, passed through his hands. He was learning economics, arithmetic, and a bit of geography, his mother pointed out and patted him on the head approvingly.

Fanny was ambitious for all her children, but she focused her dreams on Joseph. At night mother and son would sit opposite each other at the wooden table in the sputtering light of a kitchen candle while she, bent over her mending, talked and the boy listened. Joseph remembered his mother's small, plump hands, and a gesture she had—placing her hand flat out on the table when she made a point. She told him of places better than Baiersdorf, and David reproved her for filling the boy's head with “grandiose ideas.” He wanted Joseph for the woolen business.

But a Bavarian woolen business faced, in 1833, a gloomy future. Baiersdorf was a small town, and growing smaller. The Industrial Revolution was under way. Peasants, David's customers, were being forced from the land into industrial cities. Jobs and money in Baiersdorf were growing scarcer. The poor were faced with two choices, both involving further hardship: to move or struggle on where they were.

If the young German poor found themselves with little to look forward to, the outlook for young Jews was even more dismal. Jews were restricted on three sides—politically, economically, and socially. Forced to be peddlers, small shopkeepers, moneylenders—barred by law from dealing with goods that could not be carried with them—they were sequestered in the cramped
Judengassen
and trapped in a tightening strait jacket of regulations based on their religion. In the quarters where German laws forced them to live, they were permitted to own no property beyond the squares of land where their houses stood, and their right to even that much land was precarious. In Bavaria, where attitudes toward Jews were particularly reactionary, the number of Jewish marriages was limited by law in an attempt to keep the number of Jewish families constant. They were surrounded by a heavy network of special taxes, were obliged to pay the humiliating “Jew toll” whenever they traveled beyond the borders of the ghetto, were forced to pay a special fee for the privilege of not serving in the army—though
it was an army that would not have accepted them had they tried to volunteer, because they were Jewish. Periodically, Jews were threatened with expulsion from their homes—and often were expelled—unless they paid an added tax for the privilege of remaining.

Three distinct currents of Jewish migration had begun in Europe. There was a migration from German villages in the south and east to northern cities, where Jews often found conditions somewhat worse than those they had faced before. (In 1816 the seven largest cities in Germany held only 7 percent of the Jewish population. A hundred years later over 50 percent of Germany's Jews lived in these seven cities.) There was a general east-to-west movement—out of Germany into England, Holland, and France. At the same time, there was a migratory wave
into
Germany from the east—from Czarist Russia and Poland. Some of these foreign Jews merely passed through Germany on their way to other lands, others stopped for a while, to rest. These latter had a further disruptive effect on the already shaky structure of Jewish communities. Some of these families paused long enough to pick up the German language and to take German names. (In future generations, in New York, it would become a matter of some importance whether such and such a Jewish family, with a German-sounding name, had been a true
native
German family, like the Seligmans, or a stranger from the east, passing through.) Swelled by immigrants from the east, the Jewish population in Western Europe more than tripled during the nineteenth century.

The final migratory move was also westward—across the Atlantic to the land of freedom and enlightenment, the land, moreover, of land and money. In 1819, the year Joseph Seligman was born, the American paddle-wheeler
Savannah
had been the first steam-driven vessel to cross the ocean. It made America seem wonderfully convenient. America fever swept through German villages, particularly in hard-pressed Bavaria. Already, from Baiersdorf, several bands of young men had taken off and were writing home of the wonders of the New World. Fanny Seligman wanted to get her children out of Germany, and she wanted Joseph to go armed with an education. She decided he would do something no Seligman had ever done. He would go to the university at Erlangen. He was just fourteen.

David Seligman protested that they could not afford it. But Fanny, in the best tradition of Jewish motherhood, is said to have gone to a dresser drawer, from which, carefully hidden behind a stack of linens, she withdrew a little knotted sack of gold and silver coins, her life's savings.

Joseph had pale blue, watery, heavy-lidded “Seligman eyes,” which gave him an absent-minded, daydreamy look that was deceptive. His face was often set in a sleepy half-smile which gave strangers an impression that he was innocent, easygoing, even simple-minded. With a countrified accent and a changing voice, he loped around the University of Erlangen with his bag of books, a hayseed. Actually, Joseph was an extremely taut and sober-sided young man. He entered Erlangen with one determination—to get ahead. He avoided the social side of university life, and refused to be tempted by Erlangen's famous beer. He possessed another quality that would stand him in good stead in the future. He had a thick skin. The plumpish, solemn, standoffish boy was often taunted by his schoolmates; at times they baited him fiercely. If he was hurt by this, he hid it beneath a shell of indifference.

He was a brilliant student. He studied literature and the classics and, after two years, delivered his farewell oration to the university in Greek. He had also learned some English and some French. Along with the German, Yiddish, and Hebrew that he already knew, he now had six languages. None of these talents was designed to help him sell woolens or sealing wax. Joseph came home from the university with one thought in mind—to go to America.

Among Jewish families the feeling still ran strong that emigration was for the desperately poor. A departing boy was an advertisement to the whole community that a father could no longer afford to feed his son. David Seligman would have to wear his son's defection to America like a badge of shame, but there was an aspect of emigration that was even more alarming. From the land of freedom and enlightenment came rumors that young Jews in America were losing their religion.

It took Fanny a year to persuade David to let the boy go. Fanny made another trip to her little sack of coins—and got a secret loan from her Sulzbach relatives—for Joseph's passage money. David's final words to his son were a tearful entreaty to observe the Sabbath and the dietary laws. Fanny's final gesture was to sew one hundred American dollars into the seat of Joseph's pants.