The Jews in America Trilogy (56 page)

Jacob, too, had been right about Morti's tendencies toward extravagance; for all his father's efforts to bend the twig toward frugality, Morti had become a bit of a spender. After becoming a Kuhn, Loeb partner at the age of twenty-three, Morti became very social, joining what was becoming known in the postwar years as “the International Set.” Though colorblind, Morti had an insatiable love of paintings and
was the despair of dealers, who said they could never show Morti Schiff a second-rate piece of work and convince him it was a masterpiece. Morti had started a collection of art, books, bindings, and furniture that would eventually be declared worth nearly a million dollars. He had built a huge house on hundreds of acres of ground at Oyster Bay, Long Island, where Otto Kahn soon became a neighbor, and had rebuilt another old house in Paris. His days of bicycles, new or secondhand, were long gone by. In fact, to Jacob Schiff's distress, Sir Ernest was stimulating Morti's prodigality. “You know,” Sir Ernest once said to Frieda, “I rather encouraged Morti's spending money because I believe a man must learn how to spend gracefully, but not showily. Your father, you know, didn't always hold with my ideas.”

Now the children and the grandchildren were summoned to the great Fifth Avenue house to await what they were certain was the inevitable. Waiting, they whispered the story of the old gentleman's insistence on his Yom Kippur fast, two days before. The fasting of the man who, as a boy, had climbed down a drain pipe to avoid a Hebrew lesson, seemed to give the end of Jacob Schiff's life, which came quietly on September 25, a kind of pious logic, too. In silence, the family filed past, saying good-bye. The next morning the
New York Times
devoted its lead story and its entire second page to his career.

The funeral was an extraordinary affair, not for its pomp and grandeur, though there was plenty of that, and not for the weight of the testimonials that poured in from heads of state, government officials, public, and the press, though there was plenty of that, too. It was remarkable for the sheer power of the emotion that gripped the thousands of mourners through the ceremony. Jewish survivors of the pogroms of Russia felt they owed their lives directly to him. To millions who had never laid eyes on him, who knew him only as the founder of the American Jewish Committee and the guiding spirit behind the Joint Distribution Committee, his name stood for salvation. Outside Temple Emanu-El, on both sides of Fifth Avenue, people stood, many in beards and
shaitels
. Jews from the Lower East Side, whom Schiff had made it a point to visit on foot, had now made it a point to come, on foot, to bid him good-bye. The crowds stood in silence, reverentially; a few wept; many knelt in prayer. Rich and poor alike were gripped by a shared sense of loss, and when the bier made its slow progress down the temple steps, the whole corner of the city seemed to grow silent.

There was the usual speculation in the press about the size of his
estate. Estimates ranged from fifty to two hundred million. Actually, his estate amounted to some forty million dollars. It was clear that he had given away much more than that amount in his lifetime.

As the twenties progressed, it began to seem as though Jacob Schiff had been one of the last pious Jews in the German Jewish upper crust. It was almost as though, with Schiff gone, everyone could unbend a bit and, without fear of his displeasure, convert. The 1920's saw the conversions of a number of Seligmans, who became, variously, Methodists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Christian Scientists, and Roman Catholics. Otto Kahn, who had begun to say privately that “St. Paul, St. Francis, and Jesus were the three greatest figures of history,” was toying with the idea of becoming a Catholic and had begun to “play down” his Jewish background. (A story, possibly apocryphal, which for years circulated within the crowd, has it that Otto Kahn's two daughters, Margaret and Maude, were carefully shielded from the fact that they were Jewish; when a mischievous French governess broke the news to them, the two little girls threw their breakfast trays on the floor and cried in their room for hours.) Mixed marriages were suddenly fashionable, and when they occurred, it was usually the Jewish partner who converted—though at least one non-Jewish young lady, marrying a Seligman, became Jewish after being given a “rabbinical bath.”

Instead of Jacob Schiff's great pride in his faith, a certain ambivalent attitude began to reveal itself among upper-class Jews toward their religious heritage. At times, it was possible to believe that they were Jews in one breath and non-Jews in the next—that whether to be Jewish or not was rather like selecting the right fork for the right course at dinner. Even those who had converted felt it wrong, really, to deny that they were Jewish, leaving the impression that they regarded Jewishness as a racial as well as a religious matter. At the same time, they did not believe in “making a point” of being Jewish, regarding it as a “personal” thing, implying that Jewishness is purely a religious affair after all.

For the Jew, living in two communities was always something of a strain. When the edges between these communities began to blur, certain confusions of feelings and loyalties were inevitable, and never was this more apparent than when the third generation of the German Jewish crowd grew to maturity. Young Will Guggenheim was not the only man to harbor an illusion that he was not really Jewish. Adolph Lewisohn's son, Julius, cherished the same fantasy, as did Joseph Seligman's
grandson, Joseph, II.
*
In Germany the oldest Warburg boy—Felix's brother Aby—had, after boldly marrying a gentile girl, begun to disintegrate. Was it the pressures of trying to conform to both communities that made a man like Aby an alien in each? For religion, Aby Warburg began to substitute astrology. He became obsessive about his personal enthusiasms, which included the study of primitive cultures. He became a compulsive book collector and writer of articles on such divergent subjects as tapestries, postage stamps “as symbols of political power,” Indian snake dances, primitive religions and superstitions, paintings, and theatrical drawings. His library eventually grew to contain some sixty thousand volumes plus twenty thousand photographs, mostly bearing on the revival of Greek antiquity. He also assembled a remarkable collection of photographs dealing with the persistence of symbolism through the ages, which is strangely like Sigmund Freud's studies which were being carried on at about the same time.

For all this squirrel-like collecting, Aby was dissatisfied, troubled. During World War I he had a nervous breakdown from which he never fully recovered, and he developed, according to the family, a number of “phobias,” one of which was other Warburgs. He blamed the Warburgs for the fact that he was Jewish—a sensible enough conclusion—and became convinced that his two American brothers, Felix and Paul, who had become so rich by way of marrying Loebs and Schiffs, were dealing unfairly with him in a financial sense. He spent whatever time was left over from collecting writing long and bitter letters to his family, outlining his grievances. There were times when the mention of his brothers could send him into an uncontrollable fury, and at times like these only the gentle-natured Felix, whom he loved, seemed able to calm him. “It was as though,” says one of the family thoughtfully, trying to puzzle poor Aby out, “he hated
being
a Warburg and yet, at the same time, couldn't escape the fact that he
was
a Warburg.” Aby died in Hamburg in 1929. His wife, Mary, managed to hold up her side of the mixed marriage somewhat better. Watching Hitler's rise to power, she began quietly organizing the removal of her husband's collections elsewhere. Working through the American Consul in Berlin, Aby's nephew, Eric Warburg, arranged to have the material shipped to England. It took 535 crates on two small steamers, the
Hermia
and the
Jessica
, to get Aby's collections down the Elbe, across
the North Sea, into the Thames, where they now form the basis of the library at the Warburg Institute of London University. While the shipment was being loaded, Aby's widow, Mary, served tea and sandwiches on the dock to the packers, who were anti-Nazis.

Another mixed-married gentleman was Jimmie Speyer, the inheritor, in New York, of his Uncle Philip's Speyer & Company. Like Aby Warburg, Jimmie Speyer could never seem to decide—to his own satisfaction, at least—just how Jewish he was. Speyer was a small, dapper, starch-collared, and rather prickly man. He was so proud of his name that he would never allow his firm to take a lower position than anyone else's in the floating of a loan, and this Speyer vanity had, by the 1920's, meant that the firm had declined somewhat in power. Nonetheless he occupied a high-ceilinged, Old World office in a Pine Street building modeled after the Palazzo Pandolfini in Florence, from which he operated a patrician, one-man banking house. Mr. Speyer's personal bearing was so Old World itself, so Continental, as to have seemed downright exotic. He was so distinctly European that it seemed unlikely that he would have been interested in things American at all. Yet he was the guiding spirit behind the Museum of the City of New York, the handsome colonial structure on upper Fifth Avenue which houses the city's most delightful collection of Americana. He was a director of Mount Sinai Hospital, a steady donor to Jewish charities, and an outstanding critic of clubs and schools that practiced racial or religious discrimination. Yet he was a member of the Racquet Club, where other Jews were not even welcomed as guests of members. His pride in his Speyer name had caused him to have created, by royal decree, some artificial Speyers. Once, lunching with the old Kaiser Wilhelm
(that
was how Old World Jimmie Speyer could be), Mr. Speyer mentioned his sorrow at having no sons to carry on. “But surely there are some Speyers left in Frankfurt,” said the Kaiser. “None,” said Speyer sadly. “This will never do,” said the Kaiser. “There must
always
be a Speyer in Frankfurt!” And so the Kaiser conferred a title upon Speyer's brother-in-law, Eduard Beit, authorizing Eduard to add “von Speyer” to his name. It was an ennobling “von” that even such favored “court” Jews as Albert Ballin did not have.

Jimmie Speyer's country house on the Hudson was called “Waldheim,” but he married a gentile girl named Ellin Prince whose ancestry traced back to colonial days. He was so proud of his wife's antecedents that, in his listing in
Who's Who
, he included her parents' names (including her mother's
maiden
name). Yet his own parents' names, Eduard Gumpertz and Sophie Rubino Speyer, he omitted.

While some members of the crowd seemed uncertain whether or not to claim their Jewish antecedents, others were quite definite about it. One such was Howard Goodhart, Mrs. Hattie Lehman Goodhart's son. He, at one point, evolved a theory that he was directly descended from Philo Judaeus, the Greco-Judean philosopher of 20 B.C. Goodhart's reason for thinking so was simple. He believed that, as generations passed—among Jews, at least—certain names kept reappearing, though with their spellings slightly changed. The fact that his father's name was Philip J. Goodhart was enough to convince Howard that it all must have started with Philo Judaeus. To reinforce his connection with Philo, if not quite to prove it, Goodhart hired, at some expense, Professor Goodenough at Yale to write a book about Philo. Though the book was not a great best-seller, Mr. Goodhart liked it, and gave it to all his friends.

“The golf,” as it was fashionable to call it, was beginning to dominate the upper-class sporting scene. With the golf came the country club, and soon the Harmonie Club was relinquishing its title as the most fashionable Jewish club to the Century Country Club in White Plains. For years the Century was an almost exclusively German club, with an unwritten rule against “Orientals.” It was, furthermore, almost exclusively Wall Street, with, as it was said, a few “token Gimbels” from the world of common trade. Only recently has the social cast of the Century begun to change, but a distinction is still drawn between the Jews of the Century and those of the Sunningdale Golf Club in Scarsdale, which is considered by many German Jews to be somewhat
arriviste
.

There were, as the twenties progressed, certain families of the crowd who wished to expand their social horizons somewhat and who were impatient with Jewish country clubs. Morti Schiff, for instance, was much fonder of the Piping Rock Club, one of Long Island's most elegant gentile clubs. He hardly ever appeared at the Century. Other families got themselves in odd situations. Lehmans, Warburgs, Stroocks, Ittlesons, Stralems, and Seligmans began, in the twenties, to winter at Palm Beach (needless to say the crowd vigorously eschewed the Jewish mecca, Miami Beach), where they mingled comfortably in gentile circles, without ever being invited to join the elite Christian Everglades Club. At the same time, though not admitted to the Everglades, Henry Seligman was, from his summer home in Elberon, invited to join the equally elite and equally Christian Deal Golf Club, leading to the observation that Henry was a “seasonal Jew.” On Long
Island the glossy Maidstone Club and the more modest Devon Yacht Club are considered gentile clubs. Yet a New York family, blackballed by the Century, changed their name, applied to the Maidstone, and were taken in, doing much better in alien corn.

Otto Kahn's Morristown estate adjoined the grounds of the super-upper-class (and gentile) Morristown Club, which Kahn had not been invited to join. At one point, the club wished to enlarge its golf course and inquired of Kahn whether he would be willing to sell a few hundred acres. Kahn, with his perfect sense of public relations and his love of the grand gesture, said that he would gladly
give
the club any land it needed. Overwhelmed, the club accepted—and then guiltily decided that it had better ask Mr. Kahn to join. It did, and Otto Kahn accepted with pleasure—though one of the members commented later, “He was a gentleman. He never came around.”