The Maccabaean

JACOB SCHIFF was a Jew. I do not merely mean that he was a good Jew, or a high-minded Jew, or a great-hearted Jew. I mean that he was great as a Jew. He thought as a Jew; he felt as a Jew; he lived as a Jew,—not merely an outwardly conforming Jew, but a spiritually affirming Jew. When I say that Schiff was a Jew, I mean more than that he was not a non-Jew. Many Jews are only that. They happen to be Jews by birth. Unhappily, as they conceive it, they are Jews by race, but they are not Jews, highly self-revering and greatly self-ennobling. Schiff was so great as a Jew that he would have perished sooner than do what not a few mean-hearted, little-souled Jews are doing today,—namely, flinging themselves and their children into Fifth Avenue baptismal fonts. I believe Schiff would have gone to the stake if it had been necessary sooner than do that. He would not crawl in at the back door of a Fifth Avenue club nor suffer himself to be endured in certain social circles. As a Jew

Schiff was the first Jew in America to take account of, rightly to understand, and adequately to honor the East European Jew in America. He was the first American Jew

of distinction born in Western Europe who broke away from the anti-East European Jewish attitude which had disgraced American Israel. Happily for him, he came into close touch with the most distinguished Russian Jew who had lived in America,—in some ways as great a Jew as has lived in the

Western world,—a man known to a few choice spirits of his generation as one of the most learned persons in America,—Michael Heilprin. Heilprin, Emma Lazarus and Jacob Schiff in 1881 were at the head of that group of American Jews, who prepared the way and a welcome for the Russian Jews that began to come in considerable numbers to this country after the evil days of Ignatieff. Schiff was big enough to see that Russian Jews were not to be treated as inferiors because they happened to reach America thirty or forty years later than did the West European Jews, and that Russian Jews were not to be regarded as if they were to become permanently a burden to American Israel because they had been stripped and

JACOB H. SCHIFF

scourged out of their native land by the spirit of Russian pogroms. Schiff understood from the very outset, for his was insight as well as farsight, that out of the life of the Russian Jew in America would come precious elements of strength and nobleness and idealism.

Nothing in Schiff's life is finer than the way in which in his closing years he gave his adherence to the Zionist ideal. He was shaken to the very core of his being by the things