Jacob Schiff

Lore & Background

Schiff was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to a distinguished Ashkenazi Jewish rabbinical family. After the American Civil War, he migrated to the United States, arriving in New York City on August 6, 1865. He became a broker in 1866 and joined Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in 1875, eventually becoming head of the firm in 1885. He married Therese Loeb, daughter of Solomon Loeb, and had a son, Mortimer L. Schiff, and a daughter, Frieda.

Schiff financed Eastern railroads such as the Pennsylvania and Louisville & Nashville, and participated in reorganizing the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He was associated with E. H. Harriman in contests for control of Western railroads. He served as a director of Equitable Life Assurance Society, National City Bank of New York, Union Pacific Railroad, Wells Fargo & Company, and other major corporations. His most famous financial action was extending $200 million in loans to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War, which provided about half the funds for Japan's war effort.

Reader's Guide

Jacob Schiff's significance lies in his dual role as a financier and Jewish communal leader. His loan to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War was a landmark event, demonstrating the power of American capital in global conflicts and reflecting his opposition to Tsarist Russia's antisemitic policies. Schiff used his position at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. to shape American railroad development and corporate finance. As a philanthropist, he founded the Jewish Industrial Removal Office, supported relief for pogrom victims, and helped establish Hebrew Union College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the American Jewish Committee. His leadership from 1880 to 1920 defined the 'Schiff era' of American Jewish history, addressing immigration, antisemitism, and Zionism. His stance on World War I—urging a quick end even without Allied victory—and his shifting policy toward Russia after the Bolshevik revolution illustrate his pragmatic and principled approach to international affairs.

Did You Know?

• Schiff was a key funder and promoter of the Galveston Movement, which diverted Jewish immigrants away from crowded East Coast cities to Texas and other parts of the American interior, though he did not found the entry po
• Although Schiff was honored by Emperor Meiji with the Order of the Rising Sun, he was not the first foreigner to receive it in person; several others had been awarded the decoration before him.

Immigrant Roots and a Multilingual Childhood

Louis Marshall entered the world on December 14, 1856, in Syracuse, New York, a city founded only nine years earlier that was thriving as a canal-side hub for trade and manufacturing. His parents were recent German immigrants: his father Jacob, who left Neidenstein in Bavaria in 1849 in the wave following the failed 1848 revolutions, and his mother Zilli, who arrived from Württemberg in 1853. Jacob had worked his way up the Erie Canal from New York City to Syracuse, where he opened a modest hide, fur, and leather business that barely turned a profit. Louis was the eldest of six children, raised at 222 Cedar Street in the old Seventh Ward. German was his first language, and he remained fluent enough to speak to his mother exclusively in German until her death in 1910. His mother, well educated for her era, read Schiller, Scott, and Hugo to the children. Beyond public school, Louis attended German and Hebrew schools, studying French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and later taught himself Yiddish as an adult.

From Syracuse to the Nation's Highest Court

After a two-year apprenticeship in the office of Nathaniel B. Smith and a brief stint at Columbia's Dwight Law School in 1876–77—where he fell short of the two-year attendance requirement for a degree—Marshall completed his legal studies in January 1878 and joined William C. Ruger's Syracuse firm. By 1885 he was admitted to the New York State Bar and became a partner. When Ruger was elevated to chief justice of the Court of Appeals, the firm became Jenny, Brooks & Marshall. Before turning forty, Marshall had argued more than 150 cases before that court. In 1894, classmate Samuel Untermyer recruited him to New York City to join Guggenheimer and Untermyer, where he would spend the rest of his career. During the Taft administration, two Supreme Court seats opened in 1910–11, and prominent friends lobbied hard for Marshall, whom they regarded as an outstanding constitutional lawyer. It was the only office he ever truly sought, yet Taft selected two other men. By the end of his career, Marshall had argued more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than any other private lawyer of his generation.

Champion of the Persecuted

Marshall devoted enormous energy to defending the rights of Jews and other minorities throughout his career. In 1891, he joined a national delegation that petitioned President Benjamin Harrison to intervene on behalf of persecuted Russian Jews. He was among the founders of the American Jewish Committee and later served as a director of the NAACP, fighting major legal battles on behalf of all minority groups. In 1914, he joined the legal team for Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory manager convicted of murdering a thirteen-year-old employee, and initiated an ultimately unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall also proved a natural mediator: in 1910 he worked alongside Louis Brandeis to resolve a strike involving sixty to seventy thousand cloakmakers in New York City, and in 1919 he served as arbitrator in a clothing-workers' dispute. His commitment to securing religious, political, and cultural freedom for minority communities was not a peripheral interest but a defining thread running through his entire professional life.

Beyond the Briefcase

Marshall's influence extended well beyond the courtroom. He was a passionate conservationist and the driving force behind re-establishing the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, an institution that would later evolve into the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. In his personal life, he cultivated a tight circle of lawyer-friends with whom he lunched at Monch's Restaurant during the work week, debating legal questions while the waiter Loewenstein, in their playful tradition, served as judge and jury. His multilingual upbringing—German at home, Hebrew from his father, Yiddish self-taught in adulthood—reflected a lifelong curiosity about language and culture. He graduated from Syracuse High School in 1874, one of only eight males in a class of twenty-two, a small cohort that speaks to the modest, immigrant character of his origins. Even at seventy-two, he was still receiving correspondence addressing him as a 'fellow alumnus' of Columbia Law, a small reminder of a path that had led him from a fur shop on the Erie Canal to the nation's most consequential legal battles.

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