The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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.

  In July, 1837, Joseph Seligman, seventeen years old, climbed on a horse-drawn wagon with eighteen other Baiersdorf boys. The trip to Bremen and the sea took them seventeen days. They camped along the roads at night. At Bremen Joseph bought passage on the schooner Telegraph, one of 142 steerage passengers. The price of a steerage ticket—forty dollars—included one meal a day, an unvarying diet of pork, beans, and a cup of water. Since Jewish law prohibited pork, Joseph Seligman was required to disregard his father’s instructions from the beginning. Steerage was cramped, dark, and filthy—years later Joseph used to say of his first crossing, “The less said about it the better”—and Joseph’s bed was a wooden plank. Crossing the Atlantic took nine weeks.

  Joseph, considerably slimmer, arrived in New York in September in the middle of the great Panic of 1837—hardly a cheerful omen for a future financier. But he did not intend to stay in New York long. Fanny had a cousin in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, and had urged Joseph to go to this unprepossessing outpost. Still with the hundred dollars sewn in his trousers, he started off on foot, a hike of just under a hundred miles.

  The leading citizen in Mauch Chunk in those days was a man named Asa Packer, a native of Connecticut, who had established a yard where he built canal boats to haul coal from the local mines. Soon after arriving, Joseph presented himself to Mr. Packer, and the young Connecticut Yankee and the younger Bavarian Jew hit it off immediately. Joseph explained that he was good with figures, and Packer hired him as a cashier-clerk at the salary of $400 a year.

  Joseph’s quick friendship with Packer displayed what was to become an enduring Seligman habit—the lucky habit of getting to know, and to be liked, by the right people. In 1837 Packer was no more than a prosperous small-town businessman. But this bearded, craggy-faced man was to become a multimillionaire, a United States Congressman (from 1853 to 1857), the founder—with a check for one million dollars—of Lehigh University, the president of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and a very good friend for a banker to have.

  3

  “MOUNT BEAUTIFUL”

  Young August Schönberg cannot have been called casual or “lucky” in his choice of friends; he chose them with too much care, not for their possible future helpfulness but for their present and specific use. Little is known about Schönberg’s forebears for a simple reason. In later years he elaborately blurred, and eventually erased, his antecedents. It is known that he was born in 1816—three years before Joseph Seligman—in the Rhineland Palatinate in western Germany, not far from the French border, the son of Simon Schönberg, a poor merchant. (Later on he liked to create the impression that his parents were people of great wealth; all the evidence suggests the opposite.) He was not, as Joseph Seligman was, a dutiful son. He was a wild, unruly, often violent, undisciplined boy with a harsh tongue and cruel ways, who repeatedly flouted his father’s authority—a cardinal sin in Jewish homes. Yet he had a razor-sharp mind and a biting wit.

  A university, for an education or for polish, had no appeal for him whatever. He wanted to make money. At thirteen he went to Frankfurt—it is likely that he ran away from home—and went to work as an unpaid apprentice for the Rothschilds, the leading Jewish banking house in Europe. How he managed to get his toe in the Rothschild door is unclear.

  There is evidence that the Rothschilds were appalled by Schönberg and yet fascinated by him. He was to exert this double effect on people throughout his life—av
ersion and, at the same time, attraction. He could be rough-spoken and abrupt, and he could be sweetly charming. One thing quickly became apparent to the Rothschilds—he was a financial genius. His first duties were sweeping floors, but he was soon admitted to discussions in the partners’ room.

  Yet as Schönberg’s value grew, he became something of an embarrassment to the Frankfurt Rothschilds. He did not fit the aristocratic Rothschild “image,” and so, still in his teens, he was transferred to Naples, where he became very Neapolitan and handled financial negotiations with the Papal Court. At the age of twenty-one, he was reassigned to Havana, where the news of the New York Panic of 1837 reached him. A panic, to Schönberg, suggested a use for his money-making talents. He wound up his Havana business quickly and hurried to New York, arriving the same month as Joseph Seligman, traveling, of course, first class. With Rothschild money, he began buying in a splendidly depressed market.

  But some strange sea change had taken place. He was no longer August Schönberg but August Belmont, the French equivalent of Schönberg (meaning “beautiful mountain”). As August Belmont, furthermore, he was no longer a Jew but a gentile, and no longer German but, as people in New York began to say, “Some sort of Frenchman—we think.”