Mr. Brisbane says that Jewish bankers exercise their large measure of control because they are abler than the other bankers. It was very good of Mr. Brisbane to say so, and it adds to the sum of his weekly, almost daily, worship at the Jewish shrine, but it is scarcely true. Jewish bankers do not yet control the United States, and the principal reason they do not is that they are not abler than the other bankers. Doubtless they seek control; doubtless they have almost grasped it on several occasions; but not yet.
Nevertheless they form such a formidable force, and with their international connections constitute such a political problem, that the mere fact of their failing to top the column of control is not so reassuring as it sounds.
The great Jewish banking houses of the United States are foreign importations, as perhaps everyone knows. Most of them are sufficiently recent to be considered in their immigrant status, while the thought of them as aliens is stimulated by their retention of oversea connections. It is this international quality of the Jewish banking group which largely accounts for Jewish financial power: there is team-play, intimate understandings, and while there is a margin of competition among themselves (as at golf) there is also a wiping out of that margin when it comes to a contest between Jewish and “Gentile” capital.
Four conspicuous contemporary names in Jewish-American finance are Belmont, Schiff, Warburg and Kahn. All of them, even the most recent, are of foreign origin.
August Belmont was the earliest and arrived in America in 1837 as the American representative of the Rothschilds in whose offices he had been raised. His birthplace was that great center of Jewish international finance, Frankfort-on-the-Main. He became the founder of the Belmont family in America, which has largely forgotten its Jewish origin. Politics was a part of his concern in this country, and during the critical time from 1860 to 1872 he was chairman of the National Democratic Committee. His management of the Rothschild interests was exceedingly profitable to that house, although the operations in which he engaged were quite simple compared with the operations of the present day.
Jacob Schiff is another Jewish financier who was given to the world by Frankfort-on-the-Main. He entered the United States in 1865, after having passed his apprenticeship in the office of his father, who was also an agent of the Rothschilds. The name Schiff runs a long way back without change, unlike the name of Rothschild. Originally named Bauer, this family of financiers took a new name from the red shield which adorned their house in the Jewish section of Frankfort and thus became “Rot-schild.” Commonly the last syllable is pronounced as if it were “child”; it is “schild,” shield. An epoch-making family in itself, it has trained hundreds of agents and apprentices, of whom Jacob H. Schiff was one. He became one of the principal channels through which German-Jewish capital flowed into American undertakings, and his agency in these matters gave him a place in many important departments of American business, especially railroads, banks, insurance companies and telegraph companies. He married Theresa Loeb, and in due time came to be head of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company.
Mr. Schiff, too, was interested in politics with a Jewish angle, and was perhaps the moving force in the campaign which forced Congress and the President to break off treaty relations with Russia, then a friendly nation, on a strictly Jewish question which had been skillfully given an American aspect. Mr. Schiff was of inestimable assistance to Japan in the war against Russia, but is understood to have been disappointed by Japan’s shrewdness in preventing too high a return being made for that assistance.
Associated with Mr. Schiff in Kuhn, Loeb & Company is Otto Herman Kahn, who is probably more international than were either of the two gentlemen mentioned above and is more constantly engaged in dabbling in mysterious matters of an international nature. This characteristic may be accounted for, however, by his experience of many countries. He was born in Germany and is also a product of the Frankfort-on-the-Main school of finance, having had connection with the Frankfort Jewish house of Speyer.