Former President & Chief Executive Officer, PayPal
The Money Kings: Daniel Schulman in Conversation with William D. Cohan
Goldman and Sachs, Kuhn and Loeb, Warburg and Schiff, Lehman and Seligman. These Gilded Age dynasties helped develop modern finance, make New York into a business and cultural Mecca, and preside over an unprecedented era of philanthropy and institution-building. Daniel Schulman discusses his new book, The Money Kings: The German Jewish Financiers Who Shaped Modern America, which unspools the remarkable origin stories and profound impact of these German-Jewish titans. Schulman is in conversation with financial journalist William D. Cohan. Recorded March 21, 2024.
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About Daniel Schulman
Dan Schulman, who became CEO of Verizon in late 2025 after a stint as Vice Chairman and Managing Partner at Valor Capital Group, has been discussing the company's turnaround strategy and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. He stated that Verizon had lost market share for five consecutive years and that its market capitalization had fallen from first to last in the industry. Schulman described implementing a major restructuring that included laying off approximately 13,000 employees, which he said was necessary to generate cost savings for reinvestment in customer service and infrastructure. He characterized the company's new posture as "playing to win" rather than being a "punching bag." Schulman has made several predictions about technological timelines, stating that he believes artificial general intelligence (AGI) will arrive within two to four years, quantum computing by 2028, and humanoid robotics shortly after. He described current AI models as "the worst models that we will ever have in our lifetime" and said the pace of technological change is faster than any he has previously observed. Schulman acknowledged that AI will likely lead to job displacement and said Verizon is allocating $20 million toward employee reskilling, while also calling for collaboration between private and public sectors to address workforce disruption. He noted that Verizon is using AI tools, including a model called Mythos, for cybersecurity and network management, and that the company is experimenting with AI agents for customer service.
Transcript (79 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
W
William0:03
All right, this is working. Great. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you for that kind introduction. Daniel, congratulations on a great book.
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Daniel Schulman0:13
Thank you.
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William0:14
So, why don't we start? I don't know how many of these we'll get through, but we'll try. How and why did you write this? I mean, it's very different than a book about the Koch family. Wichita is very far from New York and the Kochs are very different than the Jewish founding families of Wall Street.
D
Daniel Schulman0:35
There were two New York Kochs, actually, but David Koch and his brother Frederick. That's later. In Jackie's apartment, right? Yeah, that's right. I think the through line that connects both of those books is this idea of legacy and of dynasty and of power and of money and of how people use these things to change the world in major ways, but different ones. In terms of how I came upon the story, I stumbled into it. After finishing the Koch book, I was doing some research on this wave of anarchist violence that occurred in the United States at the turn of the century that culminated with the bombing of Wall Street in 1920. 23 Wall. Yeah, 23 exactly. I was thinking I might do a book based on that, but I noticed that one of the recipients of an anarchist letter bomb was a fellow named Jacob Schiff, and the name registered, but I didn't know much about him. I started reading about Jacob Schiff and was astounded by who he was and what he had done. I couldn't believe that no one had done a major biography of him. He was every bit as important as J.P. Morgan or Rockefeller, all of whom he knew and did business with, but he was totally unknown. That's how I ended up with the story. Then I realized there was a personal connection to my own family story. My dad's parents came over from what was the Pale of Settlement during the early 1900s. As you learn Schiff's story and the legacy of the Warburgs, Goldmans, Sachses, and Lehmans, you start to understand that it might not have been possible for many American Jews to be here today without them. That includes my family and anyone's family who came over from Russia or Eastern Europe during that era.
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William2:47
And do you find — how do you find the raw material to make the book? Where was all that hiding out?
D
Daniel Schulman2:59
All over the place, really. The Schiff family were extremely helpful in helping me put together this book. Jacob Schiff's great-grandson still has a bunch of his papers down in his office. Also the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati — I spent way too much time in Cincinnati. It's a nice place, but you wouldn't want to live there. I was there for a good month. They've got good chili, decent chili. I don't know what I want to say. They've got chili. Also the Contemporary Art Museum is nice. But I was in Berlin, London, Norman, Oklahoma which has the papers of the Seligman family, strangely. And everywhere in between, looking for every document I could find. It was very document-driven. When I could, I interviewed descendants, which is helpful, but often times descendants, when we're talking about 100 or 150 years ago, only know the stories that are passed down. Often those stories can be distorted or wrong.
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William4:21
Well, I know when I wrote my book about Goldman, I don't think I found much. I had to rely on the New York Times to read about Marcus Goldman and Henry Goldman. If their papers exist, they didn't make them available to me. Henry Goldman's descendants told me that he burned his papers. But there was stuff available. At Yale, he — when he was basically blind by the time he was in his 60s, he loved to read. He hired Glenway Wescott, who later became a famous writer, as his factotum. Wescott would read to him in English and German, and help him to the baccarat table because he liked to gamble. Glenway Wescott's papers have a lot of reminiscences about Henry Goldman. So to find stuff about the Goldmans, I had to go through all those side angles. The commercial paper, yeah. Marcus Goldman putting the commercial paper in his top hat. But beyond that I managed to write a 500-page book, so I was able to find some stuff.
So, you write about these incredibly important Jewish families — the Lehmans, the Seligmans, the Schiffs, the Goldmans. What did you come to admire about them? What did you discover that disappointed you about them? Nobody's perfect.
D
Daniel Schulman6:03
Nobody's perfect. No. If you take someone like Joseph Seligman, one of the main figures in the book, he was a Horatio Alger type figure, and there was a good reason. Horatio Alger actually lived in his house. He tutored his sons, and at night they would talk about his life. Joseph Seligman, immigrant peddler, within 30 years Ulysses Grant is asking if he wants to be his Treasury Secretary. An amazingly smart guy. He was also an anti-corruption crusader. But he also took part in the 1869 gold corner on Wall Street that caused a mini crash at the time. So I guess you could say that was a little disappointing. The Lehmans had slaves. That was hard to reconcile. They owned slaves. Their business was built upon the slave economy. Cotton. Yeah, cotton. In the Reconstruction era, I found evidence that they were managing plantations at that point. It wasn't a system too much different from slavery then. But that brings up an interesting point: how could they reconcile owning slaves as Jews when the foundational story of Judaism is the flight from Egyptian bondage? It came back to what I believe: they were trying to assimilate. Many Southern Jews owned slaves and took part in Southern culture, which made them feel more white, I think. But the hypocrisy was lost on no one at the time. There was a congressional debate pre-Civil War in which an abolitionist senator referred to "Israelites with Egyptian principles," aimed at Louisiana Senator Judah Benjamin, who was Jewish and later a Confederate cabinet secretary.
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William8:31
Well, as I've discovered in some of my books, Wall Street was not pure on this topic either. When Wall Street was first created, there was an actual wall there — that's why it was called Wall Street. The Hudson River and the East River were the two boundaries. Since then, there's been a lot of landfill. But at the beginning of Wall Street, slaves would come in off the ships, and there was a slave processing center right at number one Wall Street. They would go from there after they "processed" them. That was going on in New York too, at the bottom of Wall Street. Our history is checkered with this kind of stuff.
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Daniel Schulman9:24
Totally. We don't like to talk about it very often.
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William9:28
Why do you think these families were able to succeed to the extent that they were? Do they share something in common?
D
Daniel Schulman9:42
For every Seligman brothers, there was a Shuman brothers that didn't make it. In their case, they all had a very similar story. They came over in the 1840s, fleeing conditions in Germany. Many came over in 1848 and 1849 because of revolutions that swept Western Europe and the German pre-unification states. Jews were particularly attracted to these uprisings, which were a repudiation of feudalism and called for equal rights. Jews in Germany were not citizens; they couldn't own property in most places, they were barred from almost all professions. To live in a given area, they had to pay the local authorities extra taxes, protection money. It was an inhospitable place. Large waves of immigration were set off by the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, bringing people like Marcus Goldman, Solomon Loeb, and Mayer Lehman, who was apparently a revolutionary himself. The Lazard brothers came in 1848 to New Orleans. They started out peddling. One of the great-grandsons of a Lehman brother told me that peddling was the Harvard Business School for Jewish boys. There's an element of truth to that: to make it, you had to pick up English quickly, learn American customs, develop rapport with customers, who you often asked for a place to stay for the night. It also lent itself to the rapid accumulation of capital, which they channeled into stores. That's how all these firms got started.
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William11:59
It is incredible. The Lazard brothers had a women's clothing store in New Orleans. They had it for one year, and then it burned down. They saved the inventory, traipsed across Mexico to San Francisco for the gold rush, and started selling clothes, women's clothes, then miners' clothes to people involved in the gold rush, and turned that into trading gold bullion. The Seligmans did something very similar, opening a store in San Francisco around the time of the gold rush. San Francisco burned to the ground soon after. Because they had experience — they were in upstate New York, and the town they were in burned down. So when Jesse Seligman, one of Joseph's younger brothers, opened a store in San Francisco, he said, "I've got to open it in a brick building." He did, and it was one of the few structures that survived. They made a killing.
One of the things I've always been struck by is the distinction between Jewish Wall Street firms and non-Jewish Wall Street firms. The Jews could not be part of JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, or the Waspy or Catholic firms, Merrill Lynch, whatever. They created their own firms. They were also prevented from doing business with the more established US industries like banking or railroads. That's why they ended up underwriting schmata companies and retail companies.
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Daniel Schulman14:05
What was your reaction when you stumbled upon this fact? It was interesting. There were two distinct Wall Street worlds, with some overlap. The notable exception would be Kuhn, Loeb and J.P. Morgan, which because of Jacob Schiff, were at the top of railroad finance in addition to Morgan and a select few firms. But Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs — they were pushed out of all that. It forced them to be innovative. Henry Goldman and Philip Lehman linked up in a joint venture. Lehman tried to have a joint venture with Lazard too. I thought you guys were competing. Yeah, well, there was a lot of collusive behavior back then. They joined up because both had tried to get into railroad finance, which was the place to be. They ended up pioneering the modern IPO because they'd been pushed out. They started looking at firms like Woolworths, Sears, and Studebaker — companies passed over by Morgan and others. That's how both firms, in the early 1900s, weren't major firms in the least. That's how it all begins.
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William15:53
Yeah, Goldman did the Sears IPO because they had a relationship with the family that started Sears. Yep. That's what they were relegated to do. Goldman had relationships with a lot of commercial paper, and Lehman through the commodities business had a lot of money. It was a good marriage. They approached Goldman's clients and did deals. That's how it worked until they broke up in the '20s.
I was always struck that Henry Ford was extremely anti-Semitic, but the Ford family chose Goldman to lead the Ford IPO.
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Daniel Schulman16:50
What's astounding is that Goldman Sachs would have taken that business because what Henry Ford had done through the Dearborn Independent wasn't that far in the past. He made people like Jacob Schiff — he sullied their legacies until today. The Goldmans and Sachses factored into these conspiracy theories. But it comes back to assimilation. It was a huge deal for Goldman Sachs to land that business. Very competitive. Everybody wanted it. There were stories about Robert Lehman being over the moon when a Lehman partner got a board seat on a major railroad company, not because it was lucrative, but because it signaled the firm's ability to break into those previously barred markets.
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William17:58
Sidney Weinberg ended up with 35 board seats at 35 different companies. People were astounded. It signified that Goldman Sachs had arrived. Now you don't have board seats if you're an investment banker, but at that time, it was a way to signify connections and exert control over businesses. Before the trust-busting era, everybody had board seats on each other's railroads, keeping peace until it all fell apart.
Can you tell us the story of Joseph Seligman and the hotel in Saratoga Springs?
D
Daniel Schulman18:52
Sure. Joseph Seligman in the late 1800s was probably not just America's top Jewish banker, but one of America's top bankers. In 1877, he took his family to Saratoga for their customary vacation and went to check in at the Grand Union Hotel, the finest hotel in town. The clerk said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Seligman, we can't check you in." He asked why and was told they weren't accepting Jews that season. Seligman was indignant. His proxies talked to the New York Times, and there was a big story called "A Sensation in Saratoga." Seligman gave a quote about Judge Hilton, the executor of A.T. Stewart's estate, who owned the hotel. Stewart and Seligman had a war of words in the papers. Hilton drew a distinction between "Hebrews," who he thought were outstanding, and what he called the "Seligman Jew" — showy, new money Jews. This went on for weeks. Joseph Seligman became uncomfortable because something that had been unspoken in American life — anti-Semitism — was now enunciated. The New York Times asked hoteliers if they accepted Jews; some said they did but charged double. In the Jersey Shore, hotel keepers wanted to stop the incursion of Jews. It became a major anti-Semitic episode and an inflection point. After this, society became more stratified, and Jews created their own institutions as they were barred from country clubs and private schools. It wasn't the first major episode, but one of the most widely publicized, and it wasn't resolved in the 1870s.
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William22:03
The interesting subtext is that it was probably a business dispute. Joseph Seligman was an anti-corruption crusader and helped put Boss Tweed in jail. Boss Tweed was Judge Hilton's patron. Hilton had a beef over that, and it had less to do with Seligman's Jewishness than the business dispute. But that didn't matter in terms of what came after. Was Saratoga a Waspy hotbed?
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Daniel Schulman22:45
It was — with the horse racing. Many Jewish families visited Saratoga and the Adirondacks. Marcus Goldman that same summer wrote to the Grand Union Hotel seeking a room and was also rebuffed. This had been their normal vacation destination.
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William23:10
Nice. Speaking of stories, how about Jacob Schiff convening a meeting on February 6, 1904, to decide whether to make a loan to the Japanese to help in their war against Russia?
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Daniel Schulman23:26
This is a fascinating story and important because it changes the future for Japan, Russia, and in some ways the Jewish people. In 1904, Schiff was a member of a group called the Wanderers, financiers, politicians, and academics who gathered in Schiff's living room to puff cigars and discuss current events. The major news was that Russia and Japan were about to go to war over Russia's expansionist ambitions. Schiff wrapped his knuckles on a table, the room went silent, and he said, "Gentlemen, I have something to discuss. I've been approached about financing Japan in this war." He asked, "Would this be good for the Jews?" He worried about potential blowback. For many years, Schiff had tried to get the Russian Tsar to give Jews basic rights, but none of it worked. He decided to fund Japan to teach the Tsar a lesson. It was also a wise business decision. Kuhn, Loeb ended up funding almost 20% of Japan's war expenditures. This war led to the rise of the Japanese Empire and diminished the Russian Empire, with a revolution shortly thereafter. But it also fueled the myth of the Jewish banker puppeteering world events, part of the anti-Semitic pantheon. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the touchstone of modern anti-Semitism, was published around this time. Schiff must have been in the mind of whoever forged that document.
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William26:10
That was the precedent for what happened around 1914 in World War I, when Goldman Sachs wanted to — all the bankers supported the Allies, but Henry Goldman wanted to support Germany.
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Daniel Schulman26:34
Right. That was the wrong side of history, and they kicked him out of the partnership.
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William26:43
Can you imagine bankers nowadays financing individual countries' war efforts? It's incredible. J.P. Morgan was basically running the Allies' war expenditures, as the Federal Reserve before there was one.
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Daniel Schulman27:00
Right, exactly. He was the single — single-handedly. World War I was a crucible for these German Jewish families. Previously, you could live harmoniously as a German, an American, and a Jew. But all those identities came into conflict during the war, fracturing families and firms. Goldman Sachs wasn't the only firm with disagreements. Kuhn, Loeb had debates about funding the Allies. There was espionage, with German and British agents trying to get firms to finance them. It's a fascinating time period.
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William28:02
The idea of Jewish bankers underwriting war efforts of Japan or the Allies is mind-blowing. The other piece of the Russo-Japanese War is the myths that arose. Schiff secretly funded propaganda efforts targeting Russian POWs, becoming part of the later myth that he helped overthrow the Russian government in 1917 and ordered the assassination of the Tsar, which isn't true. But like any conspiracy theory, that shard of truth fuels many theories. Was the American public supportive of these efforts?
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Daniel Schulman29:05
Public opinion dramatically turned against Russia in the early 1900s, partly because the German Jewish community publicized the mob violence there. They held mass protest meetings at Madison Square Garden. Public opinion was really turning, and we ended up breaking off a treaty with Russia. Schiff and his allies were involved in that effort. So public opinion had swung radically.
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William29:55
Let's talk about philanthropy. I'm particularly fascinated by Baron Maurice de Hirsch and his Jewish Agricultural Society. I wrote a book about four friends from Andover, one a Jewish guy from Connecticut whose parents were egg farmers. They got connected to Baron Hirsch, a wealthy industrialist who thought part of the problem with anti-Semitism was that Jewish families lived in cities and became too successful. So let's send them to rural communities to be farmers, less offensive to people. Jacob Schiff was interested in this philosophy. It affected real lives — my friends to this day who were farmers in Connecticut. What ends up happening is that German Jews established themselves in the 1830s-1850s. The next major wave of Jewish immigration occurred in the 1880s, sparked by the assassination of a Russian czar blamed unfairly on Jews, leading to pogroms. Thousands of Jews started coming over, making the German Jews nervous. They had achieved prominence and stability and were worried about their standing in the American social hierarchy, and about these provincial Jewish immigrants wrecking the image of Jews. That's where ideas like farming colonies came from. Many were created, most failed after a couple of years because many Jews wanted to be with relatives or other Jews in New York City. Later there was the Galveston Movement, an effort to divert Jews from New York by shipping them from Germany to Galveston, Texas, to settle in the interior. That didn't work terribly well either.
I thought it was ironic that Jacob Schiff was a big fan of this, but he was living in New York high on the hog, shipping his compatriots to Connecticut to become egg farmers.
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Daniel Schulman33:35
There were tensions that exist to this day between German Jews and Eastern European and Russian Jews because of these paternalistic efforts. Schiff and his allies did a heck of a lot building institutions that helped Americanize immigrants, lining them up with jobs and English lessons. But also they tried to divert Jews from the Lower East Side. There was good reason: by the early 1900s, it was an advertisement for squalor, drugs, prostitution, and Jewish gangsters with names like "Hundred and Stiff Rifka." The New York Police Commissioner wrote an essay saying 50% of crime in New York City was attributable to Jews, which wasn't true, but the image was out there. Schiff and his allies hired a private detective to penetrate the Lower East Side underworld, map it, and partner with police to crack down on criminals. They were extremely concerned about image, which led to efforts to resettle the Jewish population throughout the country.
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William35:33
Yeah, I don't think it worked as you said.
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Daniel Schulman35:35
It didn't work.
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William35:38
Have you thought about how those families created their banking partnerships and how it evolved into today's Wall Street firms? They went from private partnerships to public companies. DLJ, not a Jewish firm, became the first to go public in 1970 against NYSE rules, forever changing Wall Street. I marvel at how, with small partnerships, intermarrying — Goldmans married Sachses, Lehmans married each other — to preserve capital. They were careful about business they took on. Now we have big firms that went public and can still go bankrupt.
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Daniel Schulman37:00
It's interesting. For most of Kuhn, Loeb's early history, when it was doing a huge amount of business, there were only about four partners. All bound by blood or marriage. The reasons they were so close-knit is because doing business at that time required a huge amount of trust. You were doing transatlantic business without telephones, sending coded messages. It was important to do business with people you trusted, and who could you trust more than family? But introducing family to business caused a hell of a lot of problems — anytime blood and money mix, it can be combustible. It worked for many years. The IPO of Donaldson, Lufkin in 1970 unraveled the partnership model. To compete, you had to go public. It shifted risk from partners to the public. The partnership model imposed guardrails because it was their capital; they had to be prudent. Now it's the public's money, so incentives completely changed. We're also dealing with vastly more complex financial transactions, many times the leverage used back then. It's a much different place. The Schiffs or the Goldmans wouldn't recognize it. What would they make of cryptocurrency? I don't know. They still don't know what to make of it.
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William39:24
Maybe we can open it up to questions from this fine audience. We'll start with the man who raised his hand.
A
Audience Member39:32
A lot of Russians came over on boats with $25 in their pockets. Why were these guys — what do you think was the specific skill these entrepreneurs selling cotton? Were they so aggressive? Great numbers guys? What set them apart from others who lived in the Lower East Side and weren't as successful?
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Daniel Schulman40:07
With the people I wrote about, some of it was timing. They came here in the 1840s and 1850s. The Civil War ends up being a major turning point for the country, a huge moment in America's financial history because it hastened the financialization of American life. One reason these companies were able to pivot to finance is that they got government contracts for clothing and other necessities, building up capital. Many people entered the clothing trades because of these contracts. What distinguished them was that they were smart enough to know it was time to try something else. They took their capital and moved into finance. That's how Kuhn, Loeb got its start. Some of it was timing, luck, being in the right place at the right time. In the case of Jacob Schiff, he came from a family with financial connections. Within two years of landing in the US, he had his own brokerage working on fairly major transactions, probably because of his European ties.
A
Audience Member41:45
It sounds like they diversified, and that was unique to them.
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Daniel Schulman41:49
The Lehmans were involved in cotton, insurance, real estate, railroads to some extent. They were diversified. They had the Montgomery outpost and the New York City outpost, a north-south connection that benefited them during the Civil War. They also had a brother-in-law in Liverpool, so they could launder their black market cotton there. But history is written by the winners. All the people who struggled, their stories get lost.
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Audience Member42:33
Were the Rothschilds also part of that group?
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Daniel Schulman42:36
The Rothschilds didn't end up having a major presence in the United States. August Belmont was their financial proxy here, but they didn't make a major bet on the US, a developing market at that time. What is interesting is that in Frankfurt, where Jacob Schiff grew up, the Schiff family had one of the grandest houses in Frankfurt's Jewish Quarter, called "Jew Street." Mayer Rothschild, the patriarch, ended up buying that house to raise his family. So there was some crossover.
A
Audience Member43:43
You mentioned the New York Times coverage of the Saratoga incident with Sulzberger and Ochs being German Jews. Did you find any relationships between the Wall Street guys and those who built that establishment?
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Daniel Schulman44:00
Yes, many. Jacob Schiff helped tee up the deal in which Adolf Ochs bought the New York Times, and he was an investor in the Times for a period. Schiff had a lot of correspondence with Ochs, now at the New York Public Library. He often wrote to him about the latest pogrom in Romania or the Russian Empire, trying to get the Times to cover it. At one point they had a huge blowout because Schiff didn't like an editorial that mentioned him in passing. They eventually reconciled.
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Audience Member44:56
Wasn't he a party to the 1904 conversation in the room?
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Daniel Schulman44:59
He was in the room for that conversation. Can you imagine?
A
Audience Member45:09
This may be off topic, but can you talk about the ways in which the story of the German Jewish financiers in the US was similar and different to the story of the Rothschilds in Europe or the Sassoons in India?
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Daniel Schulman45:29
That's a great question. The Seligmans are a good example. They tried to model themselves on the Rothschilds. There were eight Seligman brothers, allowing them to divide and conquer. Joseph Seligman, the eldest, thought of them as the American Rothschilds, always trying to piggyback on their deals. They established partnerships in London, Paris, and Germany, in a conscious effort to emulate their success.
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Audience Member46:28
Now there's more awareness of anti-Semitism. There's an article about the end of the golden age. The time period you're talking about is before the golden age of Jews in the US. It's not clear to me how a Jewish financier makes money — they're venture capitalists? Do they open businesses? How does anti-Semitism interact with that? How limited was anti-Semitism for a financier making money?
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Daniel Schulman47:09
Anti-Semitism wasn't terribly limiting in terms of their ability to make money. These companies made money in different ways. Kuhn, Loeb made its money through underwriting railroads and sovereign bond offerings, like funding the Japanese. The Lehmans made money in commodities — cotton, coffee, oil. Goldman Sachs was a pioneer in commercial paper, making short-term loans to businesses. Modern anti-Semitism, as distinguished from ancient anti-Semitism, really begins in the early 1900s. The turning point is when Henry Ford bought the Dearborn Independent, one of the largest circulating papers, and filled it with conspiracy theories based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For seven years and 92 issues, he attacked Jews for everything — causing wars, financial panics, even wrecking baseball. These articles were translated into many languages, including German. The burgeoning Nazi movement blanketed Germany with them during the early 1920s. Hitler was a major fan of Henry Ford. There's a direct through line to the anti-Semitism we see now. It ebbed and flowed, and every once in a while it explodes. Jewish firms were limited in what business lines they could engage in. Kuhn, Loeb could be involved with railroads, but other Jewish firms could not, which is why they ended up underwriting Sears and Woolworth. Jews also created the M&A business because they weren't allowed to underwrite bonds or IPOs, so they became advisors to deals. Lazard did that for many years, which turned out to be a fabulous business with huge profit margins.
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Audience Member51:22
Yes.
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Daniel Schulman51:24
German Jews who came over in the 1840s and 1850s formed many different businesses, not just investment banks — department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's. It wasn't just finance. But in many cases, not really by choice. They were forced into the schmata business. They were peddlers because that was the job they were familiar with from the old country.
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Audience Member52:21
Did these families do anything to help the Eastern European Jews living on the Lower East Side assimilate?
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Daniel Schulman52:35
They did a huge amount. They poured millions into efforts to help Jews assimilate — English lessons, job training programs. Jacob Schiff was instrumental in forming the Henry Street Settlement House, which provided medical care on the Lower East Side. They were also very much working with the Jewish community there. The 92nd Street Y was part of these efforts; English lessons were taught here for Russian and Eastern European immigrants. Schiff considered it a key part of what he called "missionary work with the Russians on the Lower East Side."
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William53:36
Yes, this gentleman.
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Audience Member53:38
You mentioned the schmata business. I'm thinking about Levi Strauss, a German family that moved to New York and then to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. Which bankers backed them?
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Daniel Schulman53:54
Wells Fargo, perhaps. There's a Lehman connection with Wells Fargo — Meyer Lehman's brother-in-law helped found or purchase Wells Fargo. I think there was also a Lazard connection. The Lazard bank left San Francisco. When I wrote my book about Lazard, the firm was essentially founded in San Francisco as a bank. My publisher thought we'd go to San Francisco for a talk. I flew across the country, and nobody showed up, a rite of passage for authors, because nobody remembered that bank had anything to do with San Francisco. It quickly shifted to New York, Paris, and London.
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William54:54
Over here.
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Audience Member54:57
I have two questions. You can pick one or both. How would you describe the evolution of these families generationally? You have an immigrant peddler turned magnate with a drive for success. Fast forward a few generations, it's a comfortable life and may be different drive. Second question: what role does religion play for these families? Are they religious? Secular?
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Daniel Schulman55:47
Both are very good questions. The answer to the second is that it varied. Some families were quite religious, but many German Jews were attracted to Reform Judaism, which came up through Germany — the idea that religion needs to evolve with the times. Eastern European and Russian Jews tended to be Orthodox. Many German Jewish families were striving so hard to assimilate that by the early 1900s, they were celebrating Christmas. The Seligmans were involved in forming the Ethical Culture Society. Your questions feed into each other because the next generation often assimilated further. In terms of business drive: second-generation folks like Philip Lehman and Henry Goldman were dynamic and important to those businesses. With the Seligman firm, later generations were just showing up at the office and collecting checks. It was a range.
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Audience Member57:27
Daniel, speaking of assimilation, my understanding from the book was they really weren't in favor of a separate Jewish state. Why?
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Daniel Schulman57:39
There are modern echoes of these skirmishes over Israel and Zionism. Many American Jews and German-American Jews were opposed to Zionism in the early 1900s because it was a wild idea; nobody thought it would pan out. Jacob Schiff clashed bitterly with the Zionists because he believed a separate Jewish state risked supporting the age-old myth that Jews could never be good citizens, only loyal to each other, stirring up anti-Semitism. He was right about that. One thing they understood perfectly: German Jews and Eastern European/Russian Jews were tethered because no one would distinguish whether you were from Frankfurt or Odessa. That's why German Jews spent so much to help immigrants acculturate. The default position among many American Jews in the early 1900s was opposition to a separate Jewish state because they thought America was their refuge. Things changed in the 1920s when a harsh immigration law ended Jewish immigration to the US for 40 years. There's an interesting parallel with today.
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William59:59
This lady here.
A
Audience Member1:00:02
If everything was on the Lower East Side at that time, why was the Lower East Side built up here? This is where the German Jews lived. That's where the money was.
W
William1:00:14
Can we have time for two more questions? I'm sorry to be greedy and ask a second one. What do you got?
A
Audience Member1:00:22
Given the level of influence these families were able to exert and the prominence to which they rose, why do you think they were relatively unsuccessful at opening up immigration in the run-up to the Holocaust?
D
Daniel Schulman1:00:42
They spent decades battling nativist politicians to keep the doors open. Schiff, the unelected but undisputed leader of American Jewry, died by 1920. There was no unifying figure. The country during World War I was a cauldron of ideologies, with a Red Scare building the case in Congress to restrict immigration. I'm not sure if anyone could have rolled that back.
W
William1:01:37
One thing that struck me about your book is the level of detail — dinner parties, what people said. Tell us about getting that kind of information. You talked about the research and writing taking a long time — your son went from an infant to third grade. What was the process of gathering and distilling that detail?
D
Daniel Schulman1:02:13
Good question. When I started, I told my agent I'd be done in two years. He said, "I don't think so." Eight years passed, but it was worth it. We won't ask my wife about that. One reason it took so long was going to so many places to find details. In an archive, I found the wedding menu from when Jacob Schiff was married, or a seating chart, so I could say, "Louisa Goldman was sitting next to one of the Lehmans." Letters were a great resource. Tiny details emerged from countless places. Many people wrote books who were in the room for these conversations, so there's dialogue to pick out. That helps move a story that has dense financial details along.
W
William1:03:44
Moderator's prerogative for one final question. What did you discover — any similarities between the Kochs and some of these families?
D
Daniel Schulman1:03:57
I've thought about that. If you look at Charles Koch and Jacob Schiff, there are some things in common. They seem to understand the world in a way other people don't — financial details that take years to comprehend came to them easily. They seem to have had a plan from the outset and executed on it. Both felt a responsibility to give back and were comfortable exerting their influence and power. Both grew up in strict, hard-driving households. But there are many differences as well.
W
William1:05:26
Has our generation gotten softer? Should we be tougher on our kids?
D
Daniel Schulman1:05:34
I don't think so.
W
William1:05:39
Neither.
Well, thank you. This was great, Daniel. Thank you so much. And thank you all for those great questions. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, William. Thank you all for coming. This was a wonderful 150th anniversary of 92NY.