Jacob Schiff - Legacy

Legacy

Schiff was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1982.

The Jacob Schiff Center, named after him, was a prominent Jewish cultural center and synagogue from the 1930s through at least the 1960s. It was located on Valentine Avenue, near the intersection of Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse in the Fordham section of the Bronx.

Historian George Kennan noted that Schiff helped finance revolutionary propaganda during the Russo-Japanese war and revolution of 1905. The Jewish Communal Register of New York City stated that "Mr. Schiff has always used his wealth and his influence in the best interests of his people. He financed the enemies of autocratic Russia and used his financial influence to keep Russia from the money markets of the United States." Henry Wickham Steed, the chief editor of The Times during the period, argued that this aid went beyond the Kerensky regime, stating that "the prime movers were Jacob Schiff, Warburg, and other international financiers, who wished above all to bolster up the Jewish Bolsheviks in order to secure a field for German and Jewish exploitation of Russia." Historian Juri Lina, in his book, Under the Sign of the Scorpion, claims that it was Schiff who gave the order to kill the Tsar and his family. Contrary to these views, the Hoover Institution scholar, Antony C. Sutton, who specialized in the role of Western technological and financial transfers in building up the Soviet state, noted "Probably the most superficially damning collection of documents on the Jewish conspiracy is in the State Department Decimal File (861.00/5339)." it suggested that the role of Schiff's firm, Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., was supporting the Bolsheviks and this continued beyond the revolution, writing that "Jacob Schiff in fact made a public announcement and it was due to his financial influence that the Russian revolution was successfully accomplished and in the Spring 1917 Jacob Schitf started to finance Trotsky, a Jew, for the purpose of accomplishing a social revolution in Russia." Sutton concludes, "none of the above statements can be supported with hard empirical evidence...Moveover, when statements and assertions are not supported by hard evidence and where attempts to unearth hard evidence lead in a circle back to the starting point — particularly when everyone is quoting everyone else — then we must reject the story as spurious."