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Today's selection-- from The Money Kings by Daniel Schulman. In the mid-1800s, Joseph Seligman had risen to become one of New York’s most powerful bankers, if not its most powerful—an American Rothschild:
“Jacob Schiff was on the path to becoming one of the greatest financiers of his generation, but another mogul still towered above him. Joseph Seligman had realized his vision of becoming something like an American Rothschild, a banker whose firm was ubiquitous in major government and industrial transactions and who moved with ease in the elite financial and political circles where few Jews traveled. In New York, he and his brother Jesse numbered among the only Jewish members of the Union League Club, a stuffy clique of businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals formed during the Civil War to promote the northern cause, and Joseph served on various municipal boards and honorary committees. Including the city’s school commission, where he occupied the so-called ‘Jewish seat.’ But unlike Baron Lionel de Rothschild, the head of London’s N.M. Rothschild & Sons who became the first Jew to serve in Parliament, Joseph stopped short of seeking elected office, despite the efforts of New York Republicans who twice tried to draft him to run for mayor. (Jesse was too floated as a mayoral candidate.)
“Perhaps because the nation of his birth conveyed in countless ways that he was inferior and unwanted – that he was not a citizen but an interloper – Joseph strove consciously to blend into the fabric of the country that had welcomed him, and he raised his children to be thoroughly American. William, with his usual flair for making irritating propositions, once approached Joseph with the idea of changing their Jewish surname, pulling a Belmont as it were to distance the family from the religious stigmas holding them back from unreserved acceptance in the gentile world. ‘An excellent idea,’ Joseph deadpanned, ‘but we might as well keep our initial letter, and for you I suggest the name “Schlemiel.”’ Even though he shut William down with a thunderclap of sarcasm, Joseph seemed keenly aware of the social handicaps of their religion. When he wanted to honor Abraham Lincoln by naming his fifth-born son after the president, he opted to give the boy the similar though less Hebraic-sounding name of Alfred Lincoln.
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“There were limits to how far Joseph was willing to assimilate, and he drew a line at renouncing or concealing his Jewishness. And he embraced his role as one of the nation’s most prominent Jews (some called him the ‘King of the Jews’) even though he was by no means devout. His interest in religion was largely intellectual. A well-read man who perused the pages of the Greek classics before bed – Horatio Alger, the family tutor, recalled Seligman closing each day ‘ engrossed by business cares in the delightful companionship of the master spirits in the domain of literature and science’-- Joseph enjoyed religious and philosophical debate. On Sundays, when he and Babette entertained at their home on West 34th Street, Joseph liked inviting guests with divergent views to enliven the dinner table conversation. He counted as friends Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent congregationalist minister (and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe), as well as Colonel Robert Ingersoll, a lawyer and popular orator known for his agnostic views. More than once, he hosted both men, strategically planting a provocative topic and sitting back from his place at the head of the table to take in the spirited rhetorical volley that ensued between his guests.
“Joseph’s beliefs were closer to Ingersoll’s than to Beecher’s, his Judaism more cultural than spiritual, but he remained fiercely loyal to his people, using his political and social influence to garner support for Jewish causes and charities. For years he served as a trustee of Mount Sinai Hospital, originally called the Jew’s Hospital when it was founded in 1852 to treat New York’s Jewish population, who in some cases faced discrimination at the city’s Christian-run wards. And he headed the German Hebrew Benevolent Society, as much a social outfit as a charitable one, which held banquets and galas to raise funds to distribute to various Jewish organizations. Among its charitable activities, the group provided coal to impoverished immigrant families and occasionally furnished them with the means to continue their migration to the lightly populated West and out of overcrowded New York, where the more established and assimilated Jews feared their newly arrived coreligionists – uneducated and penniless and packing into dilapidated Lower East Side tenements – might arise antisemitic sentiments."
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