Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Jacob Schiff was born in 1847 in Frankfurt’s Judengasse to a rabbinical family with roots there reaching back some 500 years. His father, Moses Schiff, was a broker for the Rothschilds, and Jacob apprenticed in banking from 1861 before arriving in New York in August 1865. He became a citizen in 1870, joined Kuhn, Loeb and Company at Abraham Kuhn’s invitation in 1874, married Therese Loeb, daughter of founder Solomon Loeb, in 1875 and was running the firm by 1885. Drawing European capital from London and Paris, he financed and reorganized railroads including the Pennsylvania, the Louisville and Nashville and the Baltimore and Ohio, and with E. H. Harriman fought James J. Hill and J. P. Morgan for control of Western lines.

In April 1904 he met Takahashi Korekiyo of the Bank of Japan in Paris and agreed to float $200 million in Japanese war bonds, about half of Japan’s war costs against Russia, motivated by the Tsarist regime’s persecution of Jews and the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Emperor Meiji personally presented him the Order of the Rising Sun. In World War I he refused loans to Tsarist Russia, backed Kerensky’s government after it granted Jews equal rights and broke with the Bolsheviks, demanding repayment. At home he gave away roughly a tenth of his income, mostly anonymously, and launched the Galveston Project to route Jewish immigrants through Texas instead of crowded New York. He died in 1920 at 73; in 1933 the Nazis stripped his name from a Frankfurt street.

• The 1904 bond issue equals roughly $5.4 billion today, by the episode’s estimate.
• Accused of pro-German sympathies by French nationalist Charles Maurras, he cut off funding to the Central Powers in 1914 and stopped speaking German in public.
• He let his name appear on only one building, a pavilion at Montefiore Hospital, where he served as president.
• He backed the Committee of 70 against Boss Tweed and supported the Red Cross, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tuskegee Institute.
• He funded the technical institute in Haifa but never joined Theodor Herzl’s Zionist organization.