27. The Society of Zion

Baron de Hirsch Fund 

The 1868 United States presidential election was the first of the Reconstruction Era, after Andrew Johnson had succeeded to the presidency in 1865 following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. After the Civil War, General Order No. 11 became a challenge in Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign as the Republican candidate. The Democrats raised the order as an issue, with the prominent Democrat and rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise urging fellow Jews to vote against Grant because of his alleged anti-Semitism. Grant sought to distance himself from the order, asserting it had been drafted by a subordinate. And, in a response to B’nai B’rith leader Adolph Moses (1840 – 1902), Grant wrote, “I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit.”[1] Moses had taken part in the Italy’s struggle for independence as a member of Garibaldi’s army, and then studied with Abraham Geiger before emigrating to the United States, where he served as rabbi in Mobile, Alabama and Louisville, Kentucky. Moses was also a member of the Free Sons of Israel, a fraternal organization that was established in 1849 to aid Jewish “Forty-Eighters.”[2]

The General Order did not cause much long-term damage to Grant’s relationship with the American Jewish community, and he won the election, taking the majority of the Jewish vote. In 1869, after reports surfaced that Tsar Alexander II penalized 2,000 Jewish families for smuggling by expelling them to the interior of the country, Grant publicly supported the B’nai B’rith petition against him. Grant appointed more than fifty Jew to federal office, including consuls, district attorneys, and deputy postmasters, making up the most Jews appointed to public office and higher posts than any other president before him.[3] Grant appointed Rabbi Wise’s fellow B’nai B’rith member, and Lincoln assassination conspirator, Simon Wolf, whose efforts during the 1868 campaign helped Grant win the Jewish vote, to be Washington DC’s recorder of deeds. Wolf also served as Grant’s main advisor on Jewish affairs, making him the most important Jewish presidential adviser in American history. Wolf also often intervened with Grant on behalf of Jews seeking positions in his administration. Among Grant’s appointees was Wolf’s friend Edward S. Salomon (1836 – 1913), a German Jew who immigrated to the United States and served as a lieutenant colonel in Union in the American Civil War, and who was appointed governor of the Washington territory in 1870, becoming the first professing Jew to serve as governor of a US state or territory.

Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the nineteenth century, almost all Jews who received presidential appointments were nominated for diplomatic posts.[4] When his friend Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, who was the American head of the B’nai B’rith and an ally of the Alliance Israëlite Universelle, was appointed United States Consul at Bucharest in 1870, Wolf, along with the “robber baron” Seligmans was among the leading advocates for the appointment, with the aim of devising plans to improve the condition of the Jews of Romania.[5] The Seligman brothers were all born in Bavaria, moved to San Francisco in 1851. After eight years, Jesse and William returned to New York and opened a store which received government contracts to supply soldier’s uniforms for the Union Army in the Civil War. In 1964, Joseph Seligman (1819 – 1880), and his brother James founded J. & W. Seligman & Co., a prominent U.S. investment bank. Grant also offered the treasury secretary position to Joseph Seligman, where he would have become the first Jewish cabinet member, but he declined, under pressure from his brothers who wanted him to focus on the banking business.[6]

In 1870, Joseph Seligman founded the Continental Bank of New York with Jacob Schiff (1847 – 1920). German-born Schiff belonged to a Frankist family. Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz’s mother was also a member of the Schiff family. His most famous ancestors included the eighteenth-century dayyan David Tevele Schiff (d. 1791), who became rabbi of the Great Synagogue in London.[7] David was a close friend of the crypto-Sabbatean Rabbi Samuel Falk, revered as the “Unknown Superior” of Freemasonry.[8] For many years, the early Schiffs shared ownership of a two-family house with the Rothschilds. In 1877, President Rutherford Hayes asked Seligman, August Belmont, and a number of other New York bankers to come to Washington, D.C., to plan a refinancing of the war debt.

Chaim Tzvi Schneerson

The key influence in Peixotto’s appointment as consul in Romania was Chaim Tzvi Schneerson (1834 – 1882), the great-grandson of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidism, who had been accused of being a Sabbatean.[9] In 1840, Schneerson immigrated with his parents and his brothers to Palestine and settled in Hebron, which was the center of Chabad Hasidism in Israel at the time.[10] As the age of eighteen, he began going on missions as a doctor to Jewish communities such as Syria, Egypt, Iran, Romania, England, and France. On behalf of the Hebron and Jerusalem communities, he also went to Persia, India, China and Australia. In India, he mainly visited Mumbai and Calcutta. Schneerson also saw his trips as opportunities to spread ideas of Zionism to the isolated Jewish communities.

Schneerson’s international talks gained prominent coverage in Jewish newspapers around the world, including Jewish newspapers Hamagid, the Jewish Chronicle, and as in Der Israelit. With the establishment of the Der Israelit, Meir Lehmann (1831 – 1890), a leading German Orthodox rabbi, attained a high position as one of the leaders of the movement for the maintenance of Orthodox Judaism in Germany. From the 1860s, Hamagid, based in East Prussia, “fervently” supported resettlement of the Land of Israel making the paper an early nucleus of the Zionist movement.[11] The London-based Jewish Chronicle came under the leadership of Sir Francis Goldsmid (1808 – 1878), of the wealthy banking family.[12] A century earlier, members of the Goldsmid family were Masons who funded the career of Rabbi Falk.[13] Schneerson published articles in Hebrew presses in Israel and abroad, one of was quoted in Moshe Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem. In most of his talks, Schneerson stressed the idea that the Jews would soon be given control of Eretz Israel, proposed plans for the return of the Jews in large numbers and for the building of viable Jewish agricultural communities there.

Schneerson departed to return to Israel in 1863, and learned of Derisht Zion, a book by Forty-Eighter Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795 – 1874), in which he found ideas similar to his own. In 1848, Kalischer, who was born in Poland and educated in Berlin, Breslau and Prague, went to London, and the United States in 1849. In 1850, he was called to the Tifereth Israel congregation in Cleveland, Ohio, where he advanced the interest of Reform Judaism. Owing to Kalischer’s activism, the Alliance Israélite Universelle founded the Mikveh Israel agricultural school in Palestine in 1870. Through having exerted a strong influence on such prominent men as Heinrich Grätz and Moses Hess, he is considered to have been one of the most important of those who prepared the way for the foundation of modern Zionism.

According to Kalischer, the time was ripe for the carrying the Zionist ideals, as the sympathy of men like Crémieux, Montefiore, Edmond James de Rothschild (1845 – 1934), and Albert Cohn (1814 – 1877)—a French philanthropist with a lifelong connection with the Rothschild family—rendered the Jews politically influential. Cohn was a member of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, and did much to further its progress. Working with Moses Montefiore, Sir Anthony de Rothschild, Dr. Ludwig Philippson and others, Cohn obtained a recognition of the rights of Jews in Turkey. Cohn visited Palestine several times, and with the financial assistance of the Rothschilds, established a hospital erected, and schools.[14]

Albert Cohn had been introduced to Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774 – 1856), considered one of the most accomplished orientalists of his time, who employed him as one of his secretaries. According to Hammer-Purgstall, in his “Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum” in volume 6 of Fundgruben des Orients, there was found among the antiquities of the Imperial Museum of Vienna some idols named Heads of Baphomet, which the Templars were said to have venerated. It had been seized during a Templar retreat, at a time when they were pursued by the law. The term “Baphomet,” the idol of the Templars, according to his interpretation, signifies the baptism of Metis, or of fire, and is, therefore, connected with the impurities of the Gnostic Ophites.

In 1869, Schneerson travelled to the United States to raise funds and publicize his views on the coming of the messiah.[15] Upon his arrival, an invitation was sent to him by the following Rabbis which resulted in a lecture at the New-York Historical Society on February 17, 1869.[16] Among those who signed the invitation were Samuel Adler (1809 – 1891) of Temple Emanu-El, Rabbi Dr. David Einhorn of Adath Yeshurun, and Rabbi Yehuda Lyons (1814 – 1877) of Shearith Israel, co-founder of Mount Sinai Hospital. During the American Civil War, Joseph Seligman was president of Temple Emanu-El in New York City, a flagship congregation in the Reform branch of Judaism in the United States. In 1857, after the death of Founding Rabbi Merzbacher, another German Jew, Samuel Adler, became his successor. Adler was succeeded in 1873 by a Prussian-born American rabbi Gustav Gottheil (1827 – 1903), the father of “reluctant father of American Zionism,” Columbia professor Richard Gottheil (1862 – 1936).

The list included Rabbi Samuel Myer Isaacs (1804 – 1878), who was editor of The Jewish Messenger and a founder of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, whose president was Moses Montefiore. Isaacs’s sons were lawyer and judge Myer S. Isaacs (1841 – 1904), who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and Rabbi Abram S. Isaacs (1851 – 1920), who also became editor The Jewish Messenger. The president of the board was Isaac’s friend Adolph L. Sanger (1842 – 1894), a leader of the B’nai B’rith, and superintendent of the Temple Emanu-El religious school. Also included were Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887) was an American Congregationalist clergyman, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 – 1896), best known for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., such that, when Lincoln met with Stowe, he was supposed to have said to her, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”[17]

Schneerson then travelled to Washington where he lectured twice in the presence of large audiences that included the Ottoman ambassador, members of the President’s family, and several of the Ministry and of Congress. He then managed to obtain an interview with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish (1808 – 1893), and finally President Ulysses S. Grant. The New York Times described, how, dressed in “Oriental costume,” consisting of a “rich robe of silk, a white damask surplice, a fez, and a splendid Persian shawl fastened about his waist,” he walked toward the president who rose courteously to greet him.[18] The purpose of the exchange was to recommend to President Grant that he replace the then consul in Jerusalem, as the community is best served by having Jews serve the role of ambassadors around the world. As reported in The National Intelligencer, Schneerson explained to Grant that, given the oppression that Jews suffered in the Holy Land:

 

The only shelter the Israelites occasionally find is in the courts of the different European consulates, where one of their coreligionists is employed either as interpreter or deputy consul, who convey their grievances to the proper channel. This free Republic alone, whose banner covers the oppressed, whose foundation is based on equality, toleration, and liberty of conscience, has no Israelites employed near the consul at Jerusalem. I do pray, therefore, your Excellency, to turn your attention to the deplorable condition of my brethren in the Orient, that the principles of this Government may be truly embodied in its representatives abroad.[19]

 

After meeting with President Grant, Schneerson embarked upon a tour across America to California. In Cincinnati, he told audiences that he felt he could discern the finger of God pointing to a day “not far distant, he hoped, when the great deliverance would take place and the land [of Israel] be restored to the Jewish people.”[20] He also received an invitation from Brigham Young, leader of the Mormon movement, signed “In the cause of Israel,” to speak to the “Tabernacle on subjects of such deep and abiding interest to us all as the past history and present condition of God’s covenant people Israel.”[21] Schneersohn eventually returned to Jerusalem, but not before obtaining American citizenship before his departure from the United States.[22]

In light of his success in having the American consul in Jerusalem replaced, on January 19, 1870, Schneerson wrote a long letter to Grant, thanking him again for the favor, but this time to ask him that a Jew be also appointed consul in Romania. As noted by Lloyd P. Gartner, writing in the American Jewish Historical Review:

 

Why Grant and Fish willingly met the oddly clad foreigner is unclear, even though the global responsibilities of American Presidents were not very taxing. Curiosity or cordiality aside, the new President, only three months in office, desired to please Jewish opinion which had shown during the Presidential campaign of 1868 that it remembered his anti-Jewish General Order No. 11 of Civil War days.[23]

 

As Peixotto’ position was unpaid, his financial needs were covered by a group of wealthy American Jews, along with the B’nai B’rith, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, and prominent French and English Jews led by Sir Francis Goldsmid. Representatives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Anglo-Jewish Association, Israelitische Allianz demanded that the Romanian government cease the persecution and grant emancipation to “the Romanian Israelites.”[24] Peixotto’s reports to the United States resulted in the American government sending letters to its ministers at the various European courts inviting cooperation in ending Jewish persecution in Romania. Peixotto’s reports also inspired an important meeting at the Mansion House in London which produced a message of sympathy for the Jewish cause delivered by Lord Shaftesbury.

Congress of Berlin

An article in the New York Times in 1877 reported that a dispatch sent by the Department of State from the United States Minister to Turkey, providing details concerning the condition of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, noted that of the total of 500,000, 250,000 lived in Romania, 80,000 in Asiatic Turkey, 75,000 in European Turkey, and another 2,000 or so in the Balkans. The minister however noted that norms of Ottoman justice provided better treatment for the Jews than in many parts of Europe, as they were recognized as an independent community, with the privileges of their own religious rule. The article notes that the only instance of mistreatment was perpetrated against Schneersohn by his own Jewish community. The article reports that “On Nov. 28, 1874, the Rabbi was set upon by his co-religionists, certain Jews at Tiberias, robbed of a considerable amount, and most shamefully maltreated by being imprisoned, stoned, stripped naked and ridden in that condition through the streets of Tiberias, barely escaping with his life.” The United States Consul in Beirut went to Tiberias to have the perpetrators arrested, but some claimed British protection and escaped, while friends of the others overpowered the authorities and rescued them. The affair ended with the United States Minister in Constantinople requesting American consular officers throughout the Empire to monitor the conditions of Jews and to report any instances of persecution of Jews to the legation in Constantinople.[25]

In the 1860s and 1870s, the citizenship of Jews in Romania had become a European diplomatic concern, and part of the larger question concerning the status of religious groups in the new Balkan states emerging from the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The cause of the Romanian Jews was at the forefront of the Alliance’s efforts, becoming a test case for the larger issue of the emancipation of Eastern European Jews in general. To this end, influential Jewish organizations in Europe, led by the Alliance, established an informal network to generate international sympathy for the cause of Romania’s Jews. It included Crémieux and Armand Lévy (1827 – 1891) another prominent leaders of the Alliance. Born in a Roman Catholic family, but with a Jewish grand-father, Lévy was passionate about the Jewish cause. He was also an anti-clericalist Freemason and supported the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune. He fought alongside friends, such the crypto-Fankist Adam Mickiewicz, Mazzini’s collaborator Count Cavour, and Ion Brătianu (1864 – 1927), for the independence of Poland and Romania, and for the unification of Italy.[26] In Germany were Rothschild agent Baron Gerson von Bleichröder, and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In Great Britain, Moses Montefiore, President of the Board of Deputies of the British Jews. And, in Vienna, Moritz von Goldschmidt (1803 – 1888), Prussian consul and authorized representative of the Rothschild banking house.

This influential coalition also extended to Peixotto in Bucharest. [27] In Romania, Peixotto developed a friendship with between Carol I of Romania (1839 – 1914), and Peixotto initiated a conference of world Jewish organizations that convened in Brussels in 1872. Under the influence of Romanian maskilim, emigration was considered to be unpatriotic was rejected in favor of pressuring the Romanian government grant emancipation to all Jews. The conditions of the Jews in Romania were discussed at the international conferences in Brussels in 1872, in Paris in 1876 and at the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, when the Jewish question finally became a real “European question.”[28]

Congress of Berlin in 1878, a diplomatic conference to reorganize the states in the Balkan Peninsula after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, which had been won by Russia against the Ottoman Empire. Among Peixotto’s agents who played an influential role at the Congress was Adolphe Stern (1848 – 1931), who was Peixotto’s secretary. Stern published translations of nineteenth-century Romanian writers, and his work in translations of Schiller, Goethe, Heine, D’Annunzio, and Shakespeare into Romanian played a key role in solidifying his reputation and winning him Romanian citizenship in 1880. He also founded the Society of Zion with Peixotto, which became a Romanian arm of the B’nai B’rith. Another was Joseph B. Brociner (1846 – 1918), who was as President of the Union of Hebrew Congregations of Romania. He joined the Galați Lodge of the Grand Orient of France in 1868, and attained the thirty-third degree. In 1873, Brociner was chosen president of the local committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. In 1884, Brociner would become vice-president of the Galati committee for establishing Jewish settlements in Palestine, which were afterward taken under the protection of Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris.

The Jewish community of Berlin petitioned the chairman of the congress and head of the German delegation, Otto von Bismarck, to raise the question of equal rights for Romanian Jews. As a result, the German representatives were instructed to place conditions in the peace treaty demanding equal civil rights for the members of all religions in the Balkan countries.[29] To deal with the Jewish questions, a special council was established in Berlin consisting of Stern and Brociner, as well as the representatives of the Committee for Jewish Affairs in Berlin, which included Bleichröder, Jacob Bernays (1792 – 1849), the son of Isaac Bernays of the “neo-Orthodox” Hakham of Hamburg, Berthold Auerbach of the Frankfurt Judenlodge, and Moritz Lazarus (1824 – 1903), the president of the Berlin branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Other representatives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle also included Emanuel Veneziani (1825 – 1889), a director of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, and Charles Netter (1826 – 1882), who was among the founders of the first Masonic lodge in Jerusalem in 1873.[30]

Adolphe Crémieux and Baron de Hirsch contributed funds in support of the establishment by the Alliance Israélite Universelle of a free school by Netter in Jerusalem in 1868, followed by Mikveh Israel near Jaffa in 1870, after he was granted a tract of land from the Ottoman Emperor.[31] Netter, the first headmaster, introduced new methods of agricultural training, with Baron Edmond James de Rothschild contributing to the upkeep of the school. Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer was offered the rabbinate, but he was too old to accept it.

In order to submit the requests of the Jews to the representatives of the different governments, Baron Maurice de Hirsch and Moses Montefiore began negotiations with the representatives of England and France, and Bleichröder attended to Bismarck and the Russian representative, Count Shuvalov (1827 – 1889). Romania acquired the status of a sovereign kingdom only upon the express condition that the civil and political rights of the Jews should be recognized.[32] As Lord Salisbury (1830 – 1903), who was then serving as Foreign Secretary, remarked on July 24, 1879, that the powers in Berlin “adopted somewhat unusual, if not unprecedented course of making their recognition of a great political change dependent upon certain modifications of the internal laws of the country”[33]

A memorandum in the protocol of documents submitted to the congress on the question of a future of Jewish homeland in Palestine but was not discussed on the floor. In June 1878, a group of Jewish leaders submitted a memorandum to the congress, addressed to Bismarck and Disraeli, requesting that the Jews in Palestine should be granted their independence, just as that of the people in Balkan had been, and permitted to establish a constitutional Jewish monarchy. Before the congress assembled, there were discussions in the British press about a political resurgence of the Jews in Palestine. After the congress was concluded, Serbia and Bulgaria complied with the clauses of the peace treaty obliging them to grant equal rights to their minorities, and even incorporated these clauses in their constitutions. Romania refused to meet her obligation, and the struggle to implement paragraph 44 of the peace treaty extended over many years.[34]

Temple Israel

Upon his return to the United States in 1876, Peixotto was received with honor and invited to deliver many addresses in various parts of the country. He aided in forming the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), founded in 1873 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, and which has since been renamed Union for Reform Judaism, and which merged with the Board of Delegates of American Israelites in 1878, at the urging of Simon Wolf.[35] Peixotto used his influence to help President Hayes win the election in 1876, and was appointed United States consul at Lyons, France. In 1885, he returned to the United States and returned the practice of law in New York city. The following year, he founded The Menorah, the monthly journal of the B’nai B’rith. He served as one of the trustees of the Hebrew Technical Institute, and of Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in Manhattan in New York, and was one of the founders of the Ohio Society.[36]

The Ohio Society of New York was founded by Civil War General Thomas Ewing Jr. (1829 – 1896). Though a staunch friend and ally of Abraham Lincoln, when Edwin Stanton engaged in a post-assassination flap with Ewing’s brother-in-law William T. Sherman (1820 – 1891) over final surrender terms to the Southern armies, Ewing agreed to represent two employees of the Ford Theatre where Lincoln was assassinated, in the Lincoln conspiracy trials.

When Peixotto died in 1890, at the funeral, which the New York Times at the time described as “impressive services,” the leading lights of the B’nai B’rith and the Reform movement in the United States were in attendance, many of whom would go on to lead the Zionist movement.[37] A large number of associations were represented, including the Hebrew Technical Institute, the Harlem Republican Club, Menorah Publishing, the Hebrew Free School, the Independent Order of the Sons of Benjamin, the Lawyer’s Club, the Downtown Business Men’s Republican Club, the Harlem Club, and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.

The funeral took place in Temple Israel of Harlem, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. Henry Pereira Mendes of Shearith Israel, founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), conducted the service. Tribute was paid to him by Adolph L. Sanger and Maurice H. Harris (1859 – 1930), of Temple Israel of Harlem, who had been ordained a rabbi by Gustav Gottheil in 1884. In addition to Sanger and Myer S. Isaacs, the pallbearers included Julius Bien (1826 – 1909), president of B’nai B’rith. In Frankfurt, Bien had been a student of Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800 – 1882), a member of the Judenlodge, known for his portraits of famous Jewish personalities like the Mendelssohns and the Rothschilds.[38] He fought in the 1848 Revolution, before fleeing to New York. He produced a lithographed edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America. The funeral was attended by Philip Cowen (1853 – 1943), founder of the American Hebrew who was involved in B’nai B’rith. Another was Adolphus Simeon Solomons (1826 – 1910), was also an honorary trustee and general agent of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, central committee member and American treasurer of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, acting president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Multiple relatives attended including Cyrus Leopold Sulzberger (1858 – 1932), who was married to Peixotto’s niece, Rachel Peixotto Hays, and was an early trustee of Temple Israel. Cyrus’s great-grandfather, Benjamin Seixas, brother of the famous rabbi and American Revolutionary Gershom Mendes Seixas of Congregation Shearith Israel, was one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. Cyrus’ brother Solomon E. Sulzberger (1840 – 1917) was president of the B’nai B’rith and president of Temple Israel. Cyrus would later attend the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. Cyrus’s son was New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1891 – 1968).

Sulzberger’s wife, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, was the daughter of Adolph Simon Ochs (1858 – 1935) and Effie Wise, the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Adolph’s parents were Julius Ochs and Bertha Levy, who Rabbi Bertram W. Korn in Eventful Years and Experiences, has identified among the forty Jewish political refugees of the Revolutions of 1848.[39] In 1855, Bertha married a fellow German Jewish immigrant, Julius Ochs. During the Civil War, Julius was an officer in the Union Army stationed in Cincinnati, engaged primarily in guarding the Ohio River. Bertha, however, was sympathetic to the Confederacy. In The Trust, a 1999 authorized biography of the Ochs-Sulzberger families, authors Susan Tifft and Alex Jones write that Bertha “embraced a contemptuous antebellum view of blacks, and for the rest of her life was dogmatically conservative, even reactionary.”[40] Shortly after purchasing The New York Times newspaper in 1896, Ochs coined the paper’s slogan, “All The News That’s Fit To Print.” But when Ochs came to New York, he brought his Southern sympathies with him, and ten years after he took over the newspaper, it ran a celebratory profile of Jefferson Davis. Under Ochs’ guidance, aided by Carr Van Anda (1864 – 1945), The New York Times achieved international scope, circulation, and reputation. Through Iphigene and her husband Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who became publisher after Adolph died, Ochs’ descendants continue to publish The New York Times through the present day.


[1] John Y. Simon. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant: July 1, 1868 – October 31, 1869. Vol. 19. (Southern Illinois University Press, 1967). p. 37.

[2] J. Stoddard Johnston (ed.). Memorial History of Louisville From its First Settlement to the Year 1896. Vol. II. (American Biographical Publishing Co, 1896), pp. 275–276

[3] David G. Dalin. Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court From Brandeis to Kagan (Brandeis University Press, 2017), pp. 2–3.

[4] Ibid., pp. 2.

[5] Max J. Kohler. “Simon Wolf.” The American Jewish Year Book, 26 (1924), p 409.

[6] Dalin. Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court From Brandeis to Kagan, pp. 2–3.

[7] Naomi Wiener Cohen. Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership, (Brandeis University Press, 1999), p. 2; Falk’s commonplace book: Jewish Museum, London: United Synagogue Beth HaMidrash Library, London, as summarized in Adler, “Baal Shem,” 149, 166–73.

[8] Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 217.

[9] Immanuel Etkes. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Origins of Chabad Hasidis (Brandeis University Press, 2015), p. 185.

[10] “Hyam Zvee Sneersohn: The First Chabad Rabbi in Los Angeles, 1870 – JMAW – Jewish Museum of the American West.” Jewish Museum of the American West. Retrieved https://www.jmaw.org/sneersohn-chassid-los-angeles/

[11] Avner Holtzman &David Fachle. “Magid, Ha-.” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (August 27, 2010). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_YIVO_Encyclopedia_of_Jews_in_Eastern_Europe

[12] “Peixotto.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/peixotto

[13] Schuchard. “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” p. 217.

[14] Henry Samuel Morais. Eminent Israelites of the Nineteenth Century: A Series of Biographical Sketches (E. Stern & Company, 1879), p. 36.

[15] Jonathan D. Sarna. “President Grant and the Chabadnik.” Jewish Review of Books (Spring 2012). Retrieved from https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/200/president-grant-and-the-chabadnik/

[16] “Rabbi H. Z. Schneersohn…” The American Israelite (February 12, 1869), pp. P6. Retrieved from https://www.newspapers.com/image/531505295

[17] Charles Edward Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911).

[18] Jonathan D. Sarna. “President Grant and the Chabadnik.” Jewish Review of Books (Spring 2012). Retrieved from https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/200/president-grant-and-the-chabadnik/

[19] Dr. Yitzchok Levine. “The Jerusalem Rabbi Who Met President Ulysses S. Grant. Stevens Institute of Technology. Retrieved from https://personal.stevens.edu/~llevine/sneersohn.pdf

[20] I. Harold Shafrman. The First Rabbi: Origins of Conflict Between Orthodox and Reform: Jewish Polemic Warfare in Pre-Civil War America: A Biographical History (Pangloss Pr, Santa Barbara, California, U.S.A., 1988), pp. 527 - 531; cited in Dr. Yitzchok Levine. “The Jerusalem Rabbi Who Met President Ulysses S. Grant. Stevens Institute of Technology.”

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Lloyd P. Gartner. “Roumania, America, and World Jewry: Consul Peixotto in Bucharest, 1870 – 1876.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly (September 1968-June 1969), p. 5. Cited in Dr. Yitzchok Levine. “The Jerusalem Rabbi Who Met President Ulysses S. Grant.”

[24] L.-Z. Herșcovici. “The Maskilim of Romania and the Question of Identity: ‘The Romanian Israelites.’” Annals of the University of Bucharest / Political science series, 1 (2018), p. 12.

[25] “Israelites in Turkey.” The New York Times (August 23, 1877). p. 1. Retrieved from https://www.newspapers.com/image/20339299

[26] Jerzy Wojciech Borejsza. Sekretárz Adama Mickiewicza: Armand Lévy i jego czasy, 1827-1891 (Warsaw, 1969); Samuel Scheps. Armand Lévy: compagnon de Mickiewich, révolutionaire romantique (1977).

[27] Constantin lordachi. Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities: The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750-1918. Balkan Studies Library (Leiden: Brill), p. 307.

[28] Giuseppe Motta. “Nationalism and Anti-Semitism in an Independent Romania.” Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Vol 8 No 2 (July 2019), p. 16.

[29] Nathan Gelber. Encyclopaedia Judaica. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/modern-europe/turkish-and-ottoman-history/congress-berlin

[30] Leon Zeldis. “Jewish and Arab Masons in the Holy Land: Where Ideas can Fashion Reality.” First Regular Meeting of Quatuor Coronati Lodge 112 Regular Grand Lodge of Italy (Rome, March 20, 2004). Retrieved from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/zeldis12.html

[31]  “Landmarks in the history of Mikveh Israel.” Mikveh Israel Website. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20091101110931/http://www.mikveisrael.org.il/P301/

[32] Cyrus Adler, E. A. Cardozo. “Peixotto.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11993-peixotto; Benjamin Peixotto. “Principality, now Kingdom, of Roumania.” Menorah Vol. I. JULY, 1886 No. 1. p. 212.

[33] Giuseppe Motta. “Nationalism and Anti-Semitism in an Independent Romania.” Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Vol 8 No 2 (July 2019), p. 16.

[34] “Congress of Berlin.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/berlin-congress-of

[35] Esther L. Panitz. Simon Wolf: Private Conscience and Public Image (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1987), pp. 82–85.

[36] Cyrus Adler & E.A. Cardozo. “Peixotto.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11993-peixotto; Benjamin Peixotto. “Principality, now Kingdom, of Roumania.” Menorah Vol. I. JULY, 1886 No. 1. p. 212.

[37] “Funeral of B. F. Peixotto.” The New York Times. Vol. XL, no. 12190. New York, N.Y. (September 22, 1890). p. 8. Retrieved from https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1890/09/22/103266451.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0

[38] Katz. Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723-1939, p. 82.

[39] Fedora S. Frank. Five Families and Eight Young Men (Nashville: Tennessee Book Company, 1962), p. 25.

[40] Susan Tifft & Alex Jones. The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times (Back Bay Books, 2000).

Zionism