It said something about the way Jews were perceived in America that Jay Gould, the widely reviled speculator, was regularly described as either being Jewish or possessing Jewish traits. Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, called Gould, a Presbyterian by birth, a “complex Jew.” Gould biographer Trumbull White noted, “Many who knew Mr. Gould intimately are in the habit of asserting that his origin must have been Hebraic….His habits of thought and his extraordinary intellect were both Jewish, these people assert.”[48]
