The Last Ships from Hamburg Quotes

“Like Germany, Austria-Hungary was not interested in opening its doors to a flood of Jewish refugees from Russia. Then in 1891, the Kaiser’s cousin Alexander III intensified his already draconian anti-Semitic state policies. He and his uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, ordered the expulsion of all Jews living in Moscow and several other large cities in the Pale of Settlement. Suddenly, thousands of Jews were now homeless, forced to leave their possessions and businesses behind as they looked for new places to live. Some moved to smaller villages, others to cities not affected by the edicts. Tens of thousands more, however, made the decision to try to get out of Russia altogether, resulting in an immigrant surge.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Privately, Bismarck felt that the young emperor was incapable of steering the German ship of state, and that he would surround himself with sycophants rather than wise and prudent advisers. Bismarck had used wars with France and Austria-Hungary to consolidate the German Empire, but within carefully calculated limits. His worry was that Wilhelm would stumble into a military conflict that would destroy the hard work of creating the new Germany. He was particularly concerned about political instability in southeastern Europe. “If there is ever another war in Europe,” Bismarck said soon after Wilhelm assumed the throne, “it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“In 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared his independence by jettisoning Otto von Bismarck from his government. He felt that a brilliant personality like Bismarck overshadowed the glory and power of the monarchy. Bismarck, for his part, looked askance at the Kaiser’s dream of creating a German navy and an overseas empire to rival those of Great Britain. The future of Germany, he felt, lay in being a self-contained, largely landlocked nation that depended on agriculture, industry, and natural resources.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“So Jacob Schiff, one of the richest men in America, decided it was time to put virtue ahead of profit and give away his time and money to save his people from the tyranny of the czarist government. As he grew richer, he devoted more of his time to Jewish causes and less time to the lucrative goyish railroad business. Jacob Schiff would become the most outspoken and tireless advocate for Jewish life and culture worldwide.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“For Schiff, it was czarist Russia that was the great enemy of the Jewish people. Reports of the increasingly brutal pogroms and military conscriptions of Jewish boys enraged him. As a banker, he could call out for regime change in Russia, but the power of the Romanovs made that extremely unlikely. He concluded that if Alexander III remained on his throne, the only way for Russia’s Jews to improve their lot was to get out and come to America.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“The new German nation, Stoecker argued, had to impose strict limits on Jewish participation in all sectors of life. “Either we succeed in this,” he concluded, “and Germany will rise again, or the cancer from which we suffer will spread further. In that event our whole future is threatened and the German spirit will become Judaized.” In 1881, Stoecker was elected to a seat in the Reichstag, where he continued to spew anti-Semitic hatred.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“The court preacher was Adolf Stoecker, one of the most outspoken anti-Semites in Germany, who argued that the German Jews, no matter how hard they tried to assimilate, would never be part of the German Volk. In addition to his religious duties in Berlin, Stoecker was also the organizer of the Christian Social Workers’ Party, which advocated for conservative social values and the economic protection of the German working classes, or Mittelstand. In 1879, Stoecker delivered an address that swept the nation by storm. He said: The Jews are and remain a people within a people, a state within a state, a separate tribe within a foreign race. All immigrants are eventually absorbed by the people among whom they live—all save the Jews. They pit their unbroken Semitic character against Teutonic nature, their rigid cult of law or their hatred of Christians against Christianity. We cannot condemn them for this; as long as they are Jews, they are bound to act in this way. But we must, in all candor, state the necessity of protecting ourselves against the dangers of such an intermingling.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Seligman had patronized the Grand Union Hotel for years. But that spring, when he showed up to check in at the front desk along with his wife and retinue of servants, the hotel clerk refused the family admission because they were Jewish. Seligman was shocked. He had dealt with anti-Semitic slurs when traveling the American countryside as a young peddler and largely shrugged them off. He protested, but the clerk said that the hotel’s owner, Judge Henry Hilton, had decreed members of the “Hebrew race” were no longer welcome. Although Henry Hilton was no friend of the Jews, the real reason for the snub was personal: Seligman had not invited Hilton to a dinner he hosted in honor of President Ulysses S. Grant several years earlier.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“When the German Jews arrived en masse, they did face backlash from the Sephardic Jews who had established family fortunes before the Revolution and considered themselves the equal of the Protestant upper crust. By and large, they considered the German Jews brassy, unpolished, and uncouth. A group of German Jews, for example, was prevented from joining the Union Club, New York’s most prestigious social organization, one that counted several Sephardic families on the rolls. To retaliate, the new immigrants founded the Harmonie Club, an organization that ostensibly was about German choral singing but in reality was a German Jewish version of the Union Club.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“The American Jewish community remained minuscule until the Civil War. In 1861, there were only 150,000 Jews in America, with most of them residing in big coastal cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans. Because of their relatively small numbers and their colonial roots, Jews in America had been left mostly undisturbed by discriminatory practices.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“In New York City, prominent and wealthy German Jews such as Jacob Schiff took notice of Russia’s increasing persecution of its Jewish population. More alarmingly, they began to notice strains of anti-Semitism creeping into their own daily lives, no matter how assimilated they thought they had become.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Schiff was quick to criticize Jews like Cassel who he felt had forsaken their faith, especially members of his own family. Even so, Cassel became a close friend of Schiff and a confidant of Edward, Prince of Wales, who very much enjoyed the company of Jewish bankers and businessmen.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“With his brother-in-law James Loeb out of the picture, Schiff was now the undisputed heir to the banking kingdom. Leveraging his strong connections to European banks, Schiff turned Kuhn, Loeb & Co. into an adviser for blue-chip transportation clients such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and Union Pacific. Over the course of his career, his work for the Pennsylvania alone amounted to close to one billion dollars in public offerings and loans. Scrupulous to detail, Schiff preferred learning from experience and people rather than from books.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Soon, Solomon Loeb was so overwhelmed by Schiff’s energy that in 1888 he went into semi-retirement. Even if he felt shunted aside at his own firm, Loeb knew that his son-in-law’s energy was paying off, as were his connections to prominent Jewish banking families such as the Warburgs in Germany.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“As a warning shot to the rest of the extended Loeb-Schiff family, Schiff stipulated in his will that if either of his children married a non-Jew, they would be permanently disinherited.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Hartford, Connecticut, transplant John Pierpont Morgan.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“After Jacob and Therese married on May 6, 1875, Schiff’s father-in-law, Solomon Loeb, elevated him to a senior partnership at Kuhn, Loeb & Co., a position Jacob did not see as a sinecure. Schiff surveyed the investment banking landscape of New York City and decided to make it to the top. This meant taking on not just J. W. Seligman & Co., the other prominent Jewish firm in the city, but also the formidable and thoroughly gentile Drexel, Morgan & Co., led by the established Philadelphian Anthony J. Drexel and the up-and-coming”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“The two big players in funneling European capital to the United States were Baring Brothers & Co., based in London, and the Rothschild partnership, with branches in London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Vienna. Both firms, gentile and Jew, had their powerful agents in major American cities, especially New York.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“But Jacob Schiff, as much as he wanted to be close to his mother in Frankfurt, realized he had to “reemigrate” back to America. As he wrote her when he returned, “The opportunity is enormous here. The coming expansion of the United States, in railroading and all that, is so large that I myself don’t feel there will be a foreign branch for some time to come. There is more than enough to keep us here.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Jacob Schiff was one of millions of Germans coming to America looking for a better life. The year after Schiff’s birth, a series of revolutions rocked the old monarchies of Europe, especially in the patchwork of kingdoms that made up the yet-to-be-unified German Confederation. Following an outbreak of poorly planned demonstrations and uprisings by students and social liberals, the ruling aristocrats, spurred by the fear of the second coming of the guillotine, cracked down with brutal force. The result was a mass immigration of Germans to America. Some were Jews, but most were Protestants and Catholics. Many of the German Jews who settled in the United States hit the back roads of the country as peddlers. Some used their earnings from selling pots, pans, and assorted tchotchkes to start brokerage houses. Two such German Jewish immigrants were Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb, who started a dry goods firm in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, the two men formed the investment house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and moved their operations to New York City.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Frankfurt was one German city that did not expel its Jews. Yet this hardly meant tolerance. Until the late eighteenth century, Germany’s remaining Jews were confined to specific neighborhoods, known as ghettos, a term first used in Venice centuries earlier. As Germany was a patchwork of small states, principalities, and free cities, treatment of the Jewish population depended on the good graces of the ruling monarch or city senate.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Jakob Heinrich Schiff was born in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt in 1847, ten years before Albert Ballin. The Schiffs could trace their origins in Frankfurt to 1370, a time when many Jews were expelled from German cities after being blamed for the bubonic plague.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“After the promulgation of the May Laws, Konstantin Pobedonostsev granted an interview to the British journalist Arnold White, who himself was an advocate of restricting Jewish emigration to the United Kingdom. “The characteristics of the Jewish race are parasitic; for their sustenance they require the presence of another race as ‘host’ although they remain aloof and self-contained,” he told White. “Take them from the living organism, put them on a rock, and they die. They cannot cultivate the soil.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“RUSSIA, there was a clear-cut answer of who was Russian and who was not: a Russian was a white Caucasian communicant of the Russian Orthodox Church and a loyal subject of the czar. A Jew could never be a true Russian, even if he or she converted to Christianity. Konstantin Pobedonostsev made a cold prediction of the future of Russia’s Jews: “One third will die, one third will leave the country, and the last third will be completely assimilated within the Russian people.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“The May Laws, proposed by one of the czar’s appointed aristocrats, Count Ignatiev, and drafted by Pobedonostsev, placed a number of severe restrictions on the business and personal lives of Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, excluding Poland:”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Following the summer pogroms of 1881, Alexander III tasked several high-ranking aristocrats with investigating the so-called Jewish Question. A year after he ascended the throne, he promulgated the May Laws, whose main purpose was to single out and punish the Jews for the death of his father.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“In addition to the violent pogroms, Alexander III strengthened an initiative that sent shock waves of fear throughout the Pale of Settlement: military conscription. Although Jews were denied full citizenship rights, they were still fully eligible for the draft. Mass conscription into the czar’s army was nothing new. Alexander’s grandfather Nicholas I had instituted mandatory conscription quotas on Jewish communities as early as 1827. However, under his grandson’s reign, military conscription came with a terrifying new caveat: the drafting of Jewish children into the army. By taking boys as young as eight away from their parents, the czar hoped to deprive them of their religion and culture as part of a program known as Russification.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“For the Jews, a devotion to learning was a tradition to be guarded. For Alexander III and other believers in absolute monarchy, a literate population was a threat, especially when it was heavily skewed toward a group that placed no spiritual faith in the Orthodox Church. Alexander III had a special epithet for the Jews, meant to incite the populace into violence: Christ killers. In 1881, the full force of the czar’s wrath swept through Jewish communities in both cities and shtetls as saber-wielding Cossacks on horseback and peasants bearing torches and clubs descended upon a helpless population.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“few Jews in imperial Russia were able to break free of the restrictions put upon them by the czarist government. And a tiny few rose to great wealth as industrialists and merchants in big cities such as Warsaw and Kiev. One scholar of Jewish culture and language, Abraham Harkavy, became head of the Oriental Division of the Imperial Public Library, an appointment granted during the relatively liberal reign of Alexander II.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I

“Not all European rulers felt threatened by the Jews. Poland’s King Casimir III welcomed Jews from Spain, France, and German states who were fleeing the violent pogroms sparked by the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. Again, Jews became scapegoats.”
― Steven Ujifusa, The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I