Seth Chalmer on Daniel Schulman’s *The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America*

Ah, Jew-spotting!—a pastime beloved equally to antisemites and Jews. If you see someone constantly updating their social media feed with lists of famous or influential people that you might not have known are Jewish, then that someone could be the late and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving, but it could just as easily be the late and infamous (in your family) gefilte chef and tipsy hora dancer Uncle Irving.

My point isn’t that these Twin Irvings are equivalent. To the contrary—if you take up Jew-spotting, your motivations and intentions matter. David Irving and Uncle Irving might share the very same list of Jews to their Facebook feeds, with identical wording (“Tiffany Hadish—Jew! Alejandro Mayorkas—Jew!”) and both posts will have the same denotations, but David Irving’s overall career lends his list a connotation that the Jews in question are sinister, whereas, in his own context, Uncle Irving is clearly shepping nakhes. Luckily, the Twin Irvings do not define the only types of Jew-spotter—good news, because antisemitic rants and the blustery shepping of nakhes are both genres that tend (for most of us) toward the tiresome.

All this is to say that before I had even opened Daniel Schulman’s The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America[1]—and I opened it during a surge in global antisemitism which occurred after the book had already been published—the first thing I wanted to know was: Why this topic? One could write a history of bankers; one could write a history of Jews. But a history of Jewish bankers? David Irving and Uncle Irving would both be thrilled, I’m sure, but during such a true renaissance of the art of antisemitism as we see in full flower today, is that reason enough?

Schulman understands my concern. Noting that the exertion of “wealth and power” to change the world is a major theme of the book, Schulman confesses that he “initially hesitated to write” it. “Like many Jews,” he writes, “I am sensitive to the antisemitic canards that have plagued our people for centuries…” Still, he concludes, these figures “deserve to be known, understood, in some cases celebrated. Their stories illuminate much about the past and present, and that includes the origins of modern antisemitism… and the fraudulent mythology, in which these German-Jewish bankers feature prominently, that was used to justify mass murder. Maybe, I concluded, there was no better way to counter the lies than to tell their stories in full.”[2]

And “in full” is a promise Schulman keeps, almost (though not quite) to a fault. The Money Kings is a tale of generous proportions (to be fair, “epic” is right there in the subtitle), a story that spans multiple generations of multiple German-American Jewish finance families. We meet the Lehmans (they of the eponymous brothers and, much later, of 2008 bankruptcy fame), who began as peddlers and rose to the status of merchants, financiers, and supporters of the Confederacy in the antebellum and Civil War South. We meet the Seligmans, who embarked on a parallel rags-to-riches rise in the North and became Union-supporting Republicans. (I use the term “rags-to-riches” advisedly, since Joseph Seligman at one point employed Horatio Alger to tutor his children, and probably served as one of the main inspirations for Alger’s rags-to-riches stories.) We meet the Warburgs, a transatlantic banking family that might claim to have created much of the Jewish charitable sector as we know it (Felix Warburg) and the United States Federal Reserve (Paul Warburg). We meet the Goldmans and the Sachses, who are middling power players for much of the book, rising to supereminence only in its epilogue. We meet the Kuhn and Loeb families, progenitors of the more powerful firm Kuhn Loeb—and, speaking of the latter, The Money Kings, despite its span of multiple dynasties and generations, is a story that has a clear main character. In its pages, one man receives far more ink than anyone else, and it’s not a close call; that man is Jacob Schiff, senior partner at Kuhn Loeb and one of the most powerful and influential financiers and Jewish philanthropists in American Jewish history.

In depth and detail, Schulman shows us Schiff rising to the top of American finance; facing down J.P. Morgan in railroad-related financial rivalries; trying (and failing) to move large numbers of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the American West to avoid worsening crowded conditions on the Lower East Side of New York; pressuring the U.S. government to put pressure on Czarist Russia to ease its brutally antisemitic policies; ensuring that Russia is frozen out of financial credit markets during the Russo-Japanese war, as punishment for the same antisemitic policies; struggling to balance American loyalty and pro-German sentiment during World War I; founding charities and putting enormous energy into managing them; opposing the rise of Zionism and championing Jewish thriving in the Diaspora instead; and much more.

Schulman also shows us how Schiff, among others but as centrally as anyone else, emerges as a storied antagonist in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish financial power that persist in certain circles to this day. These theories are, of course, unhinged, largely because they implicitly treat it as natural and unworthy of mention that Gentile bankers like J.P. Morgan (and others) exerted even greater influence on world events than Schiff did, while treating it as nefarious that any Jew might do so as well. But, for all their distortions of emphasis and interpretation (along with embellishments and lies), these theories do draw on some facts, of the kind Schulman dutifully and rightly lays out—facts not of selfish scheming or puppet-masters pulling all the strings, but of altruistic actions taken by powerful men according to their own understandings of goodness, financial power wielded for purposes that were at once “tribal” (particularistic) and sincerely humanistic.

By telling a story that centers on Jacob Schiff, while extending significantly before and after him, Schulman sets himself a challenge faced by many an author of epic novels: how to span multiple lifetimes while still maintaining a unified story. He mostly succeeds. While a biography of Schiff alone might have been narratively tighter, it would deny the reader many fascinating sections. I would not want to have missed the parallel rises of the Lehman and Seligman families, North and South, before Schiff came to America; the controversy over Joseph Seligman being denied entry to a hotel in 1877, and the subsequent Jewish activist publicity around this incident which, while intended to confront and shame antisemitism, may have ended up giving antisemites encouragement and “social proof” that their views were widespread, making matters worse; the secret (but not nefarious!) history of the creation of the Federal Reserve; how the Warburgs and Goldmans, always patriotic Germans before that became untenable, faced the collapse of German Jewry during the Holocaust; and much more that goes beyond Schiff’s (albeit fascinating) life.

Much less would I wish to be deprived of the entire book merely because antisemites can make use of it. And let’s be clear: Antisemites can make use of it. This books shows German-American Jewish bankers having an enormous influence on the economy, politics, and geopolitics of the United States of America. If that fact makes one uncomfortable—whether because one hates the Jews and their influence or because one loves the Jews and hates that there are facts their enemies can use as ammunition—then so be it, but it remains a fact.

People consumed by hate can make use of anything, and when they don’t have facts to use (or even when they do), they will simply lie. People consumed by love or reason should not, therefore, fear to examine the truth, even at the risk of discomfort. Even at this moment in the contemporary history of antisemitism, which no one could have foreseen, and despite my initial wince at the topic, I am grateful to Daniel Schulman for this study of Jewish bankers and their influence. There is much more to their stories than either David Irving or Uncle Irving would be interested in telling you, and all of it is worth reading.

[1] Daniel Schulman, The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023).

[2] Ibid. xvii