raised. His birthplace was that great center of Jewish international finance, Frankfort-on-the-Main. He became the founder of the Belmont family in America, which has largely forgotten its Jewish origin. Politics was a part of his concern in this country, and during the critical time from 1860 to 1872 he was chairman of the National Democratic Committee. His management of the Rothschild interests was exceedingly profitable to that house, although the operations in which he engaged were quite simple compared with the operations of the present day.
Jacob Schiff is another Jewish financier who was given to the world by Frankfort-on-the-Main. He entered the United States in 1865, after having passed his apprenticeship in the office of his father, who was also an agent of the Rothschilds. The name Schiff runs a long way back without change, unlike the name of Rothschild. Originally named Bauer, this family of financiers took a new name from the red shield which adorned their house in the Jewish section of Frankfort and thus became “Rot-schild.” Commonly the last syllable is pronounced as if it were “child”; it is “schild,” shield. An epoch-making family in itself, it has trained hundreds of agents and apprentices, of whom Jacob H. Schiff was one. He became one of the principal channels through which German-Jewish capital flowed into American undertakings, and his agency in these matters gave him a place in many important departments of American business, especially railroads, banks, insurance companies and telegraph companies. He married Theresa Loeb, and in due time came to be head of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company.
Mr. Schiff, too, was interested in politics with a Jewish angle, and was perhaps the moving force in the campaign which forced Congress and the President to break off treaty relations with Russia, then a friendly nation, on a strictly Jewish question which had been skillfully given an American aspect. Mr. Schiff was of inestimable assistance to Japan in the war against Russia, but is understood to have been disappointed by