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Two branches of the Schiff family have come together to support the digitization of the papers of Jacob Schiff, the prominent New York banker and philanthropist, held at 91����’s Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA) in Cincinnati. The Schiff Foundation II and the Schiff Family Foundation, representing the families of brothers Peter Schiff and David Schiff, Jacob Schiff’s great-grandsons, have committed a two-year gift to the project.

How the Gift Came Together

The idea took root over a family lunch. Andrew (Drew) Schiff, David’s son, was meeting with his cousin Peter Maass, a great-grandchild of Felix Warburg and great-great-grandchild of Jacob Schiff, who had been researching the family’s role in early Jewish settlement of Palestine for a forthcoming book. Maass, a journalist and author who covered the war in Bosnia for the Washington Post, had grown up knowing only the broad outlines of his family’s history — that Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg were wealthy and philanthropic — without knowing the details of their involvement in Palestine. Researching a 2024 Washington Post essay he wrote drawing on his own background as a war correspondent sent him looking for answers, and eventually to a book contract.

That research took him to Cincinnati for a week last fall, where the archivists brought him boxes of his ancestors’ original correspondence, four at a time. “As a journalist, as a writer of this book, I just can’t convey adequately the importance — not just informationally, but also emotionally — of actual contact with these documents, these letters, the originals,” Maass said. “You see that there is so much more depth than you realized—even when you thought you already knew the story.”

While there, he asked whether there were plans to digitize the collection. They told him they’d love to, but lacked the resources to move forward. Back in New York, Maass mentioned this to his cousin Drew Schiff.

Drew passed the idea along to his uncle, Peter Schiff, who happened to be traveling to Cincinnati and took the opportunity to meet with AJA Associate Director Dana Herman, Ph.D. He came away deeply impressed by the work underway and decided to support it — then asked his brother David’s family to join him. The two families, though they maintain separate foundations, have a long history of philanthropic collaboration, and both quickly agreed to fund the digitization together.

Why It Matters to the Family

For Drew, the appeal is personal as well as historical. Maass had shared letters from the archive, including correspondence Mortimer Schiff wrote to his father, Jacob, while traveling through Europe after World War I — the kind of firsthand material that, as Drew put it, “is fascinating not only to family members but to anyone interested in the era. I’m gratified and proud — it’s been really wonderful to see a renewed interest in Jacob Schiff and the things that he cared about and spent a lot of time and money and effort defending or supporting be of broad interest to the country more than a century later.”

More broadly, the family sees the project as a chance to widen public understanding of Jacob Schiff’s role in American and Jewish history: his historic investments in New York City, his support for the Henry Street Settlement and his close relationship with its founder, Lillian Wald; his advocacy in Washington to cut off funding to Russia as a result of the pogroms and state-sponsored antisemitism there; and his financing — through his close ties to Japanese finance minister Baron Takahashi — of Japan’s war effort against Russia in the early 1900s.

That relationship ran deep enough that Schiff traveled to Japan for an audience with the Emperor and was the first foreign recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun; Takahashi’s daughter later lived with the Schiff family in New York for two and a half years. Peter Schiff firmly believes that “people should know about this, and I hope that this digitization project makes this more accessible to your average layperson’s knowledge of that history.”

Maass sees the stakes in even broader terms. For him, the Schiff and Warburg papers preserve a nearly forgotten chapter of American Jewish history — the fierce, wide-ranging debate within the community, long before the founding of Israel, over whether Jews should settle in Palestine at all, and if so, under what kind of political arrangement. Digitizing the collection, in his view, is part of what makes that history usable again. “You can’t be part of the conversation unless your material is available in a digital way,” he said.

Today, this important primary source is available only to those able to travel to Cincinnati; digitization will make them accessible to researchers, students, and general readers anywhere.

From the Archive

In acknowledging the first installment of the gift, AJA Associate Director Dana Herman, Ph.D., says:

“The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives is privileged to serve as the repository for the papers of the noted philanthropist and banker Jacob Schiff. This collection is among the AJA’s most significant and most heavily used, and it continues to attract scholars, students, and researchers from around the world. We are enormously grateful to the Schiff family for recognizing its importance and supporting this work.”

The AJA will share updates as the digitization project progresses, including details on where and when the digitized materials will join with other digitized collections in allowing online access to all those interested in studying the American Jewish experience.