On March 13, 1881, Czar Alexander II was in his bullet-proof carriage—he had defied five assassination attempts—riding the snowy streets of St. Petersburg, when a socialist revolutionary hurled a bomb at his caravan. A Cossack guard was killed, but the Russian leader survived uninjured. As his guards apprehended the would-be assassin, Alexander did something stupid. Ignoring his entourage’s pleas that he remain in the carriage, he stepped out. As he paced in the street, a second assailant tossed another bomb. This one hit the target. The czar died hours later.

Weeks later, as rumors flew that Jews were behind the assassination, the pogroms began in Russia, with Jewish towns and villages attacked in a campaign of destruction, rape, and murder. And the death of Alexander II brought to the throne Alexander III, who despised Jews and endorsed a variety of repressive measures against them. All this led to a massive wave of emigration of Jews fleeing Russia and Eastern Europe over the next three decades. Among them were the families of three of my grandparents. Had Alexander II just stayed in that damn carriage, who knows what would have happened? Sometimes history turns on the smallest and dumbest decisions. (Yes, see World War I.)

Why bring this up now? I just finished reading The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America, the new book by Dan Schulman, and I learned this nugget of Jewish history from that. Schulman is my colleague at Mother Jones. He’s a wonderful editor, reporter, and historian—and a good friend. (He edits this newsletter.) Dan’s previous book was a brilliant biography of the Koch brothers, Sons of Wichita. This latest one—which comes out today—is a magisterial account of a handful of men who immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s from Germany and who rose from being merchants and commodity traders to financial titans. They happened to be Jewish. You might recognize their names: Goldman, Sachs, Lehman. This is the tale of how they helped build America by constructing its financial system and how they did and did not fit into American society, as they forged their own personal empires in the Gilded Age of robber barons and railroad magnates.

It's a masterful history of fascinating people that resonates today, as we discuss such contentious issues as Zionism, immigration, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories on the right. Dan was kind enough to chat with me about the book for an exclusive Our Land interview. (I’m his boss. How could he say no?)

DC: What drew you to this story? How did you go from the Koch brothers to Jewish immigrants a hundred years earlier?

DS: After I finished the Koch book, I was looking around for different topics, and I was interested in the World War I timeframe. I initially began to look at the wave of anarchist violence that occurred in the early 20th century. One of the recipients of an anarchist’s mail bomb was a fellow named Jacob Schiff. His name faintly registered for me. But I didn’t know much about him. He was an early Wall Street financier, a rival of J.P. Morgan. I came to find out that his story tied into my own family story of immigration from what was called the Pale of Settlement, the territory in the western part of the Russian Empire, where Jews were permitted to live. This is where my paternal grandparents had immigrated from in the early 1900s.

Schiff at the time was considered the leader of American Jewry in the United States. It was a much smaller Jewish community, but it was expanding rapidly because of the mob violence and persecution of Jews occurring within the Russian Empire that was unleashing waves of immigration. It was Schiff’s story that I was drawn toward. And you can’t tell it without telling the story of Marcus Goldman of Goldman Sachs, Samuel Sachs, a close friend of Schiff, and the Lehman brothers, also close personally and professionally to Schiff. All of these firms and families were closely interwoven. There were marriages between the families. They were friends and allies. They worshipped together. They did business together.

DC: Schiff was the central and towering figure among these families. What is his backstory?

DS: The first wave of German Jewish immigrants came to the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. Many came after revolutions in Europe, and some had participated in these revolutions in pursuit of human rights. Jews, at that time, especially in Germany, were not able to own property. There were limits on where they could live. The early Jewish immigrants came over and often started out as peddlers. Now Schiff was part of a different wave. He was from a well-established family in Frankfurt. Both sides were merchants and involved in finance. At the age of 18, he came to the United States after the Civil War ended. Very quickly he established himself in finance. Before he was 20, he opened his own brokerage. He started to channel European capital into American industry, particularly the railroads. That was how he rose in finance. And as he did, he became a major philanthropist, a significant player in politics, and the unelected leader of the American Jewish community.

DC: Financing the railroad system was like being in Big Tech today, right? Like financing Facebook.

DS: The railroads at that time were the arterial system of the national economy. Which could also be said of the Big Tech firms today. There are a lot of comparisons between that era and today. Historians have suggested we’re living in a new Gilded Age—in terms of wealth concentration, income inequality, and questions of monopoly power. Schiff and J.P. Morgan were at the forefront of what was called “Morganization”—essentially creating large monopolies. By the early 20th century, the entire railroad system was controlled by six groups of moguls. These factions were buying into each other’s railroad businesses to prevent competition among themselves. This is what touched off the modern trust-busting era.

DC: There is a quote attributed to Balzac, which he did not write: Behind every great fortune there is a crime. Is that what you found?

DS: I’m not sure there’s always a great crime. But if you look at a family like the Lehmans, their fortune was built upon slavery. They established themselves in Montgomery, Alabama, and quickly became integrated in the commercial and social life there. That was not easy for Jews to do at the time. If you look back at the early credit reports on the Lehmans, there are many comments that they cannot be trusted because they are Jewish. Ten years down the road, the credit reports say the Lehmans are “well-established, almost as good as white men.” They were involved in the cotton trade, and after the Civil War, the Lehman firm was managing plantations. In that sense, the origins of their fortune were the slave economy. Then they transferred their entire operation up to New York, where there was more money to be made with the early formation of the commodities markets.

DC: I love writing history because you see that the disputes and controversies of today are often continuations of debates and events of the past. In recent weeks, with the Hamas-Israel war, there has been much discussion of Zionism and antisemitism. In Jacob Schiff’s time, there was a major disagreement regarding Zionism within the Jewish community.

DS: Today, opposition to Zionism is sometimes equated with antisemitism. But the mainstream position of American Jews, especially Jacob Schiff, in the early 1900s was strong opposition to this idea of creating a Jewish nation. They feared Zionism would stir up antisemitism and lend support to the age-old myth that Jews could never be trustworthy citizens because they always had a loyalty to Jews above the nations where they lived. That had been the basis of medieval antisemitism and used to expel Jews from various places where they had lived for centuries.

Zionism emerged during these waves of immigration in the late 1800s. As Jewish immigrants were pouring into America, Schiff and his colleagues realized they had a responsibility to take care of these people, to make sure they rapidly assimilated, to make sure they did not bring down the image of the already-established Jews in this country. They realized how tenuous their own standing was, and how Jews were often judged by what other Jews did. That obviously remains true today. Schiff viewed Zionism as a grave threat. He was very devoted to the United States. This was one of the few places that had accepted Jews, where they could live, work, and worship freely, and where antisemitism, while it was present, did not exist as it did in Germany, where you couldn’t own property, you couldn’t marry who you wanted to marry, you couldn’t hold most professional jobs. So American Jews viewed America as their Zion.

There were very fierce clashes between Schiff and the Zionists. But what ended up changing the game was that immigration led to a nativist backlash. The immigration restrictionists in Congress were trying to impose literary tests and asset requirements and limit immigration from certain parts of the world. Eventually they succeeded, and America was no longer a refuge. At that point, Zionism started to take more of a hold. During World War I, there was an enormous Jewish refugee crisis. Where were these people going to go? So late in his life, Schiff enters negotiations with the Zionists to support Zionism. But he could not back the creation of a political state. Like other non-Zionists, he could agree to the settlement of Israel as a cultural and religious homeland for Jews but not as a political entity, not as a Jewish state.

DC: It was fascinating to read this part of the book. Schiff was very firm that the idea of Zionism was bad for the Jews. Others in his milieu believed that as well. It was a lively and visceral debate within the Jewish community—and it came at a time of profound change for American Jews. With the influx of immigrants from Russia and elsewhere—largely people from poor areas who were not highly educated—there were cultural clashes and political differences between the wealthy established German Jews of uptown Manhattan and those Eastern European Jews crowded into tenements on the Lower East Side and living in squalor.

DS: There was a lot of self-interest, as well as selfless philanthropy. But Schiff and the German Jews realized their fates were tied with the Russian and East European Jews, even though they shared little in common in terms of their backgrounds and their cultures. These differences created tremendous clashes within the Jewish community. At one point, Schiff announced he would no longer be involved in Jewish politics in any form. This was a reaction to coming under attack from Zionists because he gave speeches saying that Zionism was a bad idea and anti-American.

DC: How much did Schiff and the German Jews have to confront—and overcome—antisemitism? What did you learn about the history of antisemitism by doing this book?

DS: There were two distinct phases of antisemitism. The first is the ancient antisemitism that emerges 2,000 years ago or more, when Jews refused to assimilate to the empires that conquered the land where they lived. After the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, the notion that Jews were Christ-killers became part of the basis of ancient antisemitism. Over the years Jews were forced into financial roles because Christians and Muslims were generally not allowed to participate in professions that involved usury. And Jews developed a reputation for predatory financial activity. But they didn’t have many other options.

The next phase of antisemitism occurs with the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document that purported to be the minutes of a secret conclave of Jewish elders where they are plotting world domination. This fraud was published in a St. Petersburg newspaper in 1903. But the Protocols remained obscure. They didn’t circulate widely until the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when supporters of the deposed and assassinated czar who were then living in the United States began promoting this document. Boris Brasol published the first English-language version of it and worked closely with the Independent, a newspaper in Dearborn, Michigan, that was owned by Henry Ford and that regularly published explicitly antisemitic material. It launched a series called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” Week after week, Ford’s Independent attacked Jews. It went after Jacob Schiff and his business partners and placed them at the center of the effort to overthrow the czar for their own business interests. It wrote about the Protocols all the time. Brasol and Ford made the Protocols go viral, and Jews have dealt with the consequences of that ever since, for the Protocols are the foundation of modern antisemitism. When you today hear the terms “globalist” and “international banker,” that the Federal Reserve was a Jewish creation, this all flows from there.

DC: What sort of antisemitism did Schiff and his colleagues encounter? How did they fit or not fit into American society and New York society?

DS: There was definitely antisemitism and a few dramatic antisemitic events that happened in the 1800s. When Ulysses S. Grant was in charge of a military jurisdiction in the West during the Civil War, he issued General Order No. 11, which expelled Jews from this area. Grant was accusing them of engaging in smuggling and black-market activity. The subplot was that Grant’s father, who was a bit of a grifter, had hooked up with a trio of Jewish brothers who were trying to organize a shipment of cotton. They traveled to see Grant and make a pitch, and Grant was enraged. Within a few weeks, President Lincoln remanded the order; it had little actual effect. But it had a large psychological affect. Jews living in the US believed that they were being integrated into American society and that the prejudices they had faced in the Old Country were not as present here. A decade later, there’s another antisemitic episode that drew much attention. Joseph Seligman, a character in my book and one of the top bankers of the time, goes on vacation to Saratoga, New York, and at the Grand Union hotel, where he and his family had stayed previously, he’s told he’s no longer welcomed there because they are Jewish. The Jewish population was gobsmacked that this happened.

A lot of the Jewish banking firms did business with firms like J.P. Morgan that were run by Christian bankers. But there was a social separation. They would do business during the day. But when it came to socializing, the Jews often socialized among themselves and were not totally welcomed in Christian clubs and Christian society. In the early 1900s, this social separation became more pronounced. Jews were not allowed into various country clubs. Schiff and his friends were becoming fabulously wealthy, buying or building large estates on the Jersey shore. They were new money.

DC: Let’s go back to conspiracy theories and Jews. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion set up a lot of what we see today regarding conspiracy theories promoted by Alex Jones and supported by Donald Trump and Elon Musk when they go after billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Trump, who has praised Jones, has repeatedly amplified antisemitic tropes. In the 1990s, televangelist Pat Robertson wrote a book in which he alleged that the Rothschilds, a prominent Jewish banking family in Europe, was part of a satanic global cabal trying to take over the world. But in your book, we see that Jacob Schiff did fund an effort to indoctrinate Russian soldiers captured during the Russo-Japanese War of the early 1900s so when they would return to Russia they would oppose the czar and support his overthrow. One of Schiff’s business associates did help to create the Federal Reserve. And these Jewish financiers were involved in the peace negotiations at the end of World War I that created the harsh conditions in Germany that paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler. They did participate in issues that conspiracy theorists hone in on—as, of course, did WASPs and other non-Jews. Did you have any concern that with this book you might feed the very conspiracy theories that the book blows apart?

DS: If you looked at what these men did—and their influence over the 20th century—this is an amazing tale. Today we are living in the world they created. But does this feed antisemitic notions about Jewish influence? When I started looking at Jacob Schiff, I discovered that the people today who were most concerned with keeping his memory alive were antisemitic conspiracy theorists who disfigure his legacy and make it seem like everything he did had an evil intent. The real story of who these guys were is much more fascinating than the Alex Jones or Henry Ford version. What Ford did went into the world’s blood stream, and it has never been purged. People like Trump and Musk are echoing false concepts from the early 20th century unaware of where they come from. At the end of the day, the best thing you can do is to show who they really were and what really happened.

PS: If any Our Land reader buys a copy of The Money Kings and would like a bookplate signed by Dan Schulman, please write to us at ourland@motherjones.com and include a mailing address.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

“October Sun,” Oisin Leech. Oisin Leech is one half of the Irish musical duo known as The Lost Brothers that was formed in 2008 and went on to release six albums. They are traditionalists who have been part of the indie rock scene, collaborating with the Arctic Monkeys and members of Bright Eyes, Old Crow Medicine Show (best known for “Wagon Wheel”), and Bob Dylan’s band. Their records are full of moody and intriguing tunes with a hint of that Irish melancholy, and they remind me of the wonderful Milk Carton Kids. I highly recommend this pair. Leech has just released his own single, “October Sun,” a lovely and haunting ditty. It’s a beautiful autumnal offering.