Jewish Museum ca. 1978
When Jacob Schiff saw the design for this building, he told his daughter, Frieda, that it was "terribly conspicuous" and that it would "add to the social anti-Semitism" if she and her husband Felix Warburg, built "such an ornate house right on Fifth Avenue." Schiff was the longtime and exceedingly successful president of the German-Jewish investment banking firm Kuhn, Loeb, and Company, and his thoughts on the mansion spoke to the divide between elite Jews and Protestants in Gilded-era New York.
The two groups had what was called "a nine-to-five relationship." They did business with one another because it was in their financial interest. But outside of office hours, and particularly between the 18880s and 1920s, they traveled in their own social circles. The Jewish elite formed their own social clubs, which didn't make it into the social register. And wealthy Jewish families took a vacation at the Jersey Shore while the non-Jewish elite vacationed in Newport.
The separation was due in some part to choice. German Jews-mostly members of banking families- referred to themselves as "Unser Kreis," German for "Our Crowd." There was an interest in preserving cultural and religious values, and children often married within the circle.
But prejudice was the greater cause. Anti-Semitism had increased with the influx of Eastern European Jews at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and prejudiced remarks often referred to Jewish people not only as foreign but as non-white. In 1904, J.P. Morgan that he considered his firm and Barings (a British firm with a branch in New York) to be the only "white firms in New York." And Morgan's son, Jack, wrote to his relative- who was the president of the board of the American Museum of Natural History Museum- that he wouldn't go to any of the meetings if Felix Warburg was there. "I cannot stand the German Jews," he said. "In my opinion, they have made themselves impossible as associates for any white people for all time."
Felix Warburg, however, was concerned neither with what his father-in-law, nor those outside the Jewish community might think of his new house. He proceeded with the design that you see in front of you, which was drafted by architect Charles P.H. Gilbert who had designed the Fletcher Mansion, just a few blocks down from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 79th and Fifth.
