What Makes a ‘Jewish’ Bank Jewish in America: Antisemitism and the Jewish Family Dynasties who made American Finance

• In Event: Jews with Money: transatlantic perspectives on class, family, power and vulnerability

Abstract

When all the dust settled in the days after Lehman Brothers officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States in September 2008, most people forgot that this firm began as a family business over 160 years ago in plantation Alabama. The epic saga of the rise and fall the Lehman family’s business – which began in dry good and then went to cotton futures in the deep South and ended in finance in New York - is a tale of how Jewish multi-generational family businesses shaped American finance as America molded these families as well. When it closed, it has long ceased being a family business, but this multinational corporation was often assailed as “a Jewish bank.” What did it mean to call it a Jewish bank? Indeed, in the annals of American finance, no banks are cast “Protestant” or “Catholic” banks in the same way as the financial institutions founded by Jewish families.

This paper is an expansion of an earlier investigation of what makes a ‘Jewish’ bank Jewish in the United States? Does it have to serve Jews? Be founded by Jews? Why does this moniker persist? By looking at the different familial configurations that undergirded investment banking houses such as Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Kuhn, Loeb and Co and in the Ford Syndicate of 1957., this paper illustrates why Jewish family businesses are worth studying for their own sake and for the sake of the history of American finance. It also raises questions on what makes a family banking dynasty? I contend that it starts with multigenerational success, of course, but it usually takes something more — a sense of common mission. As Israel Zangwill, author of the Melting Pot’ astutely observed, “it was not what the anti-Semite vainly imagines, a solidarity of the whole race but merely a solidarity of private families” that accounted for Jewish economic success. These familial Jewish businesses underscore the importance of thinking more analytically about the history of anti-Semitism in the United States and the different forms it took. In this paper, I address the need for more data on American Jewish banks through which we can arrive at an empirically-based understanding of the banking community in relative comparison. Did Jewish families organize their businesses in distinct ways? As I try to unpack this question, I argue that the histories of the bank can also identify with greater precision the features of anti-Semitism, specifically, and prejudice, more broadly, in the organization and makeup of the American financial community. In other words, this paper will show how the study of Jewish family dynasties that ultimately ended up on Wall Street like Henry, Mayer and Emanuel Lehman, leads to better understanding of the American financial community over time.

Author

• Rebecca Kobrin, Columbia University