Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Among that select group, right from its inception, were Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld. With regard to the Rothfeld brothers’ time in New York, the historical record is somewhat sketchy. Little is known of their first five years in America, except that they set up some kind of business in the tailoring trade, which must have done fairly well. In 1874–5 they are listed in the New York City Directory as ‘importers of dry goods’, with offices in Worth Street, Lower Manhattan. More significant as a measure of their social and financial success, however, is the fact that in the following year they appear as founder charter members of the Ethical Culture Society, along with Joseph Seligman, Jacob Schiff and Henry Morgenthau. Within seven years of being in America, then, the Rothfeld brothers had joined ‘Our Crowd’, the elite of Manhattan German Jewish society.

  In 1880, that society (including, no doubt, the Rothfeld brothers) was united in mourning the death of Joseph Seligman, known since the Saratoga incident as ‘America’s leading Jew’. Shortly before his death, Seligman had asked that his funeral service should be directed by the Ethical Culture Society. Despite this request, the Seligman family and Gustav Gottheil, the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, conspired to give him a ‘proper Jewish funeral’ at the synagogue. In addition, a funeral service conducted by Felix Adler was held in Seligman’s house, an event that served to cement and increase the acceptance of Adler’s society among New York’s German Jewish elite.

  It was, however, increasingly becoming a separate elite. In 1887, the nature of New York’s high society was spelled out when the first volume of the Social Register for New York appeared, listing the 2,000 or so families that were considered the crème de la crème of Manhattan. Not one of them was Jewish. Its author, Ward McAllister, suggested: ‘our good Jews might wish to put out a little book of their own’. In the face of such painful reminders that they were not accepted by New York high society, many prominent members of the German Jewish community migrated from the Upper East Side of Manhattan (where, along Fifth Avenue, the likes of the Astors had their grand ‘brownstones’) to form what has been described as ‘the first recognisably German Jewish upper-class neighbourhood’ in the Upper West Side. It was to this neighbourhood that Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld moved in 1887, after they had joined with their cousin, J.H. Stern, to form Rothfeld, Stern & Co., a company that specialised in importing tailoring materials. Their names would never appear in the Social Register, but among their immediate neighbours now were various Goldmans, Sachses and Guggenheims.

  Meanwhile the ‘Third Migration’ of Jews to America was gaining momentum and, as the German Jewish community had feared, arousing a new and intensified form of anti-Semitism. In the same year that the Social Register was published and the Rothfeld brothers moved to the Upper West Side, an article appeared in Forum magazine entitled ‘Race Prejudice at Summer Resorts’, which identified anti-Semitism as ‘a new feature in the New World’. ‘Only within the present decade,’ the article stated, ‘has there been an anti-Jewish sentiment openly displayed in the United States.’ The blame for this was laid by Alice Rhine, the author of the article, firmly on Judge Hilton, whose exclusion of Jews from his hotel in Saratoga had set an example that other hotel and boarding-house proprietors had followed. ‘In seeking reasons for this sweeping ostracism,’ she wrote, ‘it is found that the Gentiles charge the Hebrews with being “too numerous”; “they swarm everywhere”.’ It was also said, she recorded, that Jews lacked refinement; they dressed badly, had bad manners and showed disrespect for the Christian Sabbath.

  The kind of anti-Semitism discussed by Rhine was extremely mild, however, compared to the sort that was unleashed at around the same time in The American Jew, described as ‘the book that inaugurated racial anti-Semitism in America’. Its author was Telemachus Timayenis, a Greek immigrant. Whereas Rhine described a prejudice against Jews as identified by their culture, their language and their perceived lack of social graces, Timayenis’s target was the Jew as a racial type, identified by ‘their hooked noses, restless eyes, elongated ears, square nails, flat feet, round knees, and soft hands’. The Jews that he describes with venomous hatred wear ‘long coats dripping with filth, while their faces and beards looked suety with sluttishness’; they arrive in the United States penniless, and soon – suspiciously soon, according to Timayenis – become prominent bankers, and leaders of American industry. But despite his unease at the wealth of the German Jews, it is the wretched poverty of the Eastern European Jews in the Lower East Side that most exercises Timayenis, who is also inclined to despise the Jews because they are refugees from prejudice. ‘Let the Jews of this country understand,’ he writes, ‘that the American people do not want, and will not receive, the dregs of a race which has won only scorn and contempt from the people of Europe.’ The message of The American Jew, repeated several times throughout the book, is: ‘The Jew must go!’

  Timayenis, of course, did not speak for the whole American population, the majority of whom would have identified far more readily with the famous sentiments expressed by Emma Lazarus in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which was dedicated by President Cleveland in 1886, sentiments that indeed were inspired by the piteous sight of the arrival to New York of the very Jews that had aroused the venom of The American Jew:

  Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  The Statue of Liberty would have been the first thing that Julius Oppenheimer saw when he came to the United States in 1888 to join his prosperous and well-connected uncles and take his place among ‘Our Crowd’. He was at that time a slim, good-looking, but shy seventeen-year-old who spoke little English. However, he clearly lost no time in joining the cultural, spiritual and (perhaps most importantly) social world of his uncles. In the year of his arrival in New York, he is listed as a member of Adler’s Ethical Culture Society. Though he was, of course, immediately given a position in Rothfeld, Stern & Co., he could not yet afford to live in the Upper West Side and, for the first few years before his inexorable rise through the company’s hierarchy, lived in rented accommodation in Lower Manhattan, the same part of town in which the company had its office.

  In many ways Julius Oppenheimer was arriving in America at a bad time. The so-called ‘Gilded Age’, when unimaginably large fortunes were amassed by the ‘Robber Barons’ (Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil, Vanderbilt in railroads and Astor in real estate), and smaller but still significant fortunes were made by Jewish bankers and traders, was coming to an end, as the country headed towards recession. No doubt related to the darkening economic scene was the growth of racial anti-Semitism, which, while rarely as virulent as that expressed in The American Jew, could still shock many of those German Jewish migrants who had believed in America as a land free from the ‘old strife’.

  Among these was Jesse Seligman, who had inherited from his brother Joseph the title ‘New York’s leading Jewish banker’, and who in 1893 was given a particularly hurtful introduction to the new, more brutal form of anti-Semitism to which parts of American society had succumbed. Together with his brothers Joseph and William, Jesse Seligman had for many years been a member of, and fully accepted by, the predominantly gentile Union League Club. At the time of his death, Joseph Seligman had been a vice president of the club, and in 1893 Jesse – following in his older brother’s footsteps once again – was elected a vice president. He therefore did not anticipate any problems when he put up his son, Theodore, a young lawyer recently out of Harvard, for membership. Theodore’s application, however, was rejected, the club committee explaining to Jesse that it was ‘not a personal matter in any way, either as to father or son. The objection is purely racial.’ Jesse immediately resigned and never set foot inside the Union League Club again. ‘His bitterness over the episode probably shortened his life, just as the affair with Judge Hilton shortened his brother’s,’ writes Stephen Birmingham. He died just a year after the affair. />
  The economic recession of 1893–5 hit the clothing industry harder than any other and resulted in mass unemployment, although Rothfeld, Stern & Co. seemed to ride out the recession better than most clothing firms in New York. It moved its office to cheaper accommodation on Bleecker Street, but other than that there was no sign that it suffered very much. In 1895, Julius’s younger brother Emil came to New York, by which time Julius, now twenty-four years old, was beginning to make his mark in the firm. In 1900, the company took the decision to specialise in the importation of cloak linings, something on which Julius Oppenheimer quickly became an expert, and from that point he seems to have become the company’s leading figure. In 1903, this was recognised when he was made a partner, a move that seems to have persuaded him that the time was right to marry and settle down.

  His chosen bride was Ella Friedman, who, though a member of the same German Jewish, Upper West Side community as the Rothfelds and Oppenheimers, was seen as significantly less German, less Jewish and more ‘American’ than Julius. For one thing, Ella was not a migrant; she had been born in America, and English was her first language. According to her son, she did not speak German very well – something that seemed, if anything, to be a source of pride rather than of embarrassment. Her father, Louis Friedman, was indisputably a German Jew, but, having migrated (to Baltimore rather than to New York) in the 1840s, he had been in the US a good deal longer than the Rothfelds or the Oppenheimers. Ella’s mother, Cecilia Eger, had herself been born in America and, though from a Germanic background (her father was German, her mother Austrian), was, so it was said in the family anyway, not a German Jew, since she was non-Jewish. The claim is precarious to say the least. Cecilia’s mother, Clara Binswanger, was – as her family tree in the American Jewish Archives reveals – about as Jewish as it is possible to be: both her maternal and paternal grandfathers were rabbis. Cecilia’s father, David Eger, was a prominent member of the Philadelphia Jewish community, mentioned several times in the 1894 publication The Jews of Philadelphia. If J. Robert Oppenheimer inherited his striking blue eyes from his grandmother Cecilia, as was widely believed in the family, it was not because she was, from a genetic point of view, any less Jewish than his paternal grandparents.

  Not only was Ella seen as more ‘American’ than the family she was marrying into, but she was also seen as more ‘refined’. During the years that Julius spent working his way up the family textile business, Ella was studying art, first in her native Baltimore and then in Paris, where she made a particular study of the Impressionists. On her return to America she taught art at Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women in New York, which had opened in 1889 as an ‘annex’ of Columbia University and from 1897 was housed in a building next to Columbia in Morningside Heights in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. By the time she met Julius, Ella was an established and accomplished painter, with private students and her own rooftop studio. Her father had died in the early 1890s and she lived with her mother, Cecilia, in an apartment at 148 West 94th Street. Two years older than Julius, she would have been in her mid-thirties when they met, described by a family friend as ‘a gentle, exquisite, slim, tallish, blue-eyed woman, terribly sensitive, [and] extremely polite’. She was born with an unformed right hand. To hide this – and the artificial thumb and finger that she used to compensate for it – she always wore gloves, and her deformity was never once mentioned or even alluded to by the family. When a girlfriend of Robert’s once asked him about it, she was met with stony silence.

  It is not entirely clear how Julius and Ella met. It may have been that Ella’s father was in the textile trade and knew the Rothfeld brothers, or it may have been that they had mutual friends in the Ethical Culture Society. Both suggestions have been made, although neither seems very likely. Her father had been dead for many years before she and Julius met, and it is not likely that her mother moved in the same circles as the Rothfelds. Nor is there any indication that Ella or anybody else in her family was a member of, or in any way interested in, Adler’s society.

  It seems more likely that it was their common interest in art that brought them together. By 1903, Julius, as a partner in a thriving company, was a wealthy man and could afford to indulge his growing passion for the visual arts. It is reported that he ‘spent his free hours on weekends roaming New York’s numerous art galleries’. If so, given the way that wealth and enthusiasm attract invitations and introductions, it is not difficult to imagine that someone in the New York art world – an artist, an agent, a gallery owner – brought Julius and Ella together.

  The cultural refinement that Ella represented was by this time something Julius craved. Though he had left school as a teenager, and had arrived in America speaking little English, he was determined to develop into the ‘proper gentlemen’ that his employees later described him as being. He dressed impeccably, acquired the social graces of the upper middle class and read widely, particularly in American and European history. Discovering that a German accent was a barrier to acceptance as a gentleman in the New York of the early twentieth century, Julius took drastic steps to remove all traces of his mother tongue, taking English lessons from an Oxford tutor, from whom he acquired the gentlemanly tones of the British educated elite.

  Ella and Julius were married on 23 March 1903, their wedding being the occasion of a very public statement that they did not consider themselves Jewish. The service was performed not by a rabbi, but by Felix Adler himself, and not in accordance with any Jewish tradition, but rather as an illustration of the ‘New Ideal’ preached by the Ethical Culture Society. In his series of discourses, Creed and Deed, published in 1886, Adler had written, in connection with his notion of what the ‘Priests of the New Ideal’ might be like: ‘there are special occasions in these passing years of ours, when the ideal bearings of life come home to us with peculiar force and when we require the priest to be their proper interpreter. Marriage is one of them.’ And so Ella and Julius were, in a way, married by a priest, but not in a way that implied commitment to any religious creed.

  That Felix Adler officiated at Julius’s wedding was extremely apt, since in the years that followed Julius was to become one of Adler’s leading and most devoted disciples, his rise to prominence in his uncles’ company running parallel with his rise within the Ethical Culture movement. At the time of his wedding, as the Rothfeld brothers were entering their sixties and approaching retirement age, Julius Oppenheimer was preparing to take over the running of the company. It was an opportune time to seize the reins. The advent of ready-to-wear suits, which cut overheads, lowered prices and increased demand dramatically, had given the entire tailoring industry an enormous boost, and business was extremely good. The Rothfeld brothers, however, did not live to see the best years of their company. Longevity was never a family trait and both brothers died before they reached seventy, Solomon in 1904 and Sigmund three years later. Upon Sigmund’s death, in December 1907, Julius became president of Rothfeld, Stern & Co., which now had offices in that most prestigious of all New York addresses: Fifth Avenue. At thirty-six years old, Julius Oppenheimer was a man of means and substance.

  In the same year that he became president of Rothfeld, Stern & Co., Julius was elected onto the Board of Trustees of the Society. The following year he was appointed a member of the Society’s Finance Committee. These appointments put him in a position where he was rubbing shoulders with members of some of the most prominent ‘Our Crowd’ families. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the nature of ‘Our Crowd’ was changing somewhat. It was no longer dominated by people like Joseph Seligman, who had come over from Germany and made huge fortunes in business, but rather by their offspring, who typically were not businessmen, but something more refined (if less lucrative). They were men who, having inherited wealth – in some cases vast amounts of it – cared less about commerce than about matters of the intellect, of culture, of the spirit and of politics and society. Among them were the men who succeeded Felix Adler as president of
the New York Ethical Culture Society:fn1 Edwin Seligman, Joseph’s son, who was a professor of economics at Columbia University, then Robert D. Kohn, a famous architect, and Herbert Wolff, a leading civil-rights lawyer.

  In Howard B. Radest’s history of the Ethical Societies, Julius Oppenheimer’s role in the New York Ethical Culture Society is mentioned in passing by Herbert Wolff in an interesting and revealing anecdote:

  In the old days, if there was a deficit . . . Felix Adler would be advised of the amount . . . I remember one year . . . $25,000 was needed. Professor Adler phoned to people like Joseph Plaut, B. Edmund David, Mr Berolzheimer [the head of the Eagle Pencil Company, who bought St Simon Island in Georgia], Mr Oppenheimer, maybe one or two others. There was a command to appear at his office on a certain specified day at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. He then told these gentlemen that the deficit was $25,000 . . . Each one – there were five present – said that he would undertake ⅕ or $5,000 . . . The other members of the Society were not involved . . . Some of them didn’t even know that there was a deficit.

  Though he and his society were almost entirely dependent on the money thus received from wealthy businessmen, Adler urged his disciples to accord little respect to making money. Being wealthy might seem to be ‘supremely enviable’, he wrote, but ‘the business of wealth-getting, and of wealth-enjoyment, when viewed at close range, turns out to be a very different matter. Its effect is almost inevitably unfortunate, not only on society at large, but on the mind and character of the wealthy themselves.’ Indeed, he added: ‘I would urge the principle of self-limitation in regard to wealth’, and he made this ‘plea to the wealthy’:

  The first step to take, if they would set themselves right, is to live in the midst of superfluous wealth as if they were not the possessors of it; that is, to take for their own use only what they require for the essentials of a civilised life, and to regard the rest as a deposit for the general good, of which they themselves are not to be the beneficiaries.