The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (30 page)

By 1773, Emmanuele Conegliano, child of the ghetto, was the priest Lorenzo Da Ponte. Although an abbe, Da Ponte never practiced the priesthood. His temperament (as related in his lively and fanciful
Memoirs)
was hardly appropriate for celibacy and a chaste outlook. He was, however, a well-regarded teacher at the seminary in Treviso, fascinated with contemporary literature and ancient languages. An unfortunate series of love affairs culminated in his fathering a child with an aristocratic but married woman. The combination of his radical political views and libertine activities led to expulsion from Treviso. Da Ponte fled to Venice, it is said to the home of another lovely lady, then to Gorizia, and out of Italy on toward Dresden (where he picked up from another Italian the art of writing plays to be set to music as operas).

Finally, in 1782, armed with a letter to the court composer Antonio Salieri (later falsely rumored to have poisoned Mozart), Da Ponte traveled to Vienna, hungry for work. The Austrian court was mad for Italian opera, and the fast-talking Da Ponte was engaged as a poet of the Imperial Theater. He wrote a libretto for Salieri and at the house of a Jewish aristocrat, Baron Wetzlar, met the twenty-seven-year-old Mozart.

Their first project together, loosely translated as
The Duped Husband,
never got off the ground. Mozart, only seven years away from his death, possessed at twenty-seven the full force of perfect inspiration and technique. He required something more than just another
opera buffa
with the typical clowning and sight gags of the day. Mozart and Da Ponte were instead drawn to the most revolutionary play of their time, Pierre Beaumarchais’
Le Manage de Figaro.
It was about a philandering count (Da Ponte knew plenty of them) who wanted to cheat on his refined wife with her maid (engaged to marry his manservant!). All the elements of comic opera were there, with several exceptions. These were real people. They sang with real emotions. At times they were really frightened. They laughed and raged and sometimes sang arias with delectable words set to unforgettable melodies that cried.

Da Ponte’s libretti for
Don Giovanni
(based on an old tale,
The Stoned Guest)
and the amoral yet original
Cost
address other dramatic and poetic concerns.
Don Giovanni
is a wild tragicomedy, the story of a Don Juan or Casanova-like character not far from Da Ponte’s own past. Like
Hamlet
or
Faust,
it is unique, resisting stereotypes or rigorous analysis. With a black heart at its core,
Don Giovanni
is majestic in an elemental, horrific way.
Cosi,
in contrast, bubbles like champagne but is somehow poignant. And what they say about the relationships between men and women—how they cheat each other, lie, are passionate, learn and forget about love—were entirely Da Ponte’s invention.

Da Ponte’s Italian positively glows with phonetic excitement. He was not only a great dramatist, but a dramatic poet of the first order. Characters and settings are defined instantly. Audiences are drawn not only into the action, but more important, into the thoughts and emotions of what seem to be living people. Despite the length of these works, there is no repetition, no wasted words, just golden expression. Recognize that before Mozart and Da Ponte, this depth of dramatic presentation existed only in Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks.

One year before Mozart’s death in 1790, the Austrian emperor cut back support of artistic endeavors due to the rising cost of his war with Turkey. Da Ponte lost his position, journeyed to Trieste where he met a young Englishwoman named Nancy Grahl, then traveled with her to Paris, then London (where for thirteen years he worked with now-forgotten composers), and finally emigrated to America. Lorenzo and Nancy had four children. A struggling immigrant, advanced in years, he supported his family by tutoring the many European languages he knew. Da Ponte’s work teaching Italian at Columbia College in New York City is still commemorated by alumni such as myself. He died at the age of eighty-nine and was buried in Brooklyn.

C
haritable giving or “tsedakah” is a requirement of Jewish law. In ancient times, alms were given to the poor. During the industrial age, great philanthropic foundations were established by wealthy families to aid a myriad of causes. Often in partnership with government, private philanthropy was used to help the needy, educate the masses, defend the persecuted, and heal the sick. The whole concept of private philanthropy by businesspeople and not the nobility, on so large a scale, was a new phenomenon, one of the truly blessed results of the Industrial Revolution.

After the Civil War, immense fortunes were made in business by German Jewish immigrants whose names became synonymous with the development of America as a world power. Seligman, Guggenheim, Bache, Kuhn, Loeb, Warburg, Speyer, Schiff, Straus, Lehman, Wertheim, Goldman, Sachs, and Rosenwald were the founding families of many important financial institutions and retail establishments. Financial services firms such as Lehman Brothers; Goldman, Sachs; Wertheim Schroeder; foundations and museums created by the Guggenheims; and giant retailers like Macy’s, Abraham & Straus, and Sears, Roebuck originated in and developed out of small family businesses which grew with the American colossus.

Julius Rosenwald often said that his financial success was ninety-five percent perspiration and five percent inspiration. He also claimed not to know the size of his fortune. Whether he was worth two hundred million dollars in the days before income taxes or $17,415,450 (net without deductions for taxes) at his death in the Depression year of 1932 would have been unimportant to this remarkable man. More important to him was what he did with his money and how he influenced others to give. His son William remembered his father often asserting that large wealth must be regarded as being held in public trust.

He was born in Springfield, Illinois in a house one block west of Abraham Lincoln’s home. Rosenwald’s parents were German Jews who had migrated to America in the early 1850s. Julius’s father, Samuel, worked in the early years at a men’s clothing factory owned by the brothers of his wife Augusta Hammerslough. It was said that her uncle had specially fitted President Lincoln’s extra long legs with a pair of pants. When the Hammerslough brothers moved to New York City, Samuel bought a haberdashery and men’s clothing store business (and moved into a house across from the Lincolns).

At the age of seventeen, Julius went to apprentice with his uncles in New York City. He became friendly with Henry Goldman (later a founder of Goldman, Sachs) and Henry Morgenthau (future ambassador and father of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary). Julius’s initial efforts in New York and then Chicago to establish his own clothing businesses were moderately successful. In 1890 he married Augusta Nusbaum (they became the proud parents of five children). Augusta would play a crucial role in Julius’s development as the leading philanthropist and retailer of his time. When he could least afford it, Julius impulsively donated $2,500 to a Jewish charity. Augusta supported him with the advice that he should never hesitate to give money. In the late 1890s, he became a merchant and expressed his life’s ambition to earn fifteen thousand dollars a year: five for personal expenses, five for savings, and five for charity.

In 1895, Augusta’s brother Aaron and Julius invested in an interesting venture, the new Sears, Roebuck and Co. The founder of the mail-order house was a sales and marketing visionary named Richard Sears. Although a pioneer in publicity, Sears was not a effective merchandiser. When Aaron and Julius each purchased their twenty-five percent interest in Sears (for $37,500 a piece, Julius’s portion largely financed by a moneyed friend in New York), the business was in a shambles, the quality of goods inferior to store-bought goods and often misleadingly advertised. The opportunity for Rosenwald lay in making a great idea into a business that could grow efficiently, with customer confidence and proper business planning. Under Rosenwald’s direction, Sears grew into a mammoth corporation servicing a customer who when not able to buy what was needed at the local store, instead of travelling far over poor roads, could simply reach for the Sears catalog and order by mail.

Sears had supplied his largely rural and small-town clientele, along with clothes and furnishings, firearms and patent medicines listed as perfect cures for most any ailment. Rosenwald discontinued the sale of handguns and potions, improved merchandise quality, and made sure that the catalog exactly depicted the goods that were available. Integrity and honesty, not gimmickry, proved simply good business. Americans learned they could rely on the Sears catalog, and it become a constant of American life.

A story often retold was of the Sunday school student who asked her teacher where the Ten Commandments came from. “Sears and Roebuck, of course,” answered the teacher.

Rosenwald instituted other highly innovative and influential business practices, including using the principle of mass production (years before Henry Ford and other industrial giants). The money-back guarantee (including transportation charges both ways), use of the new parcel post, the first retail testing laboratory for sales products in the United States, the first automatic letter-opening machines in American industry, one of the earliest public offerings of a general merchandising company (arranged by his friends at Goldman, Sachs), as well as savings, profit-sharing, stock plans, and health and recreational benefits for employees were all integral parts of Rosenwald’s good business.

In the era before the income tax, Rosenwald, like such men as John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, became wealthy beyond calculation. However, Rosenwald felt strongly (as had Baron Maurice Hirsch, Sir Moses Montefiore, and Jacob Schiff before him) that the life of a businessman was not worth living without civic responsibility.

Rosenwald contributed more than sixty-three million dollars to charity. The recipients of his gifts included, but were certainly not limited to, social settlements in Chicago slums, immigrant aid societies, agricultural research institutes, the University of Chicago and other prominent institutions of higher learning, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (which helped Jews suffering from the ravages of the First World War, as well as Belgian, Armenian, Syrian, Serbian, and German victims—characteristically, Rosenwald offered a million dollars on condition that the Committee raise an additional nine million on a matching basis, thus becoming the leader in their first large campaign), Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, leading Jewish theological seminaries, and museums such as the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (which he founded).

In addition to these contributions of money, Rosenwald developed novel concepts, for the time, of how to give. He opposed the idea of a perpetual endowment, the so-called dead hand of philanthropy, which dictated in perpetuity how gifts had to be spent. Trustees and directors must have discretion, he felt, to use principal as well as interest without restriction. His method of donating had a lasting and profound influence on the way charities receive and spend donations. He felt that money was best contributed preventively, that is, before a crisis occurred, not after, and that it was preferable to give so that others would follow his example with their giving.

Rosenwald’s contributions of time and expertise often had as great and lasting an influence as his largess. He served with distinction on the Chicago Planning Commission, laying the design of modern Chicago. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him as a member of the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense led by Bernard Baruch. Rosenwald brought his retail know-how to the aid of the United States, playing a significant role in the outfitting of the nation’s armies for war.

Following Lincoln’s great model, perhaps the most remarkable and wonderful activity of Rosenwald’s event-rich life was his support of education for young black people in the South. He financed the construction in the rural South of over more than two thousand rural schools, college libraries, and YMCA buildings for African-Americans. The schools became known as “Rosenwald schools.” Although Rosenwald did not like contributing much to endowments (preferring that each generation take care of its own needs), he donated large sums to funds at black colleges such as Tuskegee Institute, which became devoted to the best in higher education during an era of almost total segregation. Along with those of his friend Booker T. Washington and former neighbor Abraham Lincoln, Rosenwald’s photograph adorned the walls of many schools and homes of grateful African-Americans.