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Morgenthau’s cable stated that “immediate assistance” to Palestine Jewry was required and suggested the sum of $50,000. Jacob Schiff of the AJC and Louis Marshall, its president, convened a meeting and raised the suggested sum within two days. Half was contributed by the AJC, $12,500 by Schiff personally, and $12,500 by the American Federation of Zionists. The funds were wired to Constantinople, converted to gold, and carried in a suitcase to Jerusalem by Morgenthau’s son-in-law, Maurice Wertheim, my father, who was then visiting him.

When it came to distribution, the gold precipitated an attack of internecine quarreling among the various local organizations, until my father, who was then twenty-eight, picked up the suitcase, locked himself in an adjoining room, and told his clients he would not come out until they had reached an agreement. Under that ultimatum, they did.

The significance of the aid was perceived at the time by a man dedicated to the homeland in Palestine, Judah Magnes, first chancellor and first president of the Hebrew University, the only important American Zionist leader to transfer his home to the land of his beliefs. Speaking at a meeting of the Joint Distribution Committee at the home of Felix Warburg in March 1916, he said of Morgenthau’s crucial intervention that “no word can be too strong, no expression too exaggerated” to describe the historical task thus performed.

The initial relief, of course, far from solved the problem, which, as soon as the Turks entered the war in November 1914, became grave. About half the Jewish population in Palestine, including many of the older group and most of the new colonists, were Russian by nationality and had preferred to remain stateless rather than become Ottoman subjects. They were now subject to treatment by the Turks as enemy aliens, with no recourse to protection by Russia, whose pogroms they had fled. Expulsion and even massacre became imminent threats, involving the American Ambassador in unceasing efforts to mitigate the harsh and capricious measures of the Turks while activating, with the help of many others, the aid of his own and the Allied governments.

Six thousand Jews expelled from Jaffa were carried by the U.S.S. Tennessee, a warship in the area, to Egypt, where the British permitted their entry. Later the U.S.S. Vulcan carried food supplied by Jewish relief organizations to the near-starving community of Palestine. A steady flow of funds collected by Jews in the U.S.—sufficient to give monthly allotments of a few francs each to fifty thousand Jews cut off from former sources—had to be delivered by one means or another, past erratic Turkish opposition on the one hand and Allied blockade of Syria and Palestine on the other. At first gold bullion was shipped directly from Egypt on U.S. warships, but when the Allies closed down this entry, Morgenthau resorted to sending the funds by mail from Constantinople to the American Consul in Jerusalem, who distributed it to the needy. By these measures the nucleus of the future state of Israel survived.

Another contribution to the future of Israel, as important in a different way, was the support that made possible the revival of Hebrew as a living language. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the compiler—one might say, the creator—of the modern Hebrew dictionary, was brought to this country in 1914 under Zionist auspices to continue his work in safety during the war years. But the funds to support him and his family while he worked, as well as a house to live in and schooling for his daughters, were arranged for by my father (who had visited Ben Yehuda in Jerusalem) and were supplied largely by his father, Jacob Wertheim, and a committee consisting of Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Julius Rosenwald, and Herbert Lehman, the magnates of the so-called gilded ghetto.

Why did they care about the revival of Hebrew? Or, in the earlier case, about the survival of the colony in Palestine? The answer to that—the unbreakable tie to the group—is the answer as well to the