The Great Jewish Families

OUR CROWD by Stephen Birmingham. 404 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

Adolph Lewisohn spent $300 a month just for shaves and took up tap dancing at 80. Before giving his famous dinner parties, Carl Loeb held dress rehearsals on the preceding evening--with real food, real wine and substitute, or second-string, guests. On entering Williams College in 1895, Herbert Lehman, who later became New York Governor and U.S. Senator, took along his private car and chauffeur. Therese, daughter of Fanny and Solomon Loeb, could not button her dress at 18: servants had always done it for her.

Route to High Finance. These names and others--Schiff, Warburg, Straus, Goldman, Guggenheim, Sachs--form what Stephen Birmingham calls Manhattan's "other Society," the great Jewish families of New York. Their founders, nearly all of them German, arrived in the U.S. in the middle decades of the 19th century. Nearly all of them were desperately poor; but in a young nation willing to reward industry, they succeeded beyond their dreams, along a route that led from peddlers' packs to high finance. Today, their banking and brokerage houses stand like monuments on Wall Street, and there are symbols, in other permutations, scattered the length of Manhattan: Macy's (owned by the Strauses), Lewisohn Stadium, the Guggenheim Museum.

Great wealth prompted them to maintain a social structure as exclusive in its way as Mrs. Astor's, to whose balls they were of course never invited. Manhattan from the East 60s to the East 80s was their principality; Elberon. N.J., a summer watering place, became known as the Jewish Newport. Familiengefuehl (family feeling) was their religion: the Seligman social calendar registered 243 anniversaries a year.

Some individuals learned to live with anti-Semitic snobbery, others out-snobbed the snobs. Banker August Belmont, born Schonberg, desperately wanted membership in Manhattan's exclusive, all-Gentile Union Club. So in 1848 he crossed the line and married Caroline Slidell Perry, daughter of the commodore. He got his membership. In more recent years, there was a good deal of studied superiority directed by the "old" Jewish arrivals toward the newer immigrants. In 1950, a granddaughter of Felix Warburg, the legendary bon vivant, yachtsman, polo player, art collector and philanthropist, married Robert W. Sarnoff; in some quarters, the groom was identified as "the son of that Russian radio man."

Close to Aristocracy. Today, the scions of the great families administer their institutions and their inheritances, and support their favorite charities, as usual calling little attention to themselves. Time has tempered the extravagances of another era. Author Birmingham, who has previously confined his work mostly to fiction, treats his subjects affectionately as well as skillfully. He calls them "the closest thing to aristocracy that the city, and perhaps the country, had seen."

This may be too easy a dismissal of the elites of New England and of the old South, among others. It is enough to say that "our crowd" was and is one American aristocracy among several, and its existence proves the immense adaptability of the U.S. as well as of the Jews. They have often seemed readier for adversity than for good fortune. But in whatever condition, they have been a tremendous altruistic force in the U.S.--and in a pinch, they have even forced themselves to adjust to palaces and private parlor cars.

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