From Mannheim to Manhattan
Henry Morgenthau was born on April 26, 1856, in Mannheim, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, the ninth of eleven surviving children of a Jewish family. His father, Lazarus Morgenthau, had prospered as a cigar manufacturer, but the business collapsed after an American tariff of 1862 hit its exports. In 1866 the family emigrated to New York, where Lazarus, never able to rebuild his fortune, turned his energies to raising money for Jewish houses of worship.
Henry studied at the College of the City of New York and then at Columbia Law School, from which he graduated in 1877. In 1882 he married Josephine Sykes. They had four children: Helen, Alma, Henry Jr. and Ruth.
Lawyer, builder, reformer
Morgenthau began as a lawyer specialising in real estate, and he soon saw that the real money was in the property itself. As New York surged north up Manhattan and across the rivers, he bought land, developed it and sold it on, and became very rich. In 1899 he left the practice of law to become president of the Central Realty Bond and Trust Company, and from 1905 to 1913 he ran his own Henry Morgenthau Company.
Wealth gave him a platform for reform. He was a Reform Jew and a leader of the Free Synagogue of New York, founded by the progressive rabbi Stephen S. Wise, serving as its president. He was also drawn into politics. In 1912 he became a key early backer of Woodrow Wilson, the reforming governor of New Jersey, and chaired the finance committee of the Democratic National Committee for Wilson’s campaigns of 1912 and 1916.
Ambassador to the Sublime Porte
In 1913 Wilson rewarded him with the post of ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The Constantinople embassy had become a post customarily given to a Jewish appointee, in the hope of fostering good relations with the empire’s Christian and Jewish minorities, and Wilson urged him to use the position to help Jews and other minorities in the Ottoman lands, and Morgenthau threw himself into the role.
In April 1914 he visited Palestine, then an Ottoman province, and saw the small Jewish community there at first hand. When the First World War broke out that summer, the Jews of Palestine, many of them foreign nationals cut off from the charity on which they depended, faced starvation and expulsion. In August 1914 Morgenthau alerted American Jewish relief organisations, and in October his son-in-law Maurice Wertheim delivered $25,000 in gold to Jaffa. More money and a ship loaded with provisions followed. Morgenthau also used his influence with the Ottoman government to protect the Jewish community from Jamal Pasha, the military governor, who regarded it with deep suspicion.
Witness to genocide
In April 1915 the Ottoman government began the mass deportation and murder of its Armenian subjects. Reports soon poured into the American embassy from consuls in the provinces: Jesse B. Jackson in Aleppo, Leslie A. Davis in Harput, Oscar Heizer in Trebizond. They described columns of women and children driven into the Syrian desert, men shot in their thousands, and towns emptied of their Armenian populations. Jackson wrote that it was a carefully planned scheme to extinguish the Armenian race.
Morgenthau forwarded the reports to Washington and added his own. On July 16, 1915, he cabled the State Department that “a campaign of race extermination is in progress.” He confronted the interior minister, Talaat Pasha, again and again, demanding that the killings stop and warning him that “our people will never forget these massacres.” Talaat was unmoved. The United States was neutral and Morgenthau had no power to force anything; but he could make sure the world knew. He pressed American relief organisations to act, and his appeals helped launch the fundraising committee that grew into Near East Relief, which raised many millions of dollars for Armenian and other survivors and saved countless lives.
Exhausted and disgusted, he resigned in 1916. Constantinople, he wrote, had become “a place of horror” and he had reached the end of his resources.
Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story
Back in the United States, Morgenthau spent the rest of the war raising money for the surviving Armenians and campaigning to rouse American opinion. In 1918 he published Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, a vivid account of his years in Constantinople and of his dealings with Talaat and the other Young Turk leaders. One chapter, “The Murder of a Nation” describes the deportations and massacres as a cold-blooded, calculated state policy, and it remains one of the most important eyewitness testimonies to the Armenian genocide. Written in wartime, the book was also meant to rally Americans against Germany and its Ottoman ally, but the diplomatic dispatches on which it drew are preserved in the American archives.
In 1917 Wilson sent Morgenthau on a secret mission to explore whether the Ottoman Empire could be detached from the Central Powers. At Gibraltar he was met by Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, who persuaded him to abandon it. Morgenthau never forgave Weizmann.
A Jew against Zionism
Morgenthau’s Jewish identity was central to his career, but he understood it in the terms of classical American Reform Judaism: Jews were a religious community, not a nation, and their future lay in full equality as citizens of the countries where they lived. He admired the Jewish agricultural settlements he had seen in Palestine, but he opposed political Zionism. In a letter to The New York Times in December 1917 he praised the settlers’ work but called Zionism a danger to the civil rights Jews had won in their adopted countries. In 1919 he signed an anti-Zionist petition presented to Wilson before the Paris Peace Conference, and the same year he resigned as president of the Free Synagogue because of his opposition to Stephen Wise’s Zionism.
His concern for Jewish lives was nevertheless real. In 1919 Wilson appointed him to head an American fact-finding mission to the newly independent Poland, where violence against Jews had broken out amid war and revolution. The resulting Morgenthau Report documented killings and abuses of Jews in the new state. In 1938, as Nazi persecution intensified, he joined Stephen Wise, his old adversary, in meeting President Franklin Roosevelt to plead for refugees from Germany.
Rescuer of the Greek refugees
Morgenthau’s greatest practical achievement came after the war. The Greco-Turkish War ended in 1922 with the burning of Smyrna and the flight of Greek Orthodox Christians from Anatolia. The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey then uprooted well over a million people. The League of Nations created a Refugee Settlement Commission to settle them, and in 1923 Morgenthau became its first chairman.
Under his leadership the commission oversaw the settlement in Greece of more than a million refugees from Turkish territory, largely in Macedonia and Thrace, while several hundred thousand Muslims moved from Greece to Turkey. The commission built villages, distributed land and helped refugees to become farmers again, transforming northern Greece. Morgenthau described the work in his book I Was Sent to Athens (1929). He was nominated as ambassador to Mexico in 1920, though never confirmed, and represented the United States at an international conference in Geneva in 1933.
A family of public servants
Morgenthau founded an American dynasty of public service. His son Henry Morgenthau Jr. served as Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 to 1945, financed the Second World War and, in 1944, pressed Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board to rescue Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe. His grandson Robert M. Morgenthau served for decades as Manhattan’s district attorney, and his granddaughter Barbara W. Tuchman became one of America’s most celebrated historians, author of The Guns of August.
Henry Morgenthau Sr. died in New York City on November 25, 1946, aged 90, after a cerebral haemorrhage.
Legacy
Morgenthau is remembered above all by Armenians, for whom he is one of the great righteous witnesses of the twentieth century: the diplomat who saw what was happening, named it, and refused to look away. His cables and his book became cornerstones of the historical record of the genocide, cited in every serious history of the subject and in the long campaign for its recognition. He is also honoured in Greece for his part in the resettlement of the refugees, one of the first large-scale humanitarian operations of the League of Nations.
His own story embodied the immigrant success he believed in: the son of a ruined cigar maker who became a millionaire, a confidant of presidents and a voice for the persecuted. He disagreed with much of the Jewish world on Zionism, but in his life’s work he defended Jews, Armenians and Greeks alike, and he left an example that his descendants and later generations of diplomats would follow.
Sources & further reading
Henry Morgenthau Sr., Wikipedia · Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Armenian National Institute · Morgenthau, Encyclopaedia Judaica via Encyclopedia.com · Henry Morgenthau, Gariwo, Gardens of the Righteous · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.