The Joint: American money for European disaster

Three committees pooled their relief for the first time. In the autumn of 1914 the American consulate in Jerusalem reported that the Jews of Palestine, cut off by the war from the halukah, were starving. The Orthodox formed one relief committee, the German-descended bankers under Jacob Schiff another, the unions and socialists a third. In November 1914 they agreed to distribute the money jointly, and from 27 November the new body was called the Joint Distribution Committee—the Joint.

By the end of the First World War the Joint was feeding whole provinces of Eastern Europe: more than twenty million dollars passed through it in 1919–1921, trains carried flour, orphanages and hospitals ran on its money. In the 1920s it invested in Jewish farming settlements in the Crimea and southern Ukraine—a venture the Soviet state would itself wind up.

During the Holocaust the Joint paid for visas, ships and bribes, worked through neutral countries and supported refugees in Shanghai and Lisbon; afterwards it ran the displaced persons camps and carried people out of the Arab lands. It is that "support of the poor by their own nation", which the directors of the West India Company made a condition in 1655, grown to world scale.