This chapter, devoted to the events of 1929–30, opens three chapters – Chapters 3–5 – which analyse collectively the Morgan role in the coming and development of the Depression between 1929 and 1933. Chapter 3 has as its centrepiece the Morgan effort to end what the partners saw as postwar economic warfare that was undermining European and, by extension, American prosperity. The concrete form that this took was the Young Plan (1929) that revised reparation as well as the establishment of the Bank for International Settlements, conceived as a forum to allow central banks to overcome pressing international questions. The Wall Street Crash, which surprised the Morgan partners – they did not see it coming – was, in the Morgan view, ephemeral. This stance helps us understand why Wall Street was slow to appreciate the downturn. The chapter argues that there was division among the Morgan partners as 1930 progressed on the state of the American and global economy. Leffingwell, the partnership economist, was pessimistic by the summer of 1930. In contrast Lamont continued to evince an optimistic outlook, driven in part by his desire to remain in step with the Hoover administration.

The epilogue begins in 1929, when multiple, high-magnitude issues affected the Jewish world: the global economic crisis, the establishment of the Jewish Agency, the first glimmers of the danger posed by Hitler, the consolidation of Soviet power in Stalin’s hands, and the outbreak of Arab riots in Palestine. It returns to a comparison between international Jewish humanitarianism with its mainstream counterparts, concluding that the moral calculus for Jews and their unique diasporic network meant that humanitarianism was, in effect, nonexpendable Jewish social policy, fundamentally different from mainstream humanitarianism although in practice, much the same. This leads to a discussion of the longevity of international Jewish humanitarianism, whose blueprint was set in the Great War and survived the twentieth century despite the Holocaust and other seismic changes in Jewish life. It concludes by reflecting on the way in which international Jewish humanitarianism was a mosaic of Jewish projects and organizations across the globe, both paradigmatic and exceptional in history.