Felix Moritz Warburg (1871 – 20 September 1937) was a member of the Warburg banking family of Hamburg, Germany.
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He was a grandson of Moses Marcus Warburg, one of the founders of the bank, M. M. Warburg (in 1798). Felix Warburg was a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co.. He is known as a leading advocate of a Federal Reserve System for the United States. He married Frieda Schiff (1876 – 1958), daughter of Jacob H. Schiff and Therese Loeb Schiff, in 1895. They had four sons, Frederick Marcus, Gerald Felix, Paul Felix and Edward Mortimer Morris and one daughter, Carola. All were active in community service.
Warburg was an important leader of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, established to help the Jews in Europe in the period leading up to, and especially during, the Great Depression. Warburg actively raised funds in the United States on behalf of European Jews who faced hunger following World War I. As early as 1919, he was quoted in the New York Times discussing the dire situation of Jewish war sufferers.[1]
| “ | The successive blows of contending armies have all but broken the back of European Jewry, and have reduced to tragically unbelievable poverty, starvation and disease about 6,000,000 souls, or half the Jewish population of the earth.
The Jewish people throughout Eastern Europe, by sheer accident of geography, have suffered more from the war than any other element of the population. |
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Warburg and the Joint Distribution Committee were also instrumental in the 1930s after the global Great Depression following the crash of the New York stock exchange 1929.
As a result of his philanthropic activities, a new Jewish village established in Mandate Palestine in 1939, Kfar Warburg, was named after him. He was a trustee of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.[2]
The Felix M. Warburg House, in New York's Upper East side was donated by his widow and today houses the Jewish Museum.
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