This is a review of a biography of Julius Rosenwald, a man who became very wealthy and used his money to help others. His most notable contribution was the building of thousands of schools for African American children in the South. Without the Rosenwald schools, these children would have had no schooling at all.

The review, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, was written by Leslie Lenkowsky, an emeritus professor at Indiana University. The title of the book is A Catalog Of Generosity: Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World

At the beginning of the 20th century, three figures dominated the rapidly expanding world of American philanthropy. Two—Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller—are still remembered, mostly because of the foundations they established. But the third—Julius Rosenwald—is largely forgotten. No foundations, and few buildings, bear his name. If his approach to giving was more modest in spirit, it was no less influential and effective in its day.

That Rosenwald became one of the leading philanthropists of his era is itself a remarkable story. As Hasia R. Diner tells us in “Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World,” a volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, he was the son of an immigrant peddler who arrived in Baltimore in the middle of the 19th century and eventually wound up in Springfield, Ill., running a clothing store. In 1879, the 17year-old JR (as he was known) went to New York to learn the garment business from his relatives. Soon enough, he made connections with other ambitious young men, such as the future financiers Henry Morgenthau and Henry Goldman. After returning to the Midwest and starting his own clothing store in Chicago, Rosenwald invested in a catalog sales company that needed capital: Sears, Roebuck. He gradually became more involved in the business and, when co-founder Richard Sears resigned in 1908, took over its leadership. An initial public offering two years earlier (underwritten by Henry Goldman in his first IPO) had not only provided resources for the company’s growth but had also made JR a wealthy man…

The most striking part of Rosenwald’s philanthropy may well be his funding of African-American education in the South. Influenced by Booker T. Washington, he developed a program to construct elementary and secondary schools in any black community that wanted such support. Over a 20-year period, nearly 5,000 schools opened. “One 1930s estimate,” Ms. Diner writes, “concluded that 89 percent of all buildings in which Mississippi’s black youngsters received schooling” were “Rosenwald schools.” He also used his gifts to induce more assistance for black education from public-school officials in the stillsegregated region. Ms. Diner attributes much of Rosenwald’s generosity to his sense of Jewishness at a time when Jews were often discriminated against as outsiders. Although he was not a particularly devout man, Rosenwald’s philanthropy reflected his understanding of Jewish history and traditions, as well as his close association with Emil G. Hirsch, a leading Reform rabbi in Chicago (and a political Progressive). Rosenwald, Ms. Diner writes, saw his giving as a means of refuting popular impressions of Jewish selfishness and particularism…

For both Jewish immigrants in the slums of Chicago and black sharecroppers in the rural South, Rosenwald’s philanthropy sought to promote practical efforts at self-improvement, not ambitious plans for social change. This approach made his gifts relatively uncontroversial, despite their magnitude. (Compared with today’s arguments over the funding of charter schools, the “Rosenwald schools” generated little political backlash.) But, as Ms. Diner notes, it also left his philanthropy vulnerable to accusations of timidity, a reluctance to take on the entrenched political and legal restrictions underlying the problems that Jews and African-Americans faced…

Rosenwald’s modesty lay behind his insistence on closing his foundation after his death and his opposition to attaching his name to projects. Perhaps his near-obscurity is one reason why many contemporary philanthropists, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are more likely to pursue bold goals, like eradicating the world’s deadliest diseases. But others may be considering a different path. Last summer, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos announced that he intended to become more philanthropic and asked for suggestions about how to help people in the “here and now.” The founder of today’s version of Sears, Roebuck could hardly do better than to peruse Ms. Diner’s biographical portrait and study Julius Rosenwald’s noble example.