What does any of that have to do with Adam Schiff?

I can assure you that it is more than you might be able to figure out. Its is a pretty tangled web.

For several generations the crowd was strikingly intramural when it came to marriage, making the crowd — to the larger crowd outside it — seem so cohesive and tight-knit as to be impenetrable. The "people we visit" became also the people we married. In the first American generation, a number of founding fathers married their own close relatives.

Joseph Seligman and his wife were first cousins, and in the next generation Joseph's brother's daughter married Joseph's sister's son. Meyer Guggenheim married his stepsister, and a Lewisohn married his own niece — and had to go to Europe to do it since such a union was, at that time, against the law in the United States — and as a result of this match he became a great-uncle to his children and his brother's son-in-law.

Three Seligman brothers married three sisters named Levi; several other Seligmans married Walters, and several married Beers. The Seligmans also followed the Jewish practice of offering widows in the family to the next unmarried son, by which process several women became double Seligmans.

Double cousinships abound. Seligmans have also married Hell- mans, Loebs, Lewisohns, Lilienthals, Guggenheims, and Leh- mans; Lehmans, who have married first-cousin Lehmans, have in addition married Lewisohns, Buttenwiesers, and Ickelhei- mers; Ickelheimers have married Stralems; Stralems have mar- ried Neustadts; Neustadts have married Schiffs; Schiffs have married Loebs and Warburgs; Warburgs have married Loebs, who, of course, have married Seligmans.