Anti-Semitism

ANTI-SEMITISM

ANTI-SEMITISM and the fight against it have played a small but significant role in American history. During the colonial period, the most serious incident of anti-Semitism occurred not in a British colony, but in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (later New York), where in 1654 Governor Peter Stuyvesant attempted to bar Jews from the city. In the British colonies, Jews generally faced no worse treatment than did Catholics or other Christian minorities. The main obstacles they faced were religious requirements for holding political office.

In the colonial and early confederation period, every one of the thirteen colonies except for New York required all office holders to take a Christian oath. Some went even further—in South Carolina, belief in Protestant Christianity was a voting requirement. But by 1877, the last Christian voting requirement had been eliminated, and the United States offered many attractive incentives to Jewish immigration.

The Early Twentieth Century

By the early twentieth century, the United States had become the immigration destination of choice for Jews from all over the world. Yet vestiges of anti-Semitism remained. In order to combat these, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) was formed in 1906. Their goal was to protect Jewish civil rights, not only in the United States, but also internationally. A few years later, in 1913, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith was formed. This organization focused on combating negative media stereo-types of Jews and economic discrimination.

The strength of these Jewish defense groups demonstrated that although the United States had problems with anti-Semitism, these problems could be redressed by organization within the political system. These opportunities helped the United States remain the main destination for Jewish immigrants until the second decade of the twentieth century. Palestine was then only a distant second.

Between the 1910s and 1930s, the Jewish population of Palestine tripled to nearly 30 percent. This population explosion was directly connected to anti-Semitism and nativism in America. In 1921, the U.S. Congress clamped down on immigration from Eastern Europe, where a majority of European Jews lived. After the United States was closed off, more Jewish immigrants moved to Palestine than any other country. This would eventually have a profound impact on anti-Semitism in America. In the meantime, however, domestic American anti-Semitism was growing more visible.

During the 1920s, automaker Henry Ford, an early financial supporter of Hitler, was quite effective in promulgating anti-Semitic material, both at home and abroad. His anti-Semitic articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, were mainly for domestic consumption. But his anti-Semitic book, The International Jew (1922), found a wide readership not only in the United States, but in Germany as well. (Hitler kept Ford's book at his office, with a portrait of Ford above his desk.) Ford also disseminated an older anti-Semitic work, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This notorious and fraudulent work claimed to expose a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

In the 1930s, one of the places where people were most concerned with this mythical Jewish conspiracy was in Germany. The Nazi campaign against the Jews was an international development with links to American anti-Semitism. After Kristallnacht, many German Jews tried desperately to emigrate to the United States. They were kept away because of U.S. immigration quotas that the government refused to relax. The ostensible reason was fear of Nazi infiltrators hidden in a sudden flood of Jewish refugees. A more covert reason was the anti-Semitism of upper-level state department officials such as Breckenridge Long.

During this period, as fascism became a strong minority movement in America, anti-Semitism became more common. One of the most visible far-right anti-Semites was Charles Coughlin, the popular "radio priest" who referred to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal as "The Jew Deal."

Although his administration was characterized by some of its enemies as "philo-Semitic," one aspect of Roosevelt's military policy during World War II (1939–1945) has since been labeled anti-Semitic: U.S. complicity in the joint allied decision not to bomb the railways leading into major concentration camps such as Auschwitz, even when the Allies had clear proof of the Holocaust.

After the Holocaust

It was postwar knowledge of the Holocaust, more than anything else, that made anti-Semitism socially and morally unacceptable in almost all parts of postwar America. This new sentiment was given concrete expression by a major Hollywood film of 1947, Gentleman's Agreement. A scathing indictment of anti-Semitism, it not only did well at the box office, but was given the Oscar that year for best picture.

Then, one year later, in 1948, the Jews in Palestine declared that they were an independent nation. Within fifteen minutes of their declaration, President Harry S. Truman made the United States the first nation to recognize the existence of Israel. From that moment on, the United States became the key supporter of Israel in the Middle East.

The international importance of Israel to America's interests in the Middle East, combined with the moral opprobrium attached to the Holocaust, made American Jewish defense groups such as the AJC even more ambitious in their aims. Essentially, they went from defensive strategies to offensive operations. More specifically, leaders of Jewish defense groups in the 1940s developed an ideology centered upon what they called a new "unitary theory of prejudice." This was the then-radical idea that prejudice itself, no matter what group it was directed at, was a major social problem. This allowed Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League to move beyond strictly Jewish issues to work with other minority groups, especially African Americans in the civil rights movement.

Their efforts came to a triumphal climax of sorts with the 1950 publication of the book The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodor Adorno and others. This widely read and tremendously influential work successfully attempted to present prejudice—prejudice against any minority—as a personality disorder.

Ironically enough, at the start of the new millennium one of the few American groups that still noticeably exhibited anti-Semitism was one that had previously been helped tremendously by the Jewish campaign against prejudice: African Americans. Certain African American leaders, notably the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan, revitalized old myths about a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. In the process, these leaders not only reopened old wounds, but created new and bitter antagonisms between American minority groups that had once worked together as allies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dinnerstein, Leonard. Anti-Semitism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Gurock, Jeffrey S., ed. Anti-Semitism in America. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Jaher, Frederic Cople. A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Kaufman, Jonathan. Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

Svonkin, Stuart. Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Richard Bradley

See also Civil Rights Movement ; Fascism, American ; Jews ; Jewish Defense League ; Zionism .