Anti-Semitism, hostility to or prejudice against Jews, has been a prevalent phenomenon throughout history. The history of the United States is no exception. Prior to the turn of the 19th century, however, American anti-Semitism was relatively mild. One of the principal reasons for its relatively moderate character was the small Jewish population. There were fewer than 3,000 Jews in the colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. The number had grown to just under a quarter of a million by 1877. At that time, Jews represented less than one-half of 1 percent of the American population. Few Americans viewed Jewish immigrants and citizens as threats to their personal or professional aspirations.
Among Jewish immigrants, there were degrees of adaptation and assimilation to American society. While some Americans commended Jews as champions of both hard work and thrift, these qualities caused a great deal of concern. Hard work and thrift often resulted in success. Success bred a degree of jealousy and distrust. The social and economic mobility of Jewish Americans alienated others who felt threatened not only by them, but also by the modern society that they seemed to accept. For nativist Americans, Jews were not only unfairly successful in the modern environment; they also came to symbolize it. Other industrializing countries similarly viewed Jewish citizens as a symbol of the evil of the modern world.
Significant increases in the number of Jewish immigrants from eastern and southern Europe further threatened many Americans who had, just decades before, migrated from western and northern Europe. From 1880 to 1914, 16.5 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Of these, more than 1.5 million, or slightly over 10 percent, were Jewish immigrants perceived by nativist Americans as a direct threat to their own social and economic prospects. This perception helped to spawn several strands of anti-Semitism that spread across America at the turn of the century.
There were several different waves of anti-Semitism that plagued the United States in the 20th century. The first emerged in the later part of the 19th century and did not dissipate until the end of World War I. The primary force behind this strand of anti-Semitism was fear of modernization. Attacks on Jewish immigrants came from two diffuse, yet interrelated sources. The first was from the quasi-agrarian movements of conservative Populists. After the defeat of the Populist Movement in the 1890s, some turned to anti-Semitism and developed an extremely potent attack on the Jewish “money classes.” Demagogues claimed that
Anti-Semitism 17
Jews were in control of an immense international financial ring that was responsible for much of the pain and suffering that had afflicted the American farmer. They argued that the Jews had made millions of dollars off the blood and sweat of hardworking Americans, an attack that denied that the new Jewish immigrants could be naturalized as “true Americans.” Conservative Populists, however, were not the only group to challenge the Jewish Americans’ rights. Members of the self-identified patrician classes also rallied around an anti-Semitic ideology. They excluded Jewish men and women from their communities, schools, and organizations.
As the popular and patrician challenges to the position of Jews in American society began to wane, other rationales emerged to fill the void. During the 1920s, new forces began to drive American anti-Semitism. The Ku Kiux Klan and Henry Ford each espoused a unique version of hatred toward the Jewish people. When the Klan of the post-Civil War era had dissipated at the end of the 1870s, its ideology, which largely focused on the problem of race in the South, died with it. When it reemerged in the
Young Jew outside a building on the Lower East Side in New York City, 1911 (Library of Congress)
1920s, it had a new ideological foundation. The new Klan was far less concerned with suppressing southern blacks. The Klan now championed additional attacks on immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. They viewed both Jewish and Catholic immigrants as antagonistic to traditional American values. The Klan’s more inclusive form of hatred allowed it to develop a tremendous following. By the middle of the 1920s, more than 4 million men and women had pledged their allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan.
Even more influential than the Klan in this era was Henry Ford, the automobile maker. For many Americans, Ford represented, with his ingenuity and success, American society. He used this perception to champion a number of causes, especially the crusade against what Ford believed to be an international conspiracy of Jews. Ford published The International Jew and a number of other tracts that told of a vast international Jewish conspiracy. He also used his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to bring down the alleged conspiracy. His attacks were so relentless that Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish-American lawyer, sued Ford for attacks levied through the Independent. After a long court battle, the case was settled. Ford apologized for his comments not only about Sapiro but also about the Jewish community in general. As part of the settlement, he had to stop publishing the Independent. Ford may have apologized for his indiscretions, but he never fully repudiated his anti-Semitic stance.
Another factor in American anti-Semitism was eugenics. Eugenics was a pseudoscience that was adopted to promote white supremacy. It came to provide a framework for anti-Semitic ideology and practices. No tract was more important in developing the idea of scientific racism than Madison Grant’s 1916 work, The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was just one of the dozens of authors of the time who argued that white Americans were being destroyed by aliens from within. These racial prophets predicted the decline of American civilization if “mongrelization” was not stopped. For Grant, non-whites were polluting the racial stock of the country. He believed that whites should increase their levels of reproduction while others, whom he believed to be less desirable, should be restricted from immigration. Eugenics attacked all nonwhite races, but southern and eastern European immigrants, many of them Jews, were especially targeted by these ideas. The fear and loathing of these immigrants was so acute, that immigration from southern and eastern Europe was virtually halted. Antiimmigration legislation such as the Quota Act (1921) and the National Origins Act (1924) helped stem the immigration by using quotas.
Anti-Semitism in the United States began slowly but developed many institutional and political expressions during the Progressive Era. For many Americans, Jews and modernity were synonymous; for others, Jewish immigrants, especially those from eastern and southern Europe, represented backward cultures and social degeneracy as well as greed and avarice. It was not until after World War II that anti-Semitism began to dissipate.
See also immigration; Immigration Act of 1917; Leo Frank case; race and racial conflict; religion.
Further reading: Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semi-tism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); David Gerber, Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
—Steve Freund
World History
