Previous: Chapter 12: Marxism and Judeophobia ('Anti-Semitism')
 
Chapter 13: Judeophobia ('Anti-Semitism') in The United States

The last chapter concluded by considering the New Left, which had a strong impact in American youth, and now we will include a special consideration about the American scene. To some extent, since there was no need for Emancipation in the US (Jews took an active part in the very inception of the States) Judeophobia in America can be seen as an imported phenomenon. Before the independence, in no colony were the Jews physically harmed as such (an attempted expulsion took place in 1654 by Peter Stuyvesant, Dutch governor of New Amsterdam). Other minorities were more group-targets than the Jews.

Native Judeophobia appeared during the Civil War when voices in both fighting sides accused “the Jews” of helping the enemy. On December 17, 1862, Ulysses Grant (victorious Union Army general and 18th US President) issued his infamous expulsion of all Jews from Tennessee, and President Abraham Lincoln reversed this “General Order Number 11” only after it was enforced in several towns.
 

Native Judeophobia appeared during the Civil War when voices in both fighting sides accused “the Jews” of helping the enemy. On December 17, 1862, Ulysses Grant (victorious Union Army general and 18th US President) issued his infamous expulsion of all Jews from Tennessee, and President Abraham Lincoln reversed this “General Order Number 11” only after it was enforced in several towns.

Although in the US there was no “response to Emancipation,” a good test for Judeophobia, the 1890’s witnessed Jew-hatred as a response to the increasing cultural gap. Between 1881 and 1890 over 1,500,000 Jews arrived fleeing the pogroms (two lessons ago we described it as the biggest exodus ever. If we take the period between 1881 and 1920, 3 million Jews entered the US). Much of the older population distrusted the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Thus, Henry Adams (a great-grandson of the second US President) voiced fears that the Jews were going to control the country: “The Jew atmosphere isolates me.” In Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890-novel “Caesar’s Columns,” the Jews seized power to take revenge against the Christians for how they had made them suffer. The aftermath of this cultural gap was “Restrictionism,” a movement to limit immigration, whose intellectual fathers did not avoid Judeophobia (Madison Grant’s 1916-“The Passing of the Great Race” condemned the Jews for mongrelizing the nation) and eventually achieved the Immigration Act of 1924 which heavily discriminated against South and East European immigration.

However, American presidents and leaders altogether expressed their esteem for the Jewish people. The founding fathers of the US had the same origin as the Puritans in England, who through their love for the Bible they rediscovered the Bible’s language, land and nation.

Responding to czarist Russia’s refusal to issue visas to American Jews and mistreatment of those few who got them, in 1911 the American government abrogated unilaterally the Russo-American Treaty of 1832.
 
A few patterns were similar to the European scene, although always in a much lesser degree. Thus, the “American Dreyfus affair” took place in 1913 against engineer Leo Frank, a factory manager in Atlanta. After his employee Mary Phagan was found murdered in the factory basement, Frank was immediately arrested and charged. The flimsy evidence was the testimony of a black employee who was suspected of being himself the true culprit. Mobs in and out of the courtroom called for Frank’s blood, the Jeffersonian Magazine demanded the execution of “the filthy, perverted Jew of New York,” and its editor led an order of “Knights of Mary Phagan” to organize a boycott of Jewish stores throughout Georgia. The Judeophobic atmosphere helped the guilty verdict and two years after the indictment, a mob dragged Frank from jail and lynched him. It was the first and last case until the episodes in Crown Heights a few years ago, when African American assaulted random Jews and murdered one as an act of “retaliation” against the accidental slaying of two children by a Chasidic driver who lost control of his car.
 

In Latin America, the similarities to European characteristics were blunter, especially Argentina, where a pogrom took place, perpetrated by the “Liga Patriotica” during the “Tragic Week” of 1919, and many Judeophobic gangs acted thereafter. But the scope we set for this course excludes a whole chapter of South American Judeophobia, each country having its own history.

The Leo Frank case was a harbinger of an upsurge of overt Judeophobia after WW1. The artificial national unity was over, and postwar disillusionment brought during the 1920’s fear that the old way of life was under the onslaught of the foreign born, the city, and religious liberalism. The racist, ultraconservative and Judeophobic Ku Klux Klan reached a membership of 4 million in 1924. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were spread by Henry Ford (as was mentioned in last lesson) in a campaign from 1920 until 1927, when he finally issued a public apology.

A new ideology appeared which accused “the Jews” of dominating Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, of causing the Great Depression, and of dragging the US into WW2 against a new Germany which deserved but admiration. The main spokesman for these tenets was the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin, whose weekly radio program drew millions of listeners. When in 1942 the truth of the Holocaust began to be known, the Church ordered Coughlin to cease all non-religious activities.

The avant-garde of the new isolationism was the America First Committee, which included the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. In 1941 he termed the Jews the most dangerous force pushing the US into the war. In 1944 a public opinion poll showed that a quarter of Americans still regarded Jews as a “menace.” But after WW2 American Judeophobia declined, except for the African American community.

In spite of the strong Jewish participation in the African American civil rights movement of the 1950’s, the Black power movement generated considerable friction in the African American-Jewish relations, especially when a native form of Islam attracted African Americans in search of an identity, while the Muslim world was at war with the Jewish sate.

On April 14, 1970, the radical Black power leader Stokely Carmichael declared: “I have never admired a White man, but the greatest of them was Hitler.” Similar expressions are heard today by Louis Farrakhan and other leaders of his “Nation of Islam.” Judaism is openly called “a gutter religion” and in 1994 labeled Hitler “a genius.” His aide Khalid Abdul Muhammad declared that “Jews are “bloodsuckers... You’re called Goldstein, Silverstein and Rubenstein because you’ve been stealing all the gold and silver and rubies all over the world.”

Gustavo Perednik

Next: Chapter 14: Contemporary Anti-Zionism
 
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Gustavo Perednik

Acknowledgement

These pages are adapted by the kind permission of Dr. Gustavo Perednik.They are based on a twelve-lecture Internet course prepared for "The Jewish University in Cyberspace." During 2000 and 2001, the book by Gustavo Perednik "Judeophobia" was published in Spanish. This course summarizes the core ideas ofthe book. It presents a comprehensive and unique analysis of the development of Jew hate (Judeophobia or anti-Semitism) throughout history. It tries to answer the question "why the Jews?" - why have Jews been particularly singled out for ethnic, racial and religious persecution, and it traces the relationship between anti-Zionism and racist Judeophobia or so-called anti-Semitism.

The Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism  is grateful to Dr. Perednik for his permission to popularize his works. .