Anti-Semitism in America. - book reviews

National Review, May 30, 1994 by Elliott Abrams

SINCE the National Jewish Population Survey of 1990 showed that intermarriage rates had passed the 50 per cent mark, the American Jewish community has been preoccupied with the related issues of intermarriage, assimilation, and survival. Organizations that once focused on defense against anti-Semitism now worry whether Jews are so well integrated into American society that they will slowly disappear.

This is an accurate, if ironic, assessment of the state of anti-Semitism in America today. It is an odd juncture for two books on the subject to appear, yet A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness by Frederic Cople Jaher and Anti-Semitism in America by Leonard Dinnerstein have both just been published. Dinnerstein, who teaches history at the University of Arizona, offers what he calls "the first comprehensive scholarly survey of anti-Semitism in the United States" and covers all of American history from the earliest settlements to the present day. Jaher, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, spends the first third of his book explaining the history of anti-Semitism in the ancient world and in Europe, and then treats American history only up to the Civil War.

While Dinnerstein gives us a comprehensive survey, Jaher writes out of a personal sense of passion and obligation: "The Holocaust and the immense rage it stirs in me have deepened my Jewish identity and inspired me to try to understand how such a catastrophe could occur." "My feelings about the massacre of my fellow Jews," he goes on, "have not blinded me to the realization that not all gentiles hate Jews, and that even those who dislike Jews would not necessarily torment or liquidate them." Not necessarily! With such a motivation, Jaher might have done better to study anti-Semitism in Europe rather than in America, and indeed the facts that emerge in his book--an excellent work of scholarship--do not justify its melodramatic title.

The story of anti-Semitism in America, both authors agree, seems to have a happy ending. From the very beginning, two factors were at war: Christian settlers brought a deep and powerful hatred of Jews with them from Europe, but the rules they established for the new society being built here blunted those beliefs. Here, Jews were citizens from the sart; and while they faced anti-Semites they did not face government-sponsored violence. As Mr. Jaher puts it, "because Christianity was uniquely shaped by American religious and secular circumstances, Jews have been better treated here than in any other Western Christian land." He presents a marvelous scene from the Fourth of July celebration in Philadelphia in 1788, "when Jewish and Christian clergymen marched arm in arm. At the feast following the parade, a kosher table was laid for Jewish citizens. Thus began the gradual admission of Judaism into the civic religion of America."

At the same time, Jews were often reviled as the killers of Christ and as merciless Shylocks. Both authors believe that the explanation of anti-Semitism in this country lies in Christianity, which taught it and spread it. As Mr. Jaher says, "Simply put, Christian viewpoints underlie all American anti-Semitism. No matter what other factors or forces may have been at play at any given time, the basis for prejudice toward Jews in the United States, and in the colonial era before it, must be Christian teachings." One need not accept the Freudian analyses of Christianity's view of Judaism put forth in A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness to agree that until very recently, Christian teachings about Jews were (to say the least) not helpful in the drive against anti-Semitism. This attitude found expression not only in sermons, but in such cultural artifacts as the famous nineteenth-century McGuffey's Readers, which, for example, characterized the Jews of Roman times as living in "the most licentious fanaticism" and expressed continuing contempt for Jews and their religion.

Jews were unable to vote in most states under their original constitutions, and New Hampshire kept its voting restrictions until 1877. In several states, Jews could not hold office or serve as lawyers. American history shows several serious outbreaks of anti-Semitism, such as General Grant's famous 1862 order expelling all Jews from the area of his command, or the 1913 Leo Frank case, in which a Jew was lynched in Georgia for a murder he did not commit.

The basic pattern is clear, and emerges in both books: for much of American history, Judaism has been tolerated--but with contempt. Jews were socially acceptable during the Colonial and early Federal periods. Anti-Semitism began to increase in the early 1800s, and grew partly because European immigrants pouring into the country brought hatred of Jews with them. It spread even more widely after the Civil War and as the Jewish population increased. A 1936 editorial that Mr. Dinnerstein quotes from the liberal Protestant establishment journal The Christian Century is typical: Jews "must be brought to repentance--with all tenderness, in view of their age-long affliction, but with austere realism, in view of their sinful share of their own tragedy." Prejudice turned into outright acts of anti-Semitism in periods of stress such as war or depression. Indeed, anti-Semitism in America peaked during the Second World War.