In “Loyalties” by John Galsworthy, there occur two statements of anti-Semitism so powerful and so keen that they may serve as a key to the whole situation. The young Jew has accused a Christian aristocrat of stealing his purse. The gentile girl, naturally a liberal, has to choose her loyalty. She says: “Oh! I know lots of splendid Jews, and I rather like little Ferdie; but when it comes to the point—they all stick together; why shouldn’t we! It’s in the blood.... Prejudices—or are they loyalties—I don’t know—criss-cross—we all cut each other’s throats from the best of motives.” And later on an English grocer of the lower middle class confesses: “To tell you the truth, I don’t like—well, not to put too fine a point on it—‘ebrews. They work harder; they’re more sober; they’re honest; and they’re everywhere. I’ve nothing against them, but the fact is—they get on so.”
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Anti-Semitism is, then, a typical because a violent group attitude. In America in its newest manifestation it is a part of the complex of group revolts after the World War; it is intimately associated with the Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigration movement, and repression generally, at the same time that it has distinctive phases of its own. As Lewis S. Gannett wrote:
[88] Because anti-Semitism is world-wide it is easy to assume that it has the same causes everywhere; but conditions in America are very different from conditions in countries where religion is taught in the schools, where the Jews are virtually all middlemen, where the Ghetto is an abiding place for generations of the same family.... American anti-Semitism can largely be explained without reference to the religious beliefs of Christians or Jews.
This last statement applies only to the immediate situation, not the background.
The two elements in American anti-Semitism, then, are the imported prejudice from Europe and the American soil which received it. The form of the prejudice was the importation; its material backing and impulse was the native American reaction against the apparently new or apparently different group. The intensity of the movement at this particular moment in history is a part of the post-war mental state of the American people. In addition to the movements described in the last chapter there are other manifestations mentioned in the introduction: such as the attempt to limit the proportion of Jews in the colleges; the anti-Semitic books and periodicals; and the activity of the Russian emigrés constituting the immediate connecting link with anti-Semitism in Europe and the world over. The agencies which hunted down the radicals, whether as Russian sympathizers or from economic motives or merely as a different group, tried assiduously to find Jews among their leaders and were bitterly disappointed when economic radicalism turned out to be an American movement in which Jews had merely a minority share.
As we have seen, in 1919 the soil of the United States was abundantly prepared for the imported seeds of anti-Semitism. Group was arrayed against group, native and alien, Nordic and South European, Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew. In addition to the local and timely fact, we must also presuppose an old inheritance of specific prejudice against the Jew of a strictly religious nature. This is by no means the immediate occasion of the present movement, as it may have been of pogroms in Russia; but it is certainly an element in the national subconsciousness and in the conscious thinking of certain more orthodox Christian churches. Granted that Horace M. Kallen exaggerates the importance of this factor, still he has done well in pointing it out. He says:
[89]In the Christian system the Jews are assigned a central and dramatic status. They are the villains of the Drama of Salvation.... Nowhere in Europe could there be a village to whose inhabitants the word “Jew” did not denote the people who had denied the Savior and crucified Him, who were thus the enemies of God and of mankind.... The word “Jew” became a stimulus which touched off this emotion. It was a word to curse with.... The root of the special Jewish difficulty is the position of the Jews in the Christian religion. If you can end this teaching that the Jews are enemies of God and of mankind you will strike anti-Semitism at its foundations.
Certainly the teachings of infancy and childhood have left this, residue of anti-Judaism in the minds of millions of persons, who would be the first to deny the possession of religious bigotry; certainly the Christian church, as a group mind, contains a tradition of anti-Judaism as one of its ideas. But this means merely that religion to the Jew takes the place of skin color to the Negro or language to the Czech. We have ancient warrant that so trivial a matter as the mispronunciation of the word Shibboleth was sufficient identification for one sub-group of Hebrews to kill members of another group of their own people. All that intolerance needs is some mark of identification, however irrelevant or petty, to set off the rival group.
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