Grateful acknowledgments are due to Professor Edgar A. Singer, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Julius Drachsler of the College of the City of New York, and Mr. Leon L. Lewis, Secretary of the Anti-Defamation League, for their very stimulating aid, both prior to and during the writing of this study, and to my wife for her assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.
Lee J. Levinger
Wilmington, Delaware, May, 1925.
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| Introduction: A Statement of the Problem | [9] | |
| I. | The “Group Mind,” a Definition and a Description | [18] |
| II. | Groups in Contact | [32] |
| III. | Intolerance | [45] |
| IV. | American History, a Development of Groups | [56] |
| V. | The World War and Its Aftermath | [67] |
| VI. | The Ku Klux Klan and Other Group Reactions | [74] |
| VII. | Anti-Semitism | [85] |
| VIII. | The Retort to Anti-Semitism | [96] |
| IX. | The Future of the American Mind | [111] |
INTRODUCTION
A STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The existence of an anti-Semitic movement in the United States of America since the World War is a paradox that attracts attention at once. The most ancient and most pervasive form of intolerance is now at home in a nation founded by revolution and dedicated to the principles of freedom and tolerance. How can such a movement exist in such a nation? The apparent contradiction leads us at once into the many contradictions of the psychology of large groups of human beings, which both parallels and contradicts the simpler psychology of their constituent individuals. This is a leading question, to answer which we must go as deeply as we can into the mind of the group, into the relation of groups to the smaller groups of which they are composed and of those smaller groups to each other, into the genesis and implications of tolerance and intolerance.
This theoretical study completed, we shall then have to verify the principles there worked out by application to the difficult and crucial problem of the present study. If a theory of group and sub-group can explain the existence and the development of anti-Semitism in America, it will have solved a problem of exceptional complexity and significance, one central to the whole field. This will involve a study of the mind of the American people, in brief outline, with its various movements of intolerance in their bearing on the present one. It will also necessitate a slight study of the various anti-Semitic examples, historic and contemporary, from which the American movement derives in part. It will conclude with a consideration of the future of the American people as a united group, taking into view the tendencies of the sub-groups within the bounds of their common nation, or over-group.
Anti-Semitism is the modern form of the ancient prejudice against the Jew; it began in Germany in 1871, directly after the Franco-Prussian War, and bases its opposition to the Jews on the race theory. Anti-Judaism is, of course, much older, as old as the people against whom it was directed. In most ancient times, as represented by the Egyptian taskmasters and the Haman of the Book of Esther, it was like any other national hatred or prejudice. Later it took on a distinctly religious coloring, so that we find a Philo going to Rome to appeal for the Jewish colony in Alexandria or a Josephus writing a defense of his people against Apion. With the growth of Christianity into a persecuting body, anti-Judaism became strictly a religious matter, based on the New Testament story that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Medieval laws on the Jews were, then, often based on the principle of expiation, such as the yellow badge which distinguished the wearer when he left the compulsory shelter of the Ghetto. A different form of religious motivation was shown in the frequent accusations of desecrating the Host or of using the blood of a Christian child in preparing the unleavened bread of Passover, which appears in the Canterbury Tales and was revived as recently as 1911 in the notorious Beilis case at Kiev, Russia. Along with this went occasional mob outbreaks such as occur against the negroes in our Southern states, and still more rarely decrees of expulsion, which drove the entire Jewish population from England in 1294, from Spain in 1492, and from other countries at other times, for a longer or shorter period.
The actual applications of this religious anti-Judaism were far too many to enumerate here, ranging from the prohibition of tilling the soil to compulsory attendance at a Christian sermon, as in Browning’s “Holy Cross Day.” Counteracting it were the frequent intercourse and occasional intermarriage through the Middle Ages, the paid protection of the Holy Roman Emperor for his Kammerknechte, the toleration of the Moors and later of Holland, finally the emancipation of the French Revolution on abstract grounds of the Rights of Man. Religious discrimination was forbidden in the American Constitution, so that anti-Judaism of the religious type had no footing in the new nation, strong as it had previously been in several of the colonies. In addition, the number of Jews in America was very small, so that discrimination against them might exist in principle but could have little exercise in practise. And those few were often wealthy and cultured descendants of the old Spanish Jewry. During the most of the nineteenth century the Jews entering the country met the same difficulties as other immigrants, with very little variation.