[101]Jew-baiting has nothing to do with the quality of Jewish characteristics. We are hated for our wealth and for our poverty, for our plutocrats and for our Reds, for display and for hard-headedness and warm-heartedness, for arrogance and servility, for pushingness and reserve, for speech and silence, for political participation and nonparticipation. If we desire assimilation you drive us out of your universities by chicanery and insult; if we do not strive after assimilation you say we ought to go where we came from.
To this we may compare the interesting if somewhat hasty generalization of Friedman:
[102]Any unabsorbed social group generates the ill will of the majority.... It is characteristic for the superior culture to absorb the inferior.... The seeming slowness of this movement is an irritant to the non-Jewish world and the persistence of the Jews as a distinctive cultural group is resented by the dominant group. It is an implied challenge to the supremacy of the culture of the lands where Jews dwell.
And Shailer speaks of [103]“This most striking and universal of ethnic judgments,” that the Jews are an unpleasant people. The Semite to him is “the ablest type of man the world has known, but a type that is somewhat archaic” because religious rather than scientific in mental trend. He feels that Jew and Aryan are different in their mode of meeting the stranger, the Jew is more impulsive due to swifter mental processes, which invariably causes bad first impressions to be later overcome. And so on. These reasons seem hardly better than those of the anti-Semites themselves—for the Jew today is not a Semite; Dr. Shailer compared him with the rather repressed New Englander at Harvard, not with the Aryan of Germany or Italy or Russia; since he wrote seven Jews have received the Nobel prize for scientific distinction; and finally, the challenge to the superior race (of Dr. Friedman) is simply the fact of difference. No characterization of the Jew accounts for anti-Semitism, whether it be formulated by friend or foe; the only genuine causes are those that can be found in the group mind itself.
5.
In addition to the background of American group mind, already studied, and the imported theory of anti-Semitism, there are certain facts which affect the situation in its special manifestations. The most important of these is the great increase of Jewish population in the United States. At the time of the Know-Nothings there were not over 50,000 Jews in this country, and many of them had lived here since before the Revolution, possessing fine patriotic records; there was thus no motive to single them out for the anti-alien agitation of that period. At the time of the A. P. A., there were about 500,000 Jews, but these were still not a large enough group to attract special attention; they were widely scattered through the south and west; and the agitation against the larger numbers of Catholic immigrants passed them by. In 1925, however, the number of Jews in the United States is estimated at 3,600,000, of whom 1,735,000 have immigrated into America in the last 25 years, and 900,000 of these in the last 15. Here, then, is a tremendous body of Jews who are also foreigners, who speak the Yiddish language, adhere to traditional Jewish religious practices, and who are massed in great bodies in certain cities and in certain industries. The foreign Jew is thus more conspicuous today than any other immigrant group, even than those much larger in number. New York City alone has 1,500,000 Jews, such a huge number of whom are of obviously foreign origin that they are a conspicuous attraction for the intolerance of other groups in America. As Mecklin says:
[104]The Jew, who has recently been coming to this country mainly from Russia and Southeastern Europe by hundreds and thousands, and who, true to his urban traits, has crowded into New York and other large cities where his native characteristics are thrust into the face of the native American on the street, in the hotel or department store, has also come in for his share of the prevalent fear psychology. Henry Ford ... has voiced the fears of the native American brought into close contact with the unassimilated and disagreeably alien Jewish population of our large centers.
A special feature of this present Jewish immigration is that much of it comes from a belated civilization. The Jew of Poland or Ukrainia or Rumania steps from an agricultural society into an industrial one; from an aristocratic class society into a democratic one; from an isolated Jewish Ghetto life into a maelstrom of races and cultural groups, among whom he must grope his way. No wonder that his adjustment is not always a correct one, still less often the same adjustment as that of the standardized, typical American. Many of them become radicals in economics, religion and politics as a reaction against their former experience of oppression; some of them were pro-German during the World War to oppose their former Russian tyrants; for all of them the problem is doubly difficult because it involves not only a personal adjustment to new economic and social conditions, but also the group adjustment into the life of the United States. Many of them in their new-found freedom become super-patriots, take America to their hearts, and are thus doubly disappointed when America also repulses them.
But Jewish immigration also has been largely stopped and the foreign aspect of American Jewry is rapidly disappearing. In 1914, the Jewish admissions to the United States numbered 138,000 or 11.3%; when departures are taken into account, the Jews became 14.3% of the total. During the war the Jewish immigration was negligible; but in 1921 it again amounted to 119,000 or 14.7% of the total, or deducting departures, 21.2%. The passage of the quota law of 1921 resulted in reducing the total Jewish admissions to 53,000 and 49,000 in the next two years; or 17.3% and 9.5% of the total admissions. As 1922 was a year of many departures among Greeks, Italians and several other groups, the net Jewish immigration of that year actually amounted to 47.5% of the total net immigration. The effect of the 1924 immigration act has already been noted by social workers and others in touch with immigration, but it is still too early to show by statistics what has occurred, namely the practical cessation of this great Jewish immigration into the United States. It is obvious that this fact will alter the animus and the nature of anti-Semitism, just as all anti-alien sentiments, even though it will not eradicate the other causes and therefore will not stop anti-Semitism completely.