Antisemitism in America 1654 - 1938

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1654- New Amsterdam Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to expel the 23 Jews fleeing persecution who had just landed in the colony. He called them a “deceitful race – such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.”
https://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/jewish_life/

American Sunday school primers, Bible mission tracts and popular novels recalled Jews’ complicity in the murder of Jesus and sought to convert them. Sabbath Lessons (1813) taught Sunday school children about the “conspiracy of the Jewish rulers against Jesus Christ.”

1852 New York Times journalist who wrote of Jews’ “sharp schooling in money-getting” and that, controlling all capital, they declared “empires solvent or bankrupt, at will.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1852/05/25/archives/jewish-disabilities.html?searchResultPosition=1

In the novel “The Prince of the House of David” (1855), a part of a trilogy which reportedly sold over 5 million copies, the author, an Episcopal priest, called on “the daughters of Israel” to abandon Judaism and follow Christ.

An illustration from 1882 in the satiric magazine, The Judge, showing a line of women, seeking employment, standing before a lecherous man who was obviously Jewish.

1890, the Reverend Charles F. Deems wrote of a segment of Jews whose only passion is “the greed of gain.” In novels, that love for money translated into the charge that Jews “control the money power of the world.”

In 1890, observing a spike in antisemitism that saw Jews excluded from public & private institutions, the editors of the New York Jewish newspaper the American Hebrew asked more than 50 clergy, college presidents, lawyers and politicians about “Prejudices Against the Jews.”

1897- in the Atlantic Monthly, a friend of Harvard professor and ambassador James Russell Lowell recalled how Lowell decried Jewish bankers, brokers and the ones who had slipped into politics and diplomacy. Lowell feared that they were poised to control “the Earth’s surface.”

Lowell’s assertion of an international Jewish conspiracy predated the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Its antisemitic fantasies of Jewish leaders plotting to destroy Christianity and control the world inspired Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The myth of a world Jewish conspiracy found a home in America in the 1920s thanks to “The International Jew – The World’s Foremost Problem.” Quoting from the “Protocols,” this series in the Dearborn Independent newspaper was subsequently published as a multi-volume book.

Circulation of the Dearborn Independent grew to 700,000 by 1924-1925 as its publisher mailed thousands of copies around the country, to bank presidents, Rotary clubs, women’s clubs, college presidents & the members of Congress. The publisher was the industrial tycoon Henry Ford.

Tufts College President E.N. Capen declared: The Jews could never “assimilate like other aliens; they are always Hebrew … They never can be Americans, pure and simple.” His was not the only response to state starkly that the Jews remained a nation within a nation.

1938- The Evian Conference and what followed. https://twitter.com/Claire_Voltaire/status/1178107414735773697?s=20

What young American Jews fail to understand is that the past 50-75 years of relative relief from deadly antisemitism, is nothing but a nanosecond of a breather from thousands of years of persecution, and that is all it is. A breather. That's not even a span of one human life.

By 1860 there were an estimated 150K to 200K Jews in the US, up from 15K in 1840. That dramatic rise was the result of poverty & discrimination in Germany/Central Europe, where Jewish people were often excluded from trade, prevented from marrying & subject to pogroms & violence.