A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (43 page)

Among the antisemites who acknowledged their debt to Ford was Father Charles Coughlin, a Detroit-based Catholic priest. At the height of his popularity in the 1930s, his radio show reached more than three million homes across the nation. He also published
Social Justice
, a magazine with a circulation of about one million. When it reprinted the
Protocols
, Coughlin wrote, “Yes, the Jews have always claimed that the
Protocols
were forgeries, but I prefer the words of Henry Ford, who said, ‘The best test of the truth of
The Protocols
is in the fact that up to the present minute they have been carried out.’” Coughlin added, “Mr. Ford did retract his accusations against the Jews. But neither Mr. Ford nor I retract the statement that many of the events predicted in the
Protocols
have come to pass.”
²⁵

Those “predicted” events included World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Balfour Declaration, and the Minorities Treaty. They were not actually predicted in the
Protocols
, but the document uses such vague language that it could be interpreted as “proof” of almost any event.

Even before Ford published the
Protocols
, antisemitism was on the rise in the United States. Some of the antagonism has been linked to the fact that in the early 1900s, about a million immigrants entered the United States each year. Unlike earlier arrivals, most of them were Catholics or Jews from eastern and southern Europe.

Much of the new anti-Jewish feeling was visible but not as conspicuous as the antisemitism in Europe. Nevertheless, American Jews experienced some discrimination almost everywhere they turned. Many colleges, private clubs, and civic organizations limited the number of Jews they would accept, while others excluded all Jews from membership. Employers routinely asked for the “nationality” of job applicants or indicated in their ads that only gentiles (non-Jews) need apply. Even large corporations that were willing to hire Jews for low-level jobs excluded Jews from executive positions or limited their number. Jews were also barred from renting or buying property in some neighborhoods and staying in some hotels. Only rarely did antisemitism become violent. Perhaps the most shocking incident occurred in 1915, during the world war and about five years before the
Protocols
was published in the United States.

In 1913, Leo Frank, the manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, had been accused of murdering a 13-year-old girl, one of his employees. Even though the prosecution had a weak case, a jury found Frank guilty, as crowds outside the courthouse shouted, “Hang the Jew.” Frank was not allowed in the courtroom when the jury gave its verdict, because the judge feared he would be attacked.

After the judge sentenced Frank to death, his attorneys appealed the conviction, but the higher courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, voted against reopening the case. Only the governor of Georgia was willing to review the trial records. As a result of that review, he reduced Frank’s sentence to life in prison. A few days later, a mob burst into the prison, kidnapped Frank, and lynched him.

The case shocked Jews throughout the nation. Many had believed that kind of antisemitic violence was impossible in the United States. Five years later, the publication of the
Protocols
added to their uneasiness. It was a time when vigilante groups like the one that had murdered Frank were being used to keep African Americans, Jews, and Catholics “in their place” not only in the South but also in many northern states. It was also a time when immigration was becoming an increasingly explosive issue, as a story in the
New York Times
revealed. On August 17, 1920, the newspaper reported:

Leon Kaimaky, [a commissioner of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and] publisher of the
Jewish Daily News
of this city, returned recently from Europe, where he went, together with Jacob Massel, to bring about the reunion of the thousands of Jewish families who were separated by the war. Mr. Kaimaky has been abroad since last February…. In an article in the
Jewish Daily News
describing conditions in Eastern Europe Mr. Kaimaky declared that “if there were in existence a ship that could hold 3,000,000 human beings, the 3,000,000 Jews of Poland would board it and escape to America.”
²⁶

Alarmed readers jumped to the conclusion that the HIAS was planning to bring over three million Polish Jews. So did members of Congress, who immediately called for a ban on all immigration. Albert Johnson, a Republican from Washington State and the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration, brought the matter to a vote without a hearing, and the House quickly passed the ban. By the time the vote was taken, many were fearful that as many as 15 million Jews—the estimated number of Jews in the world in 1920—would soon be arriving in the United States.

The Senate Committee on Immigration was more cautious. Its chairman told reporters, “This talk about 15,000,000 immigrants flooding into the United States is hysteria.” He then called for hearings. The first witness was Johnson, who warned that unless an emergency act was passed, immigrants would “flood this country.”

John L. Bernstein, the president of HIAS, also testified. He told Congress that HIAS had no plans to bring three million Polish Jews to the United States. He bluntly stated:

Now, gentlemen… during the year 1919 we obtained the largest contributions, both in membership and in donations, we have ever received… and the amount of the contributions was $325,000…. Now, I will leave it to you, gentlemen, how much of that $325,000 will be left us to undertake this great plan that somebody is reading about?
²⁷

In the end the Senate decided that there was no emergency, nor were there grounds for a general ban on immigration. Still, like their counterparts in the House of Representatives, many senators were uneasy about the “quantity” and “quality” of the nation’s newest arrivals. In 1921, the House and the Senate passed the first of several laws limiting immigration.

In his testimony before the House Committee on Immigration, John Trevor, a New York attorney and member of a group called the Allied Patriotic Societies, proposed that Congress limit immigration country by country to two percent of the number of immigrants from that country living in the United States in 1890. He deliberately ignored the most recent census, from 1920, and chose an earlier one that predated the arrival of most Jewish immigrants. After much debate, a bill containing Trevor’s plan passed by an overwhelming majority in both the House of Representatives (373 to 71) and the Senate (62 to 6). In May 1925, President Calvin Coolidge signed the National Origins Act into law. The new law effectively closed the United States to most Jewish immigrants.

During the debate, Coolidge told the American people,

Restricted immigration is not an offensive but purely a defensive action…. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American
.

Many Americans shared his views. The new law was extremely popular and seemed to solve the nation’s “immigrant problem,” at least for the time being. The problem in Europe was not as easily resolved. There, the notion that “the Jews” were a “nation within a nation” plotting world domination would lead to genocide—an effort to murder all of Europe’s Jews.

(1918–1945)

Henry Buxbaum was one of the more than 100,000 Jews who served in the German army during World War I. He returned home to Germany to find that antisemitism was sweeping the nation. He later recalled:

You could taste antisemitism everywhere; the air of Germany was permeated by it. All the unavoidable consequences of military defeat, revolution, a ruinous inflation, the Versailles [peace treaty], the loss of the territories in the east and west, the unsettling social changes following in their wake—each and every thing was blamed on the Jews and/or the Communists, who for the convinced Jew-hater were interchangeable.
¹

At the end of World War I in 1918, Europe was home to more than 9.5 million Jews. At the end of World War II in 1945, Europe’s Jewish population was approximately 3.5 million. Some had immigrated to other continents, but most—nearly 6 million children, women, and men—had been murdered by the German government solely because they were Jews. Those murders are now collectively known as the Holocaust.

Antisemitism did not begin in Germany, or anywhere else, in 1918; Jews had been regarded as dangerous outsiders for centuries, and anti-Jewish feeling usually intensified in times of war and other upheaval. But during World War II, for the first time in history, a government, with the support of many of its people, had systematically hunted and then murdered Jews for no reason other than the fact that their parents or grandparents were Jews.

Why was this time different? The years after World War I were a time of change almost everywhere in the world. Many of those changes had begun earlier and were speeded up by the war. Others were linked to innovations in science, art, and music that altered the way people saw themselves and the world around them. These innovations made some people uneasy; they suggested that things were not always as they had seemed in
the past. Other people were bewildered by the modern world and longed for a return to simpler times.

In times of great change and uncertainty, many people want simple explanations for things they cannot explain. In the years between the two world wars, some found those explanations in tales of so-called Jewish conspiracies. Perhaps that is why Buxbaum described German antisemitism as motivated not by religious zeal or a fanatical racism (although both existed) but by a belief that Germans were being victimized by “the Jews.”

In a single week in November 1918, Germany experienced earth-shattering changes. On November 9, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave up his throne and fled to the Netherlands. Within hours, the Social Democrats, then the largest political party in Germany’s parliament, replaced the monarchy with a republic. The new government faced incredible challenges, including the possibility of a revolution like the one in Russia (see
Chapter 12
). The capital, Berlin, was so unsettled that lawmakers met in Weimar (about 180 miles to the southwest), and the newly established government was therefore known as the Weimar Republic.

Then on November 11, just two days after Germany became a republic, World War I ended with a cease-fire. Only then did many Germans realize that they had lost the war. Some were even more stunned when they learned the terms of the peace treaty signed at Versailles just outside Paris in 1919. Germany had to give up its colonies abroad and some territory at home, and the size of its army was restricted. The treaty also held Kaiser Wilhelm responsible for the war and required that Germany pay reparations to the victors.

As anger over the terms of the treaty grew, Germans increasingly insisted that someone had “stabbed the nation in the back.” General Erich Ludendorff, a war hero, told lawmakers that Germany had been betrayed not by the men who had led the nation into war but by some Social Democrats, the Catholic Center Party, the socialists, and of course, the Jews. At the time, Germany’s 500,000 Jews accounted for less than one percent of a total population of about 61 million.

By 1922, Ludendorff was focusing almost entirely on Jews as “the enemy.” He wrote, “The supreme government of the Jewish people was working hand in hand with France and England. Perhaps it was leading them both.”
²
As proof, Ludendorff cited the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
(see
Chapter 12
), even though he was aware that the
Times
of London had recently exposed the document as a hoax. He believed that the
Times
was wrong or misled. So did some members of Germany’s parliament. As one explained, “The revelations of the
Times
cannot touch, let alone destroy, the genuineness of the
Protocols
.”
³

Germans expressed their anger over their defeat in the war by protesting the Treaty of Versailles.

Despite such talk, most Germans in 1919 knew that Germany had lost the war because the United States gave France and Britain the advantage when it declared war on Germany in 1917. The United States had gone to war because of German attacks on its ships.

In the end, Germany’s new constitution guaranteed equal rights to all citizens, including Jews. And some Jews took advantage of the opportunity that those rights afforded them. Outraged, extreme nationalists began to call the Weimar Republic the “Jew republic.” Yet of the 250 Germans who served as ministers between 1919 and 1933, only four were Jews. For many nationalists, even one Jew in government was one too many.