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Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism refers to prejudice, discrimination, persecution, and/or hatred directed toward Jews on the basis of their ethnic or religious heritage. Although anti-Semitism dates back thousands of years to the persecution of Jews in ancient times by the Egyptians and Romans, hostility toward Jews in Western societies holds a particularly pernicious history since the medieval era. During the 14th and 15th centuries, for example, Jews throughout the predominantly Christian European continent were blamed for causing the bubonic plague (also known as the black death), accused of poisoning the wells and thereby contaminating the drinking water for Christians, and rumored to kidnap and eat Christian children. Popular myths at the time also held that Jewish men menstruated and that Jews were the offspring of Satan and, therefore, inherent enemies of Christianity.

The United States

Unlike European societies, the government of the United States has never institutionalized official anti-Semitic practices. However, this has not curtailed prejudice toward, suspicion of, or mistreatment of Jews in American society. Being of Jewish faith and heritage in an overwhelmingly Christian society marks one as an outsider to a certain degree, but many American Jews do not actively participate in religious practices. Throughout the history of the United States, Jews have experienced anti-Semitism on both religious and nonreligious grounds, ranging from ethno-religious slurs and name-calling to more malicious conspiracy theories, incidents of vandalism, and acts of violence.

As opposed to various monarchies and empires across Europe, the U.S. government never persecuted Jews or adopted anti-Semitic laws. Instead, anti-Semitism in the United States has consisted of privately held and informal prejudices, beliefs, stereotypes, and distrust of Jews, along with acts of violence and vandalism against Jewish persons and property. Although the federal government has never implemented anti-Jewish policies, various states enacted “blue laws” during the 18th and 19th centuries, which required businesses to remain closed on Sundays in accordance with its tradition as the Christian Sabbath and a day of rest. Such policies impacted Jewish merchants by forcing them to close their businesses on a day that they otherwise could have worked. Most blue laws have since been repealed or are unenforced.

Anti-Semitism Before World War II

American anti-Semitism reached its peak during the 1920s and 1930s amid a social context of large-scale immigration, the “red scare” of communist revolution, and the economic despair of the Great Depression. Jews do not share a uniform physical appearance and are not a distinct biological “race,” but proponents of immigration restrictions and scientific racists during the early 20th century nevertheless labeled Jews as members of an allegedly inassimilable “Hebrew race” who posed a threat to the nation's Anglo-Protestant cultural core. Such theories were advanced by Madison Grant, a prominent anthropologist and head of the Immigration Restriction League, who ominously warned that the nation was committing “racial suicide” through the influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The Ku Klux Klan, the oldest active hate group in the United States, reached its all-time peak in membership during the 1920s, boasting an estimated four million dues-paying and robed Klansmen by 1925. The Klan had previously been confined to the south, where it persisted as a vehemently antiblack organization, but in the early 20th century, amid a heavy period of immigration, the Klan expanded its geographic reach into the northern and midwestern states and broadened its tactics to espouse an anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant agenda.

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