Anti-Semitism and the American Racial Context: A Historical Inquiry

This essay reacts to the observation that (1) the vast literature on anti-Semitism virtually ignores the United States and that (2) American scholarly writing on the topic of race and racism has little to say about Jews and anti-Semitism. This essay tries to bridge both gaps by arguing, first, that anti-Semitism should not be studied as an ideology or as a social virus but as a marker of specific tensions in the cultures where it becomes a public issue. Second, in the United States, a civic nation rather than a European nation-state, Jews have always been included as citizens, have never challenged a national identity based on democratic political values, and have nevertheless been perceived ambiguously. Third, Race has defined the basic fissures in our social and political history, and groups stigmatized as racially alien have faced systematic discrimination. At the turn of the 20th century, East European Jews were perceived as members of an immigrant proletariat encased - like other immgrants - in a racial ideology and faced discrimination on that critical but largely class-related basis. Fourth, other Jews before and after that era were marginal to America's basic tensions, and different groups of Jews were treated differently according to the various class positions and geographic locations that they often shared with others. Anti-Semitism marked the shifting kaleidoscope of America's endless process of economic growth and social mobility.