In June 1858, police in Bologna seized a six-year-old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, under the justification that Edgardo had been secretly baptized as a baby by his housekeeper. Edgardo was taken to Rome to live under the pope’s tutelage. The kidnapping spurred outrage around the world, but Americans were particularly outspoken—and for the American Jewish community, the Mortara case was a formative event. The following year saw the founding of the Board of Deputies of American Israelites, the first such American Jewish “defense” organization.
When Pamela S. Nadell, director of Jewish studies at American University, recounts the Mortara case in her impeccable new book on anti-Semitism in American history, she connects what happened in Bologna with an incident that occurred five months later at a Catholic hospital in St. Louis, where a Jewish Army captain on his deathbed was baptized against his will. But in this case, the mayor of St. Louis joined the Jewish community in successfully demanding the release of the body for a Jewish burial.
Throughout Nadell’s book, this becomes a recurring theme: An anti-Semitic affront is committed against Jews somewhere in the world, American Jews mobilize on behalf of the victims and then establish some sort of organized vigilance against the possibility that American Jews will be victimized in the same manner.
The examples Nadell chooses are representative of their respective eras in American history, so the book is both concise and fairly comprehensive. It is also timely: Nadell warns against minimizing anti-Semitism in America just because it is less pogrom-filled than its European counterpart.
The American strain of Jew-hatred is social anti-Semitism, typified by university quotas and country-club bans. But as Nadell notes, “social anti-Semitism” is merely a harmless-sounding gateway to anti-Jewish violence if it isn’t contained. And there are plenty of examples from American history to demonstrate as much.
So what is social anti-Semitism exactly, and how have Jews in America responded to it? The experiences of Joseph Seligman offer a perfect case study. Seligman, an immigrant peddler from Bavaria, became one of the 19th century’s most successful investment bankers, eventually financing railroads and public utilities and advising the president of the United States on public indebtedness. In 1877, after creating a plan for America to finance its Civil War debt, Seligman and his family were turned away from the Henry Hilton–owned Grand Union in Saratoga Springs, a premier vacation spot, because of the hotel’s new “No Israelites” policy.
By most accounts, Seligman was vital to the Union’s war effort and then to the country’s financial recovery afterward. But “no Israel-ites” meant no exceptions, not even for a man on whom the country had leaned in difficult times. Seligman denounced Hilton, who responded by complaining to the New York Times of Seligman’s “Shylockean meanness.” A “Seligman Jew,” Hilton ranted, was a “shyster.” Hilton’s hotel managers insisted other guests found the Jews’ “ill-breeding disgusting.” It was a high-profile assault on the very humanity of America’s Jews.
“The Seligman affair became seen as the first instance of social antisemitism,” Nadell writes. But American Jews had what we might call the constitutional right to chutzpah and made good use of it. Jewish women stopped shopping at the high-end department stores that enriched the Hiltons. Banking associates of Seligman’s publicly denounced Hilton. There were public protests against Hilton. Newspapers started looking into other hotels’ reported “no Jews” policies, blowing the lid off polite society’s anti-Jewish bigotry. Hilton stuck to his guns, but the public relations nightmare was costly to him.
American Jews made a habit of responding to anti-Semitism with resolve. The notorious lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish man falsely convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan in Atlanta in 1913, spurred the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. When Henry Ford financed the publishing and distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Semitic texts, the public backlash and its effects on Ford’s standing led the industrialist to pen a groveling letter of public apology.
Nadell digs up plenty of lesser-known but colorful examples throughout U.S. history. When an Army private was explicitly denied a promotion because he was Jewish, his mother contacted the Washington office of B’nai B’rith, which then lodged a complaint with then–President William Howard Taft. The president himself rebuked the offending colonel’s “race prejudice,” and the promotion went through. And in 1927, discrimination against Jewish doctors and patients at Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital led to not just outrage but criminal charges and a mayoral investigation of the hospital system.
American Jews found other ways to get proactive in the fight against anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, former ADL official and World War I veteran Leon Lewis established “what may have been the era’s largest domestic spy operation run by a Jew.” Lewis enlisted former military men with German heritage to infiltrate pro-Nazi groups. Lewis’s agents “uncovered shocking plots to sabotage the nation’s military installations and seize National Guard armories as well as schemes to murder Jews by driving through Boyle Heights [in Los Angeles], where many Jews lived, shooting up homes and sending in exterminators to fumigate them with cyanide.” There was also “a plot to kidnap Jewish movie stars and studio heads” as part of a plan to “spark a nationwide pogrom.”
American Jews understood the relative freedom they possessed (compared with much of world Jewry) to protest such treatment. Advocating for victimized Jews abroad therefore did much to shape American Jewry itself. The Mortara case is one example. Another was the so-called Damascus Affair. In 1840, a friar in Damascus went missing while traveling to the city’s Jewish quarter. Authorities tortured a local Jew until he “confessed” that local Jews had murdered the friar to use his blood on matzah during Passover—i.e., the classic blood libel. Anti-Jewish violence followed.
America even had its own blood libel. In Massena, New York, in 1928, four-year-old Barbara Griffiths walked into the woods near her house and seemingly vanished. The following day, as Jews were preparing to observe Yom Kippur, Nadell writes, “the mayor and a state trooper summoned the congregation’s rabbi to the town hall. He had to wade through a crowd of several hundred people outside of it to get in. There, the mayor and trooper asked him if Jews in the old country offered human sacrifices on their holidays.”
Thankfully, little Barbara wandered back out of the woods unharmed before sundown, but a crowd still gathered outside the Massena synagogue that night to taunt and threaten the Jews. Had Barbara not emerged when she did, that crowd would have shown up to carry out a pogrom instead of a protest.1
Indeed, American history is littered with instances of full-blown anti-Jewish violence. When Major-General Ulysses S. Grant expelled all Jews from the territory under his control during the Civil War after accusing them of disloyalty to the Union, he didn’t “merely” cause them economic loss and social disruption. He also opened them up to vigilante attacks from citizens who were riled up by their war leader and took matters into their own hands.
The discrimination discovered in hospitals surely cost some Jewish patients their lives—doctors and relatives of deceased patients later testified as much. In 1902 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, hundreds of Jews participating in a funeral procession were attacked by factory workers and then the police; some victims compared it to pogroms back in Russia. And then there were the immigration restrictions: Calling it “social anti-Semitism” was of no consolation to the many Jews around the world who were condemned to systematic murder in their home countries because the gates of America were closed to them.
The lesson that jumps off the pages of Nadell’s book is not that some forms of anti-Semitism are harmless but that all forms of anti-Semitism are connected and will, with the reliability of a law of physics, proceed toward violence unless acted upon by an outside force. Responding to the Damascus Affair, Nadell writes, U.S. Jews “honed strategies that they would employ to counter discrimination and persecution in the future. They held public meetings, lobbied the government, appealed to the press, welcomed allies, and stood up individually and collectively against antisemitism wherever and whenever it arose.”
Which is why Nadell’s concluding chapter is so important. She weaves together the post-10/7 wave of discrimination against Jews in major institutions and across party lines. In Nadell’s telling, that very much includes not just the post–October 7 atmosphere on campus but the two decades’ worth of buildup to this moment in colleges throughout the country. “The battle lines over antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israelism—the disapproval or demonization of all things Israeli—on campus were drawn,” Nadell writes about such fights in the early years of the new century. “They would widen into deep trenches in the years to come. Jewish students and faculty experienced what they perceived as antisemitism no matter what others called it.”
Nadell should be commended for refusing to adjudicate the debate over terminology. What matters most is what is happening, not what name you give it. The goal of all these anti-Jewish and anti-Israel extremist movements is clear, ambitious, and evil: Exclude Jews from society, and put targets on their backs in the process. And they will ultimately fail so long as American Jews remain vigilant and willing to exercise their rights.
1 For a deeper analysis of the Massena blood libel, see Andrew Doran’s “When the Blood Libel Came to America” in this issue.
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