8 - The Jewish experience in America

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The treatment of Jews has long played an important part in discussions of religious freedom in the United States. Legal scholars have considered Jews the “hard test” of religious tolerance, the benchmark for whether the protection of religious belief and practice truly extends beyond the Christian mainstream. In eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and even twentieth-century descriptions of American religious diversity, Jews would usually be the only non-Christians mentioned. Part of the significance of Washington's famous letter to the Newport Synagogue (see Chapter 2) was the implication that if even Jews were safe in the United States, then all religious groups would be safe.

The background to America's self-congratulatory tolerance of its Jewish minority was the catastrophic violence that at some point befell Jews in nearly every European country. A large body of scholarship has been devoted to explaining the global longevity, universality, and lethality of anti-Semitism. During the Christian period of the Roman Empire, state authorities transferred culpability for Christ's death almost entirely to the Jews, and a series of hostile measures culminated in the Justinian Code that consigned Jews to a separate existence from gentile society. State-enforced separatism and the stigma of being Christ-killers continued to define Jews throughout the Middle Ages, and during the Crusades this developed into a full-blown demonology of Jews as the children of Satan. During the Enlightenment, distrust of Jews became overlain with anxiety about modernity. As political entrepreneurs forged new national identities in fragmented societies, ghetto-dwelling Jews became a useful scapegoat for everything that was inorganic, alien and threatening in the disorienting new world of urbanization and commerce. Across much of Europe, Jews came to represent the antithesis of the nation, a threat to national sovereignty by their very presence, and this perception easily developed into conspiracy theories about international cabals of Jews controlling the governments and economies of Christian countries.

The United States was never immune from anti-Semitic prejudice. Being a predominantly Christian country, traditional Christian complaints about Jews have had considerable traction in America. As late as 1966, Charles Glock and Rodney Stark found that a third of Protestants in a survey of Northern California churchgoers definitively believed that Jews remained unforgiven by God for “what they did to Christ,” while up to 60 percent acknowledged that this might be true.