From The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank) 1894-1915 by academic Albert S. Lindemann:
Observers as different as Winston Churchill and Theodore Herzl firmly believed that international Jewry exercised enormous power in international relations. Even figures who passed as defenders of the Jews at this time made statements about Jewish power that appear today to be both extravagant and tinged with anti-Semitism. Arnold White, who praised Russia’s Jews as the “most virtuous and prolific race” in the tsar’s empire, wrote that the European press and international finance were in Jewish hands, that Jews “garnered most of the harvest that came from the blood shed by Boer and Briton”, and that “the Prime Minister and the Cabinet of England alter their policy and abandon an important bill in parliament at the frown of the Rothschilds.” He concluded that Jews were making “monotonous progress toward the mastery of the world.”
* “Twenty-five years of education resulted in making the colored women more immoral and the men more trifling…. Negroes are intellectually, morally, and physically an inferior race — a fact that none can deny.” (Editorial in the newspaper The Jewish South, 1896)
* Belief in superior and inferior races was probably even more important in the United States than in Europe; the country’s large Black population was believed by the majority of nineteenth-century White Americans to be racially inferior, and the findings of nineteenth-century “science” that confirmed Black inferiority were welcomed as a modern justification of slavery…
Jews were accepted as whites; potential hostility to them as “different” was minimized since Blacks were incomparably more different — and threatening…
Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise…energetically defended Black slavery… Wise was bitterly opposed to Abraham Lincoln, whom he described as an “imbecile.”
On the issue of race, the evidence suggests that Jewish attitudes, until the turn of the [20th] century, did not differ markedly from non-Jewish.
* German Jews in the United States shared the racist views of the surrounding society, including a belief in the racial inferiority of eastern and southern Europeans…
Even when racism was not predominant or explicit, many Americans of northern and western European background, Jews among them, feared an array of evils arriving with the new immigrants: disease, crime, prostitution, revolutionary activity, unemployment, indigence. American Jewish leaders took an active part in the campaign against white slavery (international prostitution), in which, as they recognized with intense shame, Jews from eastern Europe played a prominent role.
* Mark Twain: “It will not be well to let that [Jewish] race find out its strength. If horses knew theirs, we should not be able to ride them.”
The Jew “is substantially a foreigner wherever he may be, and even the angels dislike a foreigner.”
Emma Lazarus suggested that another place, not the United States, should be found for Russian Jews “that mass of semi-Orientals, Kabbalists, and Hassim.”
Ethnic riots occurred in the United States in the troubled years around the turn of the century, but they were directed against Italians and Chinese, not Jews.
Ignatius Donnelly’s work helped to spread negative images about Jews…[such as] contempt for non-Jews, uncontrollable greed, lust for power, secretiveness, and indifference to national allegiance. But one of the images…is of particular relevance in examining [the Leo] Frank affair: the Jew as unclean, lecherous, and lusting after Gentile women…
Some observers have argued that fear of Jewish sexuality explains the special vehemence and irrationality of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and related fears unquestionably played an important role in Nazi propaganda against Jews…
Jews found a friendlier, more welcoming environment in the South… Before the Civil War, Jewish entrepreneurs bought and sold slaves; individual Jews owned them. Slave-owning Jews included rabbis and other prominent members of the Jewish community. …The attitudes of southern Jews to slavery did not differ significantly from those of southern Christians. No Jewish figure of the Old South ever expressed any reservations about the justice of slavery or the rightness of the Southern position… People of color were not allowed in Jewish congregations… Unlike Christians, Jewish owners did not educate their slaves into their faith… Southern rabbis commonly justified slavery from Old Testament texts.
After the [Civil War], Southern Jews commonly expressed regret at the passing of slavery. Jews participated in the Ku Klux Klan.
A Jewish editor, Jacob N. Cardozo, explained that “the reason the Almighty had made the colored black” was to mark them as inferior, to provide an obvious, God-given approval of their natural status as slaves.
There was not a single abolitionist among the Jews of the South.
…Reform Judaism found strong approval from the German-Jewish elite [of Atlanta], no doubt in part because it facilitated Gentile wood will and added to the social respectability of upwardly mobile Jews.
Rabbi Marx and other German Jews in the city were not reticent to describe the newly arriving Russian Jews as barbaric and ignorant… Atlanta’s German Jews…feared that these backward Jews would awaken anti-Semitism…
It was charged that Russian-Jewish saloon keepers sold alcohol to the Blacks, contributing to the rising levels of public drunkenness, street violence, indigence, and crime… Allegations were also widely made that Russian-Jewish pawnbrokers were receiving stolen goods, and even selling weapons to Blacks.
