Twenty-five Hundred Years of Anti-Semitism: A Brief History
Bonus: Untold story of a man who felt forced to leave Iowa in the 1930s because he was a Jew
The number of documented cases of anti-Semitism in America – harassment, vandalism, assault, and even murder – has tripled over the past seven years.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), the highest-ranking Jew in American government in the history of the U.S., called it a five-alarm fire in a recent speech in the Senate.
After several years of relative calm, the growth of anti-Semitism in America became noticeable in 2017 with a 56 percent increase over the preceding year, according to comprehensive annual reports compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which began keeping records of documented anti-Semitic incidents in 1979. The increase came on the heels of five consecutive years from 2009 to 2013, when the number of cases of anti-Semitism in America decreased each year. There were slight rises in 2014, ‘15, and ’16. Then, in 2017, the dam broke.
It can be argued that the U.S. was catching up with a worldwide growth in anti-Semitism and/or that ongoing hatred of the Jews by many Palestinian Arabs was beginning to have some impact in America.
But something also happened in America in 2017. On Friday evening, August 11, hundreds of white nationalists gathered in protest of an effort to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia that was once named for Lee. They gathered in the park with torches and chanting white nationalist slogans. Counter-protesters showed up early the next morning and violence between the two sharply divided groups broke out. The issue of the Lee statue quickly became overshadowed by shouts of “You will not replace us,” and “Blood and soil,” a phrase summarizing Nazi ideology by tying together the Nazi obsession with racial purity (blood) and its country of origin, Germany, (the soil).
At 1:40 p.m., a car plowed into the crowded park. One counter-protester, Heather Heyer, 32, was killed; at least 19 others were injured. Also that day, in collateral damage, two Virginia State Troopers monitoring the situation from a helicopter, died when their helicopter crashed.
And then, several days later, in response to a question from a reporter, President Donald J. Trump made a statement about the white nationalists and the counter-protesters in Charlottesville that will ring in the memories of Jews throughout America for the rest of their lives: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.”
Jews in America read that comment as providing a presidential blessing for those on the far right to take whatever extreme anti-Semitic actions they might wish and to then think of these actions as freedom of speech.
Anti-Semitism has followed the Jews for thousands of years
The first recorded incident of anti-Semitism occurred in the Holy Land 500 years before the Christian Era, when the first temple, in Jerusalem, was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylonia, after he captured the city. The Jews rebuilt their temple, which had been the centerpiece of both their culture and religion. The Romans destroyed the second temple after they conquered Jerusalem 500 years later.
During the early years of the Christian Era, the Jews drifted into Europe. Anti-Semitism followed them. They were run out of many of the cities in which they settled for various reasons, but often because they provided unwanted competition in the marketplace for Christian businessmen. However, the Christian community looked for and found various other excuses or opportunities to practice anti-Semitic violence. It happened under the guise of the Inquisition and the Crusades, spanning hundreds of years in both situations. When the Black Death came along, Jews were blamed for poisoning the wells – because they did not fall victim to the plague as often as Christians. But what neither the Christians nor the Jews knew at the time, the reason was that the Jews bathed and washed much more often than Christians – because the Jewish religion required it. Then, there was blood libel. Repeatedly, Jews in Europe were accused of murdering Christian children for their blood. Absurdly, Christians believed the Jews used it to make matzoh for Passover.
Ultimately, many Jews were run out of Western and Central Europe. Many retreated to Eastern Europe and Western Russia in the medieval era. There, the Russians, in control in the late 1700s, confined the Jews to the Pale of Settlement, where they were limited in property ownership and occupational choice, while also becoming disproportionately conscripted into and restricted within the Russian Army; it was often a death sentence.
The Jews began arriving in ones and twos to the New World within a decade or so of the pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock in 1620. They may or may not have been surprised when they encountered anti-Semitism.
During the colonial era, many states had laws prohibiting Jews from voting or holding office. The practice, often including Catholics, and more obviously, women and people of color, carried over into the new government of the United States after the Revolutionary War. Jews also encountered difficulties in finding employment almost from the beginning. Meanwhile, early newspapers in the US. often described Jews based on physical stereotypes, something they never did to Christians.
Here’s a Page 1 newspaper reference to my great-grandfather, Solomon Greenstone, in Lincoln, Nebraska, in November 1895, that inexplicably made reference to the size of his nose. (See below). Newspapers also commonly quoted Jews in dialect, reflecting in print their heavy Yiddish accents from having grown up in parts of the world where that was their native language. No other immigrant group was held to such a standard in the press.
However, it was the discrimination in hiring that had the most defining impact on the Jews who settled in America beginning in the 1880s, in the Jewish immigration wave that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in Russia. Russians blamed the Jews, of course, two or three of whom had been among the several dozen leaders of the group that carried out the assassination. Thus began the pogroms. During the next 40 years, more than 2 million Jews from Russia and Poland immigrated to America.
Employment discrimination caught up with Jews when they least expected it
Ben Helphand was born in Columbus, Nebraska, in 1915, the fifth of the nine children of David Helphand, who operated a dry goods store, and his wife, Bessie. David and Bessie were immigrant Jews, who arrived in America in the late nineteenth century. They came from Poland, where their respective families had lived for generations.
The Helphands moved their family and business to Fremont, Nebraska in 1924. Fremont was about twice the size of Columbus, and opportunity called. It also was closer to Omaha, which had the state’s largest Jewish population, and Lincoln, home of the state university.
In the fall of 1932, Ben Helphand, a recent graduate of Fremont High School, came to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska. He knew no one until he stopped in at Guarantee Clothing, a men’s clothing store, to buy a shirt one day. He met a young salesman there, Sol Stine, also Jewish. Stine invited Helphand to attend the upcoming Jewish New Year services with the Stine family at the synagogue in Lincoln. The holiday began at sundown on Friday evening, September 30, 1932. Before the three-day religious holiday was over, Ben had met Sol’s sister, Bessie Stine, one year younger than Ben. Their mutual attraction was immediate and their romance progressed from there. (Full disclosure: Sol, who grew up in Lincoln, had two sisters. The other one, Celia Stine, would become my mother in 1941.)
By the spring of 1936, Ben had decided that he wanted to pursue a career in actuarial science. He had earned high scholastic honors in the field at Nebraska and received a full scholarship for a year of graduate study leading to a master’s degree at the University of Iowa. As the spring of 1937 approached, Ben began interviewing on campus with insurance companies that came to Iowa City to look for the best and brightest young graduates.
One of those companies was the respected and fast-growing Bankers Life (later to become The Principal Group), based in Des Moines, Iowa. Ben liked the company, and the interviewer liked him. The company’s offer was attractive. He would start work later that spring, immediately after graduation.
He likely was both excited and a bit nervous when he entered the Bankers’ Life home office building in downtown Des Moines the day he was supposed to start work. The first things he was asked to do was to visit the human resources office (or whatever that was called at that time) to fill out paperwork.
You may be able to see this coming, but Ben Helphand did not. There was a line on the form asking for his religion. He did not think at all about his answer. He wrote, “Jewish.” First, there was a short stall for time after someone reviewed the form. Then the head of the department approached him. Ben’s Bankers Life career drew to an abrupt end. He was told, simply, that the company did not employ Jews.
Ben had no money, no job, no plan.
He hitchhiked back to Iowa City, laid down at dusk under some bushes in a quiet area, and thought about his situation as he fell asleep.
The next morning, he got on the road again and stuck out his thumb heading west; all the way west. The Midwest, he had decided was not a place of likely success for a young Jewish man with a specialized skill set in a field that few Jews had entered. He would head for Los Angeles and begin knocking on the doors of insurance companies there. His intuition told him that he might have a better chance to get started in his chosen field in Southern California than in the more staid Midwest. Thousands of Jews from all over the country already had relocated there, drawn by the entertainment industry and the opportunities created by rapid growth and development.
He quickly found work at Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company in downtown Los Angeles. He started work there in July 1937. He also quickly connected with Bess Stine, back in Lincoln. She took a train to Los Angeles, where they became engaged in August and married in September. He worked for Pacific Mutual his entire career, ultimately becoming the company’s senior actuary and a member of its small upper management team.
Ben’s business savvy reached beyond actuarial science, however. Sometime in the mid-1950s, he started reading about the proposed Interstate highway system in the United States – the first coast-to-coast and border-to-border highway network built for both speed and heavy traffic without any stop signs or stoplights. Work on the road system would begin in 1956 – and would take 30 years or more to complete. He quickly realized, however, that travel – and especially the movement of freight through America – would be transformed. He began studying the transportation industry and discovered PACCAR, a publicly traded company that manufactured heavy equipment and also owned Kenworth, one of the two major semi-trailer truck companies in the U.S. Ben decided he would invest as much money as he could find in PACCAR, which later would acquire the other semi-trailer truck company, Peterbilt. He borrowed money to do it. He told his siblings what he was doing and urged them to do the same. Over the years, his PACCAR holding would be the anchor of his modest wealth.
He also served in World War II as a colonel, managing the U.S. military airbase in Selma, Alabama, after the Army sent him to Harvard to study management. He later was based in Europe and attended the Nuremberg Trials, which began in November 1945. Twenty-four of the highest-ranking Nazi officers were tried for the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Twelve were convicted and sentenced to death; three were acquitted and the rest received prison terms.
Although Jews had been murdered throughout the world for centuries simply because they were Jews, the perpetrators rarely were brought to justice. Nuremberg was an exception.
The Jews of America escaped the Holocaust, but the U.S. did not throw down the welcome mat for them.
The 1920s and ‘30s stood out for anti-Semitism. The powerful anti-Semitic voices of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest in Detroit, and industrialist Henry Ford rang loud and clear throughout the country – the former through periodic nationwide radio broadcasts that drew tens of millions of listeners, the latter via a newspaper he owned in Dearborn, Michigan and forced to be distributed nationwide through every Ford dealership in the country. They both hated Jews, accusing them of plotting to take over the world and defending Nazi violence against the Jews. Coughlin said the violence was justified in retaliation for Jewish persecution of Christians.
In the late 1930s, as Hitler was rising in Germany and his intentions to rid the world of Jews were becoming clear, the United States used its stringent immigration restrictions (see arnoldgarson@substack.com for November 11) as a tool to prohibit Jews from trying to escape Germany. Hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews were turned away.
The prejudice was not confined to the U.S. In July 1938, delegates from 32 countries, including the United States, met in Evian, France, for a conference on what to do about the large number of Jews trying to emigrate from Germany and Austria. After a week of discussions, the delegates were nearly unanimous in refusing to allow Jews entry from Europe. There was one exception.
Thank you to the Dominican Republic, one of the smallest countries in attendance.