Anti-Semitism in America.

SINCE the National Jewish Population Survey of 1990 showed that intermarriage rates had passed the 50 per cent mark, the American Jewish community has been preoccupied with the related issues of intermarriage, assimilation, and survival. Organizations that once focused on defense against anti-Semitism now worry whether Jews are so well integrated into American society that they will slowly disappear.

This is an accurate, if ironic, assessment of the state of anti-Semitism in America today. It is an odd juncture for two books on the subject to appear, yet A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness by Frederic Cople Jaher and Anti-Semitism in America by Leonard Dinnerstein have both just been published. Dinnerstein, who teaches history at the University of Arizona, offers what he calls "the first comprehensive scholarly survey of anti-Semitism in the United States" and covers all of American history from the earliest settlements to the present day. Jaher, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, spends the first third of his book explaining the history of anti-Semitism in the ancient world and in Europe, and then treats American history only up to the Civil War.

While Dinnerstein gives us a comprehensive survey, Jaher writes out of a personal sense of passion and obligation: "The Holocaust and the immense rage it stirs in me have deepened my Jewish identity and inspired me to try to understand how such a catastrophe could occur." "My feelings about the massacre of my fellow Jews," he goes on, "have not blinded me to the realization that not all gentiles hate Jews, and that even those who dislike Jews would not necessarily torment or liquidate them." Not necessarily! With such a motivation, Jaher might have done better to study anti-Semitism in Europe rather than in America, and indeed the facts that emerge in his book--an excellent work of scholarship--do not justify its melodramatic title.

The story of anti-Semitism in America, both authors agree, seems to have a happy ending. From the very beginning, two factors were at war: Christian settlers brought a deep and powerful hatred of Jews with them from Europe, but the rules they established for the new society being built here blunted those beliefs. Here, Jews were citizens from the sart; and while they faced anti-Semites they did not face government-sponsored violence. As Mr. Jaher puts it, "because Christianity was uniquely shaped by American religious and secular circumstances, Jews have been better treated here than in any other Western Christian land." He presents a marvelous scene from the Fourth of July celebration in Philadelphia in 1788, "when Jewish and Christian clergymen marched arm in arm. At the feast following the parade, a kosher table was laid for Jewish citizens. Thus began the gradual admission of Judaism into the civic religion of America."

At the same time, Jews were often reviled as the killers of Christ and as merciless Shylocks. Both authors believe that the explanation of anti-Semitism in this country lies in Christianity, which taught it and spread it. As Mr. Jaher says, "Simply put, Christian viewpoints underlie all American anti-Semitism. No matter what other factors or forces may have been at play at any given time, the basis for prejudice toward Jews in the United States, and in the colonial era before it, must be Christian teachings." One need not accept the Freudian analyses of Christianity's view of Judaism put forth in A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness to agree that until very recently, Christian teachings about Jews were (to say the least) not helpful in the drive against anti-Semitism. This attitude found expression not only in sermons, but in such cultural artifacts as the famous nineteenth-century McGuffey's Readers, which, for example, characterized the Jews of Roman times as living in "the most licentious fanaticism" and expressed continuing contempt for Jews and their religion.

Jews were unable to vote in most states under their original constitutions, and New Hampshire kept its voting restrictions until 1877. In several states, Jews could not hold office or serve as lawyers. American history shows several serious outbreaks of anti-Semitism, such as General Grant's famous 1862 order expelling all Jews from the area of his command, or the 1913 Leo Frank case, in which a Jew was lynched in Georgia for a murder he did not commit.

The basic pattern is clear, and emerges in both books: for much of American history, Judaism has been tolerated--but with contempt. Jews were socially acceptable during the Colonial and early Federal periods. Anti-Semitism began to increase in the early 1800s, and grew partly because European immigrants pouring into the country brought hatred of Jews with them. It spread even more widely after the Civil War and as the Jewish population increased. A 1936 editorial that Mr. Dinnerstein quotes from the liberal Protestant establishment journal The Christian Century is typical: Jews "must be brought to repentance--with all tenderness, in view of their age-long affliction, but with austere realism, in view of their sinful share of their own tragedy." Prejudice turned into outright acts of anti-Semitism in periods of stress such as war or depression. Indeed, anti-Semitism in America peaked during the Second World War.

Since then it has been greatly reduced. "Within two decades of the end of World War II near revolutionary change occurred in public policies and attitudes, toward Jews in the United States," Mr. Dinnerstein concludes. Opinion polling demonstrates that anti-Semitic stereotypes are weaker than ever, social acceptance of Jews very high, and discriminatory practices rare enough to cause surprise and outrage when exposed.

"In human terms," Dinnerstein writes, "the best indication of the decline of American anti-Semitism is the number of marriages that have occurred between Jews and Gentiles." And that fact is now providing Jewish communal agencies with a new crisis, the high intermarriage rate, in place of the old problem of discrimination against Jews.

Yet if anti-Semitism has fallen sharply among most Americans, there is one exception, and both Dinnerstein and Jaher point it out: the black community. Here it seems to be on the rise, and Dinnerstein notes that while whites shy away from anti-Semitic expressions today, this is not true for blacks. "African Americans," he writes, "suffer no such constraints. Their anti-Semitic verbiage seems to make them more, rather than less, popular among their peers." As if to prove the point, Howard University postponed a lecture by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian David Brion Davis, a Jewish convert, this April. Howard adminstrators feared he would be subjected to heckling and harassment. One has to reach back to Germany in the early 1930s to find such an academic atmosphere of anti-Semitism in the West.

Jaher and Dinnerstein both offer the same explanation of black anti-Semitism, which the latter covers extensively in a separate chapter. Like all American anti-Semitism it is, in their view, the product of Christianity, and emerges more strongly among blacks because they are more likely than whites to be well churched. Dinnerstein carefully reminds us that black anti-Semitism is not a novel phenomenon, or, to be more precise, demonstrates that the notion that blacks have for much of this century felt particularly warmly toward Jews is an illusion. Some rather nasty quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington make the point sharply: in his famous work The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote that Jews in the Middle Ages "used deception and flattery ... cajoling and lying," actions that left their mark "on their character for centuries," while blacks in the American South now faced (when he wrote in 1903) "shrewd and unscrupulous Jews." Both men expressed praise of Jews at some point in their lives, but both reached maturity and indeed fame filled with prejudice against Jews.

The American Jewish community dedicated enormous effort to supporting the civil-rights movement, motivated both by the enlightened selfinterest of one minority in helping another fight bigotry, and by a desire to see the United States meet its ideals and provide justice to all its citizens. There was a moment of wonderful, close cooperation, but it was with leaders such as Martin Luther King and Roy Wilkins rather than with the American black population as a whole. By the late 1960s tension had already begun rising.

Still, today's outbreak of anti-Semitism among blacks is something new. It is evident not only in polling data that show blacks twice as likely to be anti-Semitic as whites, but also in the popularity on black campuses of exceptionally vicious peddlers of hate. To say that all of this merely reflects that old-time religion, American Protestantism--as do both Jaher and Dinnerstein--will not wash. Both authors, curiously, seem to suspend the desire for deeper analysis on this point. Is it not odd that the anti-Semitic orators in question are self-described Muslims, competitors rather than partners of the black churches? Is there not an obvious link here to the anti-Semitism that has so long existed in the Arab world, and was spread during the Cold War by the Soviet Union and its allies? It is more logical to call today's virulent strain of black anti-Semitism a product of the Left and of Islam, than of the black churches?

This aside, both Mr. Dinnerstein and Mr. Jaher offer well-researched, well-written accounts. Mr. Dinnerstein's may be the more useful, as it covers the entirety of American history. Mr. Jaher's general complaint against Christianity is not exactly apposite here in the New World, where the history of Christian anti-Semitism finally wound down. Still, his account of the origins of modern anti-Semitism, and his comparisons of the condition of Jews in Europe and America in the seventeeth to nineteenth centuries, show careful study and are a reminder of the great gap between the experience of Jews in the Old World and in the New.

In genesis, God tells Abraham that He will bless those who bless the Jews and curse those who curse them. Looking at the fate of those who have oppressed Jews since those ancient days, and the happy history and situation of America, one is led back to those words of the Bible.

Truly the Jews found here, if not an Eden, then a warmer welcome than they received in any other land at any other time. these two books, while they focus on the dark side of the American Jewish experience, are nevertheless reminders of the uniquely happy history of Jews in this country.