American anti-Semitism is nothing new — but Donald Trump gave the Jew-haters newfound courage
Americans who were surprised by the anti-Semitic vitriol that was directed at former Hawaii governor Laura Lingle during her speech before the Republican National Convention on Monday shouldn’t have been: American anti-Semitism has a long history. Monday’s explosion of Jew-baiting and racist trolling that took place on the Republicans’ official YouTube page shocked the RNC into closing down the comments section, but it is unlikely to have had an impact on diminishing the anti-Semitism that its presumptive nominee has been actively courting.
In an article published earlier, Raw Story demonstrated some of the ways that Donald Trump was manipulating anti-Semitic imagery — some of which went all the way back to the 12th century. That imagery had its roots in Europe. But there is a particular type of American anti-Semitism that is also being courted by the Trump campaign, and the ugliness that erupted on the YouTube comments page was just the foam on top of the boiling pot. (And for purposes of this article, anti-Semitism is defined, not as racial hatred of Semites, but as the irrational fear and hatred of Jews, a term more generally referred to by Jewish historians as antisemitism.)
And while American anti-Semitism obviously doesn’t go back as far as the 12th century, what is remarkable is that it first shows up in documents in the 17th century–when a total of 12 Jews lived in the then-American colonies. This points to something that historians of Judaism have long argued about anti-Semitism; namely, that a lot of hatred of Jews occurs without those who “hate Jews” ever having had contact with a Jewish person in their entire life. Jews — not Judaism, but the figure of “the Jew” — are turned into “bogeymen,” some kind of monstrous creatures who present an almost supernatural threat to the health of a community.
At various points in American history, anti-Semitism has been whipped up. Not surprisingly, those periods roughly correspond with periods of greater immigration into the United States and with periods of economic insecurity. Despite the fact that Jews comprised only a tiny number of the many bankers in the United States in the nineteenth century, during waves of immigration or debates over economics, conspiracies about “Jewish bankers” would be sold by populist politicians who sought to place easy blame for complex issues onto scapegoats. During the Civil War, U.S. Grant expelled Jews from portions of Tennessee and Kentucky, in response to wild rumours that Jewish merchants were war profiteering. The order was almost immediately overturned by President Lincoln, but the message had been sent to Jews that their status as “real Americans” had been brought into question.