Anti-semitic Danger in U.S. Barely Averted 10 Years Ago, Says ‘christian Century’ Writer

The persistency of the Jews in maintaining their “peculiarities and racial isolation” and their “dual relationship to two distinct nationalities” are the grounds for suspicion of the Jew as some one alien and foreign, declares Alfred Williams Anthony, founder of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ Commission on Good Will Between Jews and Christians, in an article, “Explaining the Jew,” in the current issue of The Christian Century.

A wave of anti-Semitism which threatened this country ten years ago, “when Henry Ford was issuing his Dearborn Independent and the revived Ku Klux Klan was flourishing,” was only narrowly repelled, Mr. Anthony says. Anti-Semitism, such as is manifest now in Germany is “a double problem of the Jew and the Christian; certainly not less for the Jew to work upon and solve than for the Christians,” he declares.

Referring to the causes of anti-Jewish feeling, he states:

“As the Jews move among the nations they persist in peculiarities and racial isolation as no other peoples do. While they may profess to be loyal to the government under which they live, yet common folks, seeing their alien and foreign ways, scarcely can be blamed for regarding them as still alien and foreign. Particularly is this suspicion of disloyalty aggravated when some of the Jews continue to glory in their national ideals, as distinct from the ideals of the country in which they live, and endeavor to recover Palestine as their country, and there set up a modern state, autonomous and independent. That dual relationship to two distinct nationalities, which may be justified in the mind of a Zionist Jew, is hard to understand and justify in any other mind. Frequently it takes the aspect of treason to the land of residence, as the non-Jew looks at it.”