Report Wave of Anti-semitism Sweeping Mexico; Jews of San Potosi Being Boycotted

A wave of anti-Semitic agitation against Jewish merchants is spreading through the provinces of Mexico and is assuming threatening proportions according to a letter that has been received here from the Jewish community of San Luis Potosi, signed by the heads of twenty Jewish families, telling of the boycott movement against Jewish merchants which has been organized by Mexican merchants there and asking the Jews of Mexico City to start a fight against the anti-Semites.

The letter, which appears in the local Yiddish weekly, “Der Veg,” reads:

“In San Luis Potosi a group of Mexican merchants have started a bitter anti-Semitic campaign against the Jewish merchants. They have organized themselves into a society called ‘Society of Potosian Merchants’ Campaign Against Russian-Polish Jews,’ and are inciting against Jews both orally and in writing. They are also arousing the local government institutions against the Jewish merchants, and have succeeded to such an extent that taxes on our businesses have been increased threefold. Two issues of their organ, ‘Vanguardia,’ have already appeared with venomous anti-Semitic articles, in which Jews are reviled and the Mexican masses asked to boycott Jewish places of business and Jewish employers.

“The Jewish colony of San Luis Potosi is in despair and requests the Jewish colony of Mexico City, which numbers thousands of families, to seek ways and means to combat the danger which is threatening the small Jewish colonies in all the Mexican provincial towns. What is happening today in San Luis Potosi is characteristic of all the provincial towns of Mexico where Jews live. Besides, anti-Semitic propaganda in Mexico City itself encourages the dark forces in the provinces. Let the Jewish colony in Mexico City remember that the destruction of the Jewish settlements in the provinces will have an especially harmful effect on the Jews of the capital. Ways and means must be found by the Jews of Mexico City to stop the anti-Semitic agitation, against which we Jews in the provinces, who are only a handful, are powerless.”