Episode 3: Merchants and Money

Mark Oppenheimer 

Support for Antisemitism, U.S.A. comes from the Henry Luce Foundation and the David Bruce Smith Foundation.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Man, street parking in big cities, it's horrible. Spots are hard to find. And even if you get lucky, you still need a bag of quarters or you have to work with one of those cumbersome parking apps on your phone. But not if it's Sunday. Whether you're in Sacramento or Seattle, Atlanta or Boston, you don't have to feed the meter on Sunday. You can stay in that parking spot as long as you darn well please. You can park your car and sleep in it all day, and never feed the meter. Not even once. Because on Sundays parking is free. Nobody objects to free parking. But there are some other Sunday laws that are more controversial. For example, in some parts of the country on Sundays, you can't buy a beer. You can't even shoot a deer. And in some places car dealerships have to close. These Sunday restrictions have a long history. Originally, they were pretty strict. Take the early Jamestown settlement. A 1611 Law forbade any violation of the Sabbath by gaming at home or in public. And every man and woman had to attend church on Sunday, twice. Repeat offenders could be whipped or even executed. Many places did enforce laws against profaning the Sabbath, no work, no commerce, and overtime for reasons that remain fuzzy, these statutes came to be known as blue laws. These blue laws can be baffling. After all, how did Sunday even become the Sabbath? Isn't the Sabbath from sundown on Friday until nightfall on Saturday evening. That's the original Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath. Early Christians began worshipping on Sundays, which they called the Lord's day, out of their belief that Jesus had risen from the dead on a Sunday. Over time they conflated these two terms, the Sabbath and the Lord's Day. So when Christians passed laws to protect the Sabbath, and keep it holy, they meant Sunday. Theire Sabbath, their day of rest. Through the middle of the 20th century, many American states and communities had laws that shut down most businesses on Sundays. Most workers were grateful for a day of rest, although they might be annoyed that they couldn't spend it at the saloon. But the blue laws were particularly problematic for one group of citizens, Jewish Americans, because the Sunday was not their Sabbath. So if they were observant, they had to close on Saturday, and then again because of the Christian blue laws on Sunday. And this became a point of tension.

Mark Oppenheimer 

I'm Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Antisemitism, U.S.A., a podcast about the history of antisemitism in the United States. Episode Three, Merchants and Money. In our last episode, we talked about the exclusion of Jews from citizenship rights, and exclusion rooted in the Christian European sense of Jews as religious outsiders. In this episode, we're talking about economic stereotypes and resentments. These prejudices and tropes also had a long history in Europe. And they took root in American culture as well. By the middle of the 19th century, Jewish immigration to the US had accelerated. What had been an American Jewish population of a few thousand at the start of the century, by the Civil War had grown to around 50,000. Most of them were German speaking Jews from Central Europe. After the discovery of gold in California, thousands of these new arrivals joined other Americans heading west seeking their fortune. Many Jewish settlers in California were merchants setting up shops in towns and cities. By the 1870s, Jews made up nearly 10% of San Francisco's booming population. There were so many Jewish owned textile warehouses in the heart of San Francisco, that other residents just call them "Jew shops." California was a pretty good place to be Jewish. The mix of peoples including Native Americans, free African Americans, and Chinese immigrants, ensured that Jews were closer to the top of the social hierarchy than the bottom. There also wasn't much of a Protestant establishment to hold them down. But as California's white population grew, its political leaders talked about passing a Sunday Closing law. Here's Jeremy Zeitlin, a California lawyer who has researched the history of the state's closing laws.

Jeremy Zeitlin 

If Sunday closing laws are about consolidating how a community acts, folks that you see who are sort of outside the community, you know, the I don't want to milk a stereotype like the passing Jewish peddler like, well, he's not part of the community ever anyway, so why should we let his alien considerations affect the way we build our communities. And I think Sunday closing laws, that's what they're about. They're about consolidating a wholesome Christian life.

Mark Oppenheimer 

California's politicians knew that such a law would disadvantage Jews. And for some state leaders that was precisely the point. It was a feature, not a bug.

Jeremy Zeitlin 

Some folks understood that if they, Christian business owners, were forced to close down they would lose business on Sunday to a Jewish shopkeeper.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In 1855, as the California Legislature considered a Sunday closing law, Speaker of the Assembly, William Stowe stated that he had quote, "no sympathy with the Jews." They "ought to respect the law and opinions of the majority." He said, they were "a class of people who only came here to make money and leave as soon as they had." Stowe was pointing the finger in the wrong direction. Jews were actually far more likely than non Jews to stay in California permanently. But nativism was a powerful political force in the mid 1850s. For the most part, Nativists were Protestants upset at the tide of Catholic immigration from Ireland. Stowe probably didn't like Catholics, but he also wanted to discourage more Jews from coming to California.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Stowe said, quote, "I am for a Jew tax that is so high that Jews would not be able to operate any more shops." In a sense, a Sunday closing law would function like Stowe's desire to Jew tax, making observant Jews close their shops an extra day each week. Because many Californians were indifferent to the Christian Sabbath, the proposed 1855 law didn't pass. But the legislature returned to it several years later. Again, there was discussion of how a Sunday closing law would harm Jewish businesses. An article in the Sacramento Bee newspaper explained that "it is particularly hard upon Hebrews, as they have a Sabbath of their own to keep and are by this law of force to keep the Christian Sabbath also." Ignoring such arguments, the legislature in 1858 passed a law that required that "no person shall on the Christian Sabbath, keep open any store, warehouse, mechanic shop, workshop, banking house, or manufacturing establishment, or sell any goods wares or merchandise on that day."

Mark Oppenheimer 

After it passed, the Sacramento Bee reported that "the Hebrews intend to test the law at an early date." Morris Newman became the test case. Newman was born in present day Poland around 1810. After coming to the States, he lived in Texas for a while, then migrated to California, where he and his wife had the last of their four children. He established himself in Sacramento. He was a trustee at congregation B'nai Israel, the oldest congregation in town. He didn't own any land, but he ran a clothing shop. In 1860, he told census officials that he was worth around $2,000. He wasn't wealthy, but he was doing well. Days after the new blue law passed, Newman was arrested for violating the law by keeping his shop open on a Sunday, and he was fined $50. For refusing to pay the fine, he was sentenced to a month in jail. He petitioned the court for release by challenging the law's constitutionality, and the California Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. One of Newman's attorneys was Solomon Heydenfelt one of the most prominent Jews in California politics. After coming within a hair's breadth of a US Senate seat in 1851, he got a seat on the state Supreme Court as a consolation prize.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Newman's legal team argued that the Sunday closing law infringed on their clients religious freedom. The California constitution guaranteed "free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship without discrimination or preference." This blue law was pretty obviously discriminatory. "Under this act," the lawyers maintained "the Jew can only labor five days but the Christian six." Heydenfelt pointed to the clear religious purpose of the law. The statute after all, was called "an act for the better observance of the Sabbath." And they didn't mean the Jewish Sabbath. But attorneys for the state emphasized that the law had a secular purpose. Look, they said it gives everyone a day of rest. The law didn't stop Newman from closing his shop on Saturday and attending services at B'nai Israel. The state also noted that many other states such as Pennsylvania, had upheld the constitutionality of Sabbath observance laws. Not coincidentally, it was a Jewish merchant, Abraham Wolf, who had challenged the Pennsylvania law. Here's his story and David Sehat, author of This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism.

David Sehat 

And there were various Jews who challenged these laws in court. And what they were told constantly is you can absolutely close your shop on Saturday. And it is not discriminating against you to say you also must keep it closed on Sunday, because this is a Christian nation. And there was really nothing that Jews could do to get around that. That was the law of the land. That was what the courts kept telling them. And so they either had to violate their faith, or they had to compete economically at a disadvantage by losing out that business for two days rather than just one.

Mark Oppenheimer 

One would have expected California Supreme Court to follow these precedents, but it didn't. A split Court ruled in Newman's favor invalidating the act and his jail sentence. Chief Justice David Terry, writing for the majority, declared himself in favor of "not only toleration, but religious liberty in its largest sense, a complete separation between church and state, and a perfect equality without distinction between all religious sects." And with that, Morris Newman was allowed to keep his clothing shop open on Sundays, at least for three years. In 1861, the legislature passed a very similar law and this time, a non Jew ended up as the test case. By then the makeup of the Supreme Court had changed. Chief Justice David Terry, who had written the opinion in the Newman case, had shot a US senator in a duel, and he'd had to resign his seat on the court. It was still the semi Wild West, but shooting senators was a bit too wild. Stephen Field who had dissented in the Newman case was now the Chief Justice. And the new court upheld the Sabbath Observance Act, stating that it only compelled citizens to rest not to violate their consciences. So Morris Newman's case became a footnote rather than an important precedent in Church State law.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Now for a while authorities did not crack down on those who profaned the Sabbath, many saloons just stayed open. But then, officials in San Francisco made a very unpopular attempt to enforce the law. And it didn't work. There were just too many people breaking it and you couldn't arrest them all. In response, the Democratic Party supported repealing the measure. And that's what they did after they won a state election. That made California the first state in the country to repeal a Sunday closing law. California later passed a new law requiring employers to give their workers one day of rest every seven days. But the choice of which day to rest was up to the boss, not the workers. So were Sunday closing laws anti Jewish? That depends. sticking it to Jewish merchants was one reason California's politicians passed its Sabbath law. But in most parts of the country, blue laws weren't anti Jewish in their intent. They could be in their enforcement however. Laws were sometimes selectively used against Jews. In New York City, policemen were known to demand bribes from Jewish businesses wanting to stay open. Just as Jews in Maryland and other states had fought for the right to vote and hold office, Jews in California and elsewhere, sought rights that they understood as inherent to citizenship, including the right to observe their own Sabbath. Morris Newman's victory in court was a relatively rare one in the 19th century. In fact, Jews and other religious minorities never did persuade the US Supreme Court that Sunday closing laws were unconstitutional. Blue laws gradually withered away because American Christians stopped observing their own Sabbath. They wanted to shop and drink on Sunday, and so Jews got to as well. We'll be back with more after the break.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The story goes that whether Jewish immigrants came with nothing or came with just just a little, they made it here. For Jews United States was different. There just wasn't that much antisemitism holding Jews back. And there's a lot of truth to that story. Not that it was easy to be a poor Jewish immigrant, but there were jobs here, and there was room for upward mobility. Here's historian Rachel Kranson, author of the book Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America.

Rachel Kranson 

Generally speaking, most of the Jews living in the United States today are the descendants of the nearly 3 million Jews who left Eastern Europe between 1870 and 1924 when the Johnson-Reed Act restricted migration from eastern and southern Europe, and the Jewish immigrants who came from Eastern Europe, for the most part came to the United States in dire poverty, having sold most of their assets just to make the journey and most of these immigrants did not have much English they didn't have much of a secular education and they worked at the margins of the American economy. They found their first jobs as factory workers often in the garment industry or in petty retail peddling or or selling from pushcarts and some also supplemented their income by taking in borders of newer immigrants and had them pay rent to live in their slum apartments, and charging rent for room and board.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Because the children and grandchildren of those immigrants had more educational opportunities, and because many of them succeeded economically, it's easy to presume that Jews were on a smooth, easy path of upward mobility. But it's not that simple.

Mark Oppenheimer 

American Jews faced significant forms of discrimination and they weren't alone. Italian Americans did too, as Irish Americans had in earlier decades. In 1882, Congress banned new Chinese immigrants from entering the country at all. Jews faced challenges, barriers, and impediments to success, some legal, some financial, and some violent. Many American Jewish men got their start by peddling. Here's historian Zev Eleff, author of Who Rules the Synagogue: Religious Authority and the Formation of American Judaism.

Zev Eleff 

Jews had an outsized role in peddling. Very often, a Jew from Eisenstadt would arrive by sail. Usually, ahem, usually men, single men came single women generally did not and married men preceded their families in migrating to the new world in the 19th century. Jews would come they would meet a Landsman meaning somebody that they recognize that they knew from their village in southern Germany, and they would maybe get some tips on how to peddle, maybe they would be able to purchase certain lotions or oranges at wholesale, and they would build up a pack, they would take their business because after all, if I'm from Eisenstadt, and I meet somebody else, and I've been here for a couple of weeks, I'm not about to sell my Landsmann, lotions, whatever, for him to peddle in my area. Go off to Cincinnati, go to Cleveland, go to Chicago, go down south to Mobile, Alabama. And they created networks, social and economic networks with one another, which was pivotal in the economic transformation of Jews in this country. It also entrenched certain ideas of how Jews did business.

Mark Oppenheimer 

You heard what Eleff just said certain ideas about how Jews did business. What were those ideas? Well, they go way, way back. In medieval and early modern Europe, a disproportionate number of Jews had become merchants, moneylenders and bankers. Why? Well, it's a long and complicated history. It's not the case that Christians forced Jews to become moneylenders. And it's also not the case that most Jews were moneylenders, let alone wealthy moneylenders. But it is true that the church sometimes enforced prohibitions on usury or lending money at excessive rates and interest. And during those campaigns, Jews often were scapegoated, sometimes as grounds for their expulsion. One thing is clear, Christians developed harsh and persistent stereotypes about Jewish merchants and bankers. The most famous example is the character Shylock. In Shakespeare's play, The Merchant of Venice,

Zev Eleff 

Shakespeare created one of the most important documents of anti Jewish prejudice with The Merchant of Venice. The caricature of Shylock, images of him with a long nose, obviously being deeply concerned about financial windfall at the expense of honesty and morality. In all likelihood, William Shakespeare never met a Jew.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In the play, Shylock takes revenge on a hateful Christian merchant. Instead of charging this man interest on a loan he desperately needs, Shylock forces him to accept a bond of a pound of flesh if he defaulted on his loan. And Shylock wasn't the worst depiction of a Jew in English literature. Chaucer, Marlowe, and Dunn all referred to Jews murdering Christians.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The image of the greedy and cruel Jewish merchant and banker became a key part of the way European and American Christians thought about Jews. And Americans apply these ideas to all sorts of Jews from wealthy bankers to lowly peddlers to modest shopkeepers. In the mid 19th century, RG Dunn and Company became a national credit agency, providing information about individuals and businesses to its customers, telling people who was credit worthy and who wasn't. RG Dunn relied on local correspondents for its information, and some of these informants betrayed an unmistakable animus against Jews. Historian David Gerber read through the files for Buffalo, New York, which by the 1850s had a small Jewish community. What Gerber found in RG Dunn's reports was an American updating of the old trope of Jewish bankers and merchants. They were depicted as greedy and cruel and dishonest, particularly toward non Jews. Here's a sampling of the different reasons provided for why Jews were not deemed a credit worthy,

Buffalo Resident #1 

Is a Jew, and will pay or not as he pleases.

Buffalo Resident #2 

Prudence in large transactions with all Jews should be used.

Buffalo Resident #3 

Responsible now but is a Jew. There is no telling him how long he will remain so.

Buffalo Resident #4 

Are Jews and should not be allowed to get behind.

Buffalo Resident #5 

Good, but Hebrew good.

Buffalo Resident #6 

He is a Jew. And although in point of fact, he may now be perfectly responsible. Yet Jews have a wonderful faculty of becoming at almost any moment they choose, entirely irresponsible.

Mark Oppenheimer 

These reports advised against giving credit to Jewish merchants, or suggested that Jews only be advanced small amounts of money. Jews weren't the only group singled out. Irish Americans, for instance, were presumed to be at a high risk of failure. But as Gerber notes, Jewish merchants were in a double bind. It wasn't that the credit agency's informants necessarily thought Jewish businesses would fail. It was that Jewish merchants couldn't be trusted. So whether they succeeded or failed, other Americans should view them with suspicion.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And these stereotypes had consequences. In California, Morris Newman and other Jews had to close on Sundays. In Buffalo, Jewish merchants struggled to get loans. Here's another one of those consequences. In 1862, during the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant issued his general order number 11. The order read

Ulysses S. Grant 

the Jews as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders are hereby expelled from the department within 24 hours from receipt of this order.

Mark Oppenheimer 

This order expelled all Jews from Grant's Military District, which included large portions of Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky. Why would Grant issue such an order? Here's historian Jonathan Sarna, author of American Judaism: A History.

Jonathan Sarana 

General Grant, like other generals, at that time, believed that smuggling was a huge problem that was prolonging the war. If you could cut off smuggling, the South would not have the money to continue its war effort. And to his mind, the word smuggler and the word Jew were synonyms. Indeed, the tendency was to blame Jews, not just for smuggling, but for a whole range of Civil War era problems, shoddy goods, Jews. And there are other similar kinds of problems that were blamed and placed on the shoulders of Jews. And of course, there were Jews who were smuggling and cheating and delivering shoddy merchandise, so that allowed you to reinforce the stereotype.

Mark Oppenheimer 

There were some Jews involved in smuggling cotton, which often meant bribing Union Army officers. But not all smugglers were Jews. In fact, Grant's own father was complicit in smuggling. But General Grant blamed Jews as a class.

Jonathan Sarana 

It is the most notorious, official act of antisemitism in all of American Jewish history. And there's nothing comparable really, where there is an order against Jews as a class.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It was a throwback to the medieval expulsion orders rooted in stereotypes about usurious Jewish moneylenders. In the end, Grant's order had little effect. Though some Jews were expelled from a few communities, Confederate attacks on telegraph lines delayed the order's transmission to most of Grant's subordinates, so they never heard about it. And Jews who got wind of the order immediately appealed to the highest authority in the land. President Abraham Lincoln overturned Grant's order within two weeks.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Shortly after his 1868 election to the presidency, Grant wrote a letter that served as a public apology:

Ulysses S. Grant 

I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit. Order Number 11 does not sustain this statement, I admit, but that I do not sustain that order.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Then shortly before he left the White House, Grant attended the dedication of Washington's Adas Israel Synagogue and made a donation to the congregation. Numerous Jewish leaders praised Grant for the steps he took to make amends for his expulsion order. Grant's order is exceptional in US history, but his suspicions about Jewish merchants were common. They were present from San Francisco to the deep south to the northeast. By 1890, there were more than 20,000 Jews in the former states of the Confederacy, with established communities in Charleston and New Orleans and a growing community in Atlanta. Jews also had shops and warehouses in small cities and towns across the region, from which merchants took their wares into rural areas. Historian Patrick Mason has written widely about violence in the 19th century against religious minorities.

Patrick Mason 

In the late 19th century south you had a number of Jewish peddlers who were itinerant salesmen, they were traveling salesman itinerant merchants, they would live in one place oftentimes in a small town or a city somewhere, they would load up a wagon full of goods, and they would travel especially to farms to very small towns, to reach people who were in places that were too small to to have shops or merchants to service them.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In the backwoods of the American South, Jewish peddlers became a much more common sight after the Civil War. It was the only way that many southerners encountered someone Jewish.

Patrick Mason 

The southern economy was pretty devastated after the Civil War, and the South was still a very rural region. So a lot of these small farmers who were scattered around the countryside, they didn't have access to a lot of consumer goods, a lot of things that were being produced and available in cities. It was oftentimes these Jewish peddlers, and it wasn't only Jewish peddlers, there were other kind of traveling salesman as well. But there was this contingent of Jewish peddlers who they usually weren't pulling their own wagon that a horse or a donkey or something like that, but they were literally just going house to house farm to farm in some of these really remote areas in the South.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Abram Surasky was an immigrant peddler from Poland. His brother had come over first and established himself as a merchant in Aiken, South Carolina, where he became respected enough to serve on city council for a decade. Abram Surasky became a sort of assistant to his older brother. He took a horse drawn wagon into the rural areas around Aiken selling goods and collecting on debts. On July 28 1903, Abram didn't come back from his circuit. He stopped at the residence of Lee and Dora Green. Only Dora Green was home and she invited him inside. Not long thereafter, Lee Green returned home and found his wife with Surasky.

Patrick Mason 

What's clear is that Surasky is brutally murdered by Lee Green. He's shot multiple times, and then actually hacked to death by an axe. So it's a horrific, horrific murder. And there are no other eyewitnesses other than the wife Dora Green. This went to court the following year in 1904. And we actually have great records and affidavits and testimony from various people. And a number of people say that immediately after the murder, Lee Green told them he had killed Surasky. He always admitted to the murder.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Lee Green wasn't very good at covering his tracks. He tried to hide the wagon and the body would soon had vultures circling above it. He asked Mary Drayton, an African American neighbor to clean the blood. Lead Green also tore out of Surasky's account book, the pages that recorded his debt. In court, Lee Green testified that he saw Surasky attempting to seduce his wife. Enraged by this crime, he shot the peddler.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Dora Green backed her husband up. It was a dishonest but very shrewd defense. Other witnesses told different stories. Green had shot at another peddler not long before he killed Surasky. Mary Drayton, the neighbor who had cleaned up the blood testified that several weeks earlier, Lee Green had told her husband that he intended to kill Surasky. She also testified that she had overheard Green talking to a neighbor about concocting the story that Surasky was trying to rape his wife. And it worked. A jury acquitted Lee Green.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The Surasky murder took place at a time of increased violence against Jews in the rural south.

Patrick Mason 

I spent a summer basically going from archive to archive throughout the south, just seeing what I could find. And as I did, so a number of these cases emerge. I'm confident that there are many more cases that I didn't find either that went unrecorded or that I just didn't come across. But I was able to find a couple of dozen of serious instances of violence against Jews in the late 19th century south. It pales compared of course to violence against African Americans where we know that there's over 2000 lynchings during this same time period, and then countless acts of non lethal violence. But it's still not nothing. And it's more than we knew before.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Some of these were just acts of violence by individuals like Lee Green, but others were more organized, and they grew out of a toxic stew of racism and economic resentment. It's a complicated story. But in a nutshell, white southern farmers resented merchants, farmers would sometimes mortgage their land to obtain credit from these merchants, and when they couldn't pay back, they would lose their land to the merchants. And those merchants, having foreclosed on the farmer's land, sometimes leased it to black tenant farmers. White farmers then complained that this amounted to unfair competition.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Some of the merchants involved were Jewish, and many of those white farmers came to understand themselves as victims of a Jewish conspiracy. These circumstances fueled the populist movement in American politics, and the mix of racial and economic resentment led to the rise of vigilante groups known as white caps. These secret societies mostly attacked black farmers in attempts to drive them off their land, but white cappers also targeted Jewish merchants and landowners.

Patrick Mason 

A lot of these vigilante groups are sort of harkening back to the Ku Klux Klan. So they call themselves the white caps. And when they attack people, it's called White capping them. They specifically go after Jewish landowners. They complain of the fact that Jews own so much land. It's these long standing stereotypes of the Jewish banker, the Jewish moneylender, the oppressive Jewish merchant, that's always charging too high of interest rates or ripping people off or pursuing unfair business practices.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Vigilantes were trying to use violence and intimidation to do the thing that General Grant had tried to do with his order number 11. Get Jews out of town. Here's an example of a Jewish merchant with the last name Hiller. His first name is unknown, but we know that Hiller immigrated from Europe and settled in Summit, Mississippi in the 1850s. He did very well and he owned 400 small farms, most of which he had obtained through foreclosures. Black tenants worked on many of Hiller's farms. In November 1892, whitecaps burned 27 houses on Hiller's farms. Night riders threatened to kill Hiller's agents. Many of his tenants fled and Hiller himself moved to New Orleans. A well organized effort drove Hiller out of what had been his home for four decades. Here's another example.

Patrick Mason 

Early Saturday afternoon, October 25 1889, a large party of armed men rode into the northeastern Louisiana city of Delhi. Not far from where Simon Witkowski had been violently driven from town two years previous. The mob fired their pistols into the showcases and front windows of the Jewish owned mercantile establishments in the town, discharging about 50 shots into T Hirsch's storefront window, smashing S Bloom and Company and sending bricks through the windows of Karp, Wile and Company. Threatening the Jewish store owners and putting them in terror for their lives, the rioters ordered them to leave the place within the next 12 to 15 hours, then rode away as fast as they had come. The townspeople who were friendly to the Jewish merchants, expressed a general regret over the incident, and their disapproval of the mob's activities probably protected the merchants from further harm, at least in terms of making empty threats of expulsion. Although the attackers were not publicly identified in the newspapers, their identities must have been known, since it was immediately ascertained that the motivation behind the violence was that the merchants held mortgages on the land of many small farmers in the area, and that certain debtors in the neighborhood were banded together to run their creditors away.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Some residents of Delhi, Louisiana were outraged by the violence. But a lot of people in town thought the Jews had it coming. One Delhi woman told a newspaper that Jewish stores had refused to hire non Jewish clerks, and that Jewish merchants were parasites who took the town's money and kept it for themselves. This sort of southern vigilantism peaked in the late 1880s and early 1890s. And white cappers and other vigilantes were more likely to kill or brutalize black tenants than Jewish merchants. But there were Jewish stores with bullets through their windows, and the economic resentments shaped the way that many Americans thought about Jews and money.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The history of American Judaism is full of paradoxes. We've been discussing white capping in the rural American South. At the same time, there were widespread pogroms in Russia. There was an imperial decree ordering the expulsion of Jews from Moscow in 1891. So for good reason, American Jews saw what happened in Delhi, Louisiana as an isolated exception. They were grateful that America was not like Eastern Europe. Usually there was outward civility between Jews and other Americans, whether in San Francisco or South Carolina, Solomon Heydenfelt served on the California Supreme Court. Abram Surasky's brother was on the Aiken City Council. At the same time, there were deep rooted suspicions and misgivings about Jews, especially Jewish merchants, bankers, and businessmen. Whether in post Gold Rush California in the US Army, in the RG Dunn credit agency, or in the backwoods and small towns of the South, these misgivings lead to discrimination, and sometimes much worse. These suspicions about Jewish merchants and bankers grew into fears about a worldwide conspiracy. One in which rich and powerful Jews conspired to bring about the downfall of Western civilization through revolution and war. At the same time, Europeans and Americans were developing new ideas about Jews as a diseased and dangerous race. And that combination of conspiracy theories and anti Jewish racism ushered in the most antisemitic era in American history.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Thank you for listening to Antisemitism, U.S.A. It's a production of R2 Studios part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Visit R2studios.org for a complete transcript of today's episode and for suggestions for further reading. I'm your host Mark Oppenheimer. Antisemitism, U.S.A. is written by John Turner and Lincoln Mullen. Britt Tevis is our lead scholar Jim Ambuske is our producer, Jeanette Patrick is our executive producer. We'd like to thank Zev Eleff for being our lead advisor and we'd like to thank our advisory board members Laura Shaw Frank, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan Sarna. Our graduate assistants are Rachel Birch, Alexandra Miller and Amber Pelham. Our thanks to Jeremy Zeitlin, David Sehat, Rachel Kranson, Zev Eleff, Jonathan Sarna, and Patrick Mason for sharing their expertise in this episode. We're able to bring you this show through the generosity of the Henry Luce Foundation, the David Bruce Smith Foundation and many individual donors like you. Thank you for listening, and we hope you'll join us for the next episode.