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Anti-Semitism in the United States
An Overview
Before the Civil War, there were few Jews in the United States. Because the
Jewish population was barely noticeable, Jews did not meet much anti-Semitism. As
Nathan Belth writes, “it took a hundred years for the population of the thirteen
colonies to reach 2,000,000 and the Jewish component to reach 2,000.” 103 Some
states in New England, such as Massachusetts, accommodated its Jewish inhabitants.
In its early years, Massachusetts maintained colonial ties to churches, allocating
churches a portion of its citizens’ taxes. However, the Jewish Moses Michael Hayes of
Massachusetts arranged to have his religious tax given to his synagogue rather than
the state’s Congregationalist Church. 104 Some states were tougher on Jews; in 1777,
Jews in Maryland petitioned to have a law lifted which required politicians to take
an oath of Christianity and were rejected. Aside from this one instance, there were
not noteworthy incidents of anti-Semitism until the nineteenth century, when the
Jewish population multiplied.
Historians attribute the growth of the American Jewish population to two
waves of migration: the first, between 1820 and 1880, and the second, between
1880 and 1924 (the year the National Origins Act was passed). In 1920, the
American Jewish Yearbook estimated that there were 3,600,800 Jews in the United
States. 105 According to the Yearbook, roughly 2,269,289 of these Jews immigrated to
103 Nathan C. Belth, A Promise To Keep (New York: Times Books, 1979), 8.
104 Ibid, 11.
105 American Jewish Yearbook, 1924-1925 Statistics of Jews, 564.
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