Historian’s Notebook: The Jewish History I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know

A little over 10 years ago, I went with a friend to the Philadelphia area. During our trip, we took our kids to the Crayola Factory in Easton. I think we were the only non-Jewish people learning about the manufacture of crayons and the Erie Canal that day. At one point, I was seated at a table with a Jewish family and we started chatting. They explained that they were celebrating Chol HaMoed Sukkot, one of the intermediate days of Sukkot when observant Jewish families can travel and spend time together.

Living in Indiana my entire life, this was all completely new to me. At that point, nearly everything I knew about Jewish culture came from Tuesdays with Morrie, Shapiro’s deli in Indianapolis, and Sunday school class.

As we explored the area over the next few days, I noticed so many other Jewish families, some dressed very differently from the people I had met at Crayola. I learned about Hasidic Jews and other Orthodox communities in which men may wear black coats, white shirts and hats, and some grow payot – the curls at the sides of the hairline – in accordance with the biblical prohibition against cutting the corners of the head.

As the years went by, those experiences lived somewhere in the back of my mind, as things often do. Why did so many Jewish people live in that part of the country? Why was there not a larger Jewish population where I lived? When did Jewish people begin immigrating to the United States?

And here we are, reading about my 4 a.m. wonderings.

At first, I assumed perhaps much of the Jewish population in the United States had come during or immediately after World War II. But as soon as I thought that, I remembered Anne Frank’s father, Otto, trying desperately to get his family out of Europe.

Beginning in 1938, Otto Frank pursued the possibility of immigrating to the United States. His application was never formally denied; it was never processed. The American consulate in Rotterdam was destroyed during the German bombing of the city, applications had to be reconstructed, American immigration requirements became increasingly difficult to navigate, and eventually the U.S. consulates in Nazi-occupied territory closed. He tried another route through Cuba, but that failed as well.

That didn’t fit comfortably with the version of America I had learned growing up, the country represented by Emma Lazarus’ words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

And this is where it gets interesting and devastating.

During the Nazi era, the number of Jewish refugees admitted to the United States was much smaller than we might imagine when looking backward from the end of World War II. By then, the United States had already built an immigration system designed to sharply restrict immigration from parts of Europe where many Jewish people lived.

Between 1881 and 1924, more than 2.5 million Eastern European Jews left their homelands, driven in large part by persecution and a lack of economic opportunity, with huge numbers coming to the United States. Then Congress began closing the door. The Emergency Quota Act came in 1921. Three years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 created an even more restrictive national-origins quota system.

And Congress didn’t base those quotas on what America looked like in 1924.

It used the 1890 census.

That matters because the enormous wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, including millions of Jewish immigrants, had largely happened after 1890. The new law limited annual immigration from each nationality to two percent of the number of people of that nationality counted in the United States in 1890. The effect heavily favored immigration from northern and western Europe while sharply reducing it from southern and eastern Europe.

What is absolutely heartbreaking is that even the limited quotas available during the 1930s were not always filled. There was no special American refugee policy for people fleeing Nazi persecution. Refugees had to squeeze themselves through the existing immigration system while navigating bureaucracy, financial requirements, security restrictions, antisemitism and a country that was not particularly eager to admit them.

So, feeling equal parts angry and curious, I wondered what happened in 1924.

Or maybe the better question was: what had happened before 1924 that made Americans willing to support such restrictive legislation?

I expected to find fear of foreigners after World War I. I expected the First Red Scare, which is a story for another time. I expected nativism and antisemitism.

I did not expect to find eugenics.

This is where the free preview ends.

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