Some of these narratives were decidedly antagonistic toward Jews.
J.
G.
Wilson, a surgeon with the U.S.
Public Health Service, was particularly disdainful.
In a study he conducted on “Jewish psychopathology” just a year after he wrote about diabetes, he referred to Jews as “a highly inbred and psychopathically inclined race.” Wilson made this claim while he was stationed at Ellis Island, the U.S. port of entry for most Eastern European Jews.
His sense of discomfort with this group, whose clothing, language, and mannerisms seemed so alien to him, was clear in two ways: the speed with which he moved from correlation to causation, assuming that the simultaneous increase in both the mortality rate from diabetes and the Jewish population meant that Jews were responsible; and his insistence that Jews had such a high rate of this disease because of “some hereditary defect” exacerbated by “the practice of inbreeding.” Wilson’s decision to refer to the Jewish practice of consanguineous marriages, which was being hotly debated at the time by Jews and non-Jews alike, as “inbreeding” not only fed anxiety about the close-knit nature of Jews, but also tainted the diagnosis of diabetes with hints of incest.
Wilson was writing at a time of intense anxiety over the seemingly endless flow of immigrants from Eastern Europe to the United States that had begun in the 1880s.
In 1911, just a year before Wilson published his study of diabetes in New York City, a congressional committee known as the Dilling ham Commission had produced a lengthy report recommending that immigration be curtailed.
As part of its investigative work, the committee had prepared an analysis of the racial makeup of the existing immigrant population, a clear indication that race was to be a critical factor in deciding who among the “tired,” the “poor,” and those “yearning to breathe free” would be allowed to continue to enter the country.
Working with standard anthropological classifications, the members of the commission began by dividing the immigrant populations into five major races, Caucasian (white), Malayan (brown), Mongolian (yellow), American Indian (red), and Ethiopian (black), before separating them further into subgroups, alternatively referred to as “peoples,” “nations,” or, confusing matters further, “races.” In the end, and by employing a combination of biological, linguistic, and cultural characteristics, the Dillingham Commission identified roughly six hundred “branches or divisions of the human family” throughout the world, forty-five of which could be found in the United States.
Jews, also referred to as Hebrews, were among them, along with Celtics, Alpines, Teutonics, Mediterraneans, Slavonics, and many others, but it remained unclear exactly who was related to whom and how. One of the questions that received considerable attention was whether Jews should be considered white.
This was not an academic question.
The five major races were understood to exist in a hierarchy, with whites representing the most “civilized” of the groups and blacks and American Indians the most “savage.” According to the 1790 naturalization law, only “free white persons” could apply for citizenship, and in the early years of the American republic this included Jewish immigrants, who hailed primarily from Germany.
But later in the century, the influx of millions of Eastern European Jews, with their strange language, clothing, and overall appearance, cast doubt on this classification.
A group of radical nativists jumped into the fray, going to great lengths to cast the latest influx of Jews as “thoroughbred Asiatics.” As strange as that may seem today, the question of whether Jews were fundamentally “oriental” or “occidental” dates back at least to the Middle Ages, when Christian writers often depicted them as turbaned and oriental as a way of highlighting their otherness.
According to radical nativists, Jews still bore the imprint of their years wandering in the desert when they were little more than a nomadic tribe.
Describing them alternately as primitive, tribal, and “Mongoloid,” some claimed that they had descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who allegedly converted to Judaism in the eighth century.
Whatever the specific allegations, casting Jews as “oriental” raised the hope, at least for the nativists, that Jewish immigrants seeking entry might be denied under the terms of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States.
The members of the Dillingham Commission did not join the radical nativists in questioning whether Jews were white.
But they evidently struggled with the degree of Jews’ whiteness, revealing their embrace of early twentieth-century beliefs that some groups were whiter than others.
This was apparent in their criticism of the Bureau of Immigration’s previous classification of Jews as “Slavonic” and thus as “Aryan,” and their reclassification of them as “Semitic,” which placed them lower on the race ladder.
Given the widespread belief that Semitic peoples stemmed originally from Africa, this change raised further questions about Jews’ whiteness.
Indeed, although never a popular belief, some considered Jews to be “essentially Negro in habits, physical peculiarities and tendencies,” possessing both “Mongoloid” and “Negroid” traits.
The motivations behind this change became evident when the commission concluded its work in 1911 and recommended that the government enact a restrictive immigration law.
It took another decade, but the commission’s report finally bore fruit: in 1921, and again in 1924, with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, the government put in place restrictive immigration laws that reduced the number of Jews entering the United States from a record high of 120,000 in 1921 to just 10,000 three years later.
As the eugenicist Charles Davenport, who had advised the Dillingham Commission, wrote to a friend shortly after the legislation passed: “Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to.
Also they burned the witches but it seems to be against the mores to burn any considerable part of our population.
Meanwhile we have somewhat diminished the immigration of these people.”
A decade before Davenport penned these words, J.
G.
Wilson, the surgeon with the U.S.
Public Health Service, had voiced related concerns.
The same year the Dillingham Commission published its final report, and one year before he blamed rising diabetes rates on the influx of Jewish immigrants, Wilson had published an article in Popular Science Monthly on “The Crossing of the Races.” This was Wilson’s opportunity to articulate the criteria he believed the government should employ as it crafted its immigration policy, and his message was clear: there are good immigrants and bad ones, and Jews belonged to the bad group.
Notably, Wilson did not base this determination on biological race, despite the title of his article.
Unlike his peers who spread widespread panic about the effects of race mixing on the vigor of wholesome American stock, Wilson believed that “racial amalgamation” had long been a part of human history and should be embraced, at least as long as it took place “between different branches of the white races.” In fact, he believed that some racial crosses, such as between Teutons, Britons, and Celts, had produced positive results, and he could well imagine future intermarriages between “real Americans” and select immigrants that would be similarly beneficial.
What worried him was not the biological mixing of the races, but their moral mixing.
He wanted the government to restrict entry to those immigrants who would have a positive impact on “our habits of thought , upon our morals , and upon our institutions ,” in short, on “our spiritual selves.”
Wilson claimed that history provided the best clue to an immigrant group’s moral mettle, so he proceeded to offer a brief lesson about each of several populations, reading their past to see what it revealed about the group’s character and whether they would be capable of adopting “those Anglo-Saxon habits of thought which we must insist upon as necessary to good citizenship in a great republic.” His conclusion was that Italians, Magyars, Poles, and other Slavs had all demonstrated their ability “to adopt the ways of western civilization.” Jews, on the other hand, he referred to them as “the other type of immigrant”, had failed the test.
In his interpretation of their history, Jews had been welcomed in many different lands from biblical times to the present, and each time they had begun by being treated as equals.
Invariably, however, they had drawn others’ wrath by insisting on “certain special privileges” and keeping to themselves.
This “clannishness,” Wilson insisted, reinforced by Jews’ refusal “to intermarry with those of other religions,” worked against ensuring that immigrants adopt, rather than obliterate, “our inherited Anglo-Saxon ideals.”
Diabetes, Wilson may well have thought, was a just punishment for Jews’ insistence that they “breed” only among themselves.
The hostility that Wilson evinced in his discussion of Jews and diabetes was, however, the exception rather than the rule.
Far more common in the diabetes literature was subtle trafficking in negative stereotypes.
Thus one physician attributed Jews’ high rate of diabetes to the love of the “Hebrew race” for “high living,” adding that “they are given to parties, they congregate together and have frequent and irregular meals.” William Osler wrote of Jews’ particularly “neurotic temperament.” A journalist weighed in, blaming Jews’ “racial tendency to corpulence.” And Haven Emerson, professor of preventive medicine at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and a previous commissioner of health for the city of New York, put the onus on Jews for spreading what he called “this great luxury disease.” In doing so, he drew on not only widespread fears of the drastic changes shaking the foundation of American society in the interwar years, but also negative images of the Jew as the embodiment of much that was wrong with modernity.
Emerson honed his argument in an article entitled “Sweetness Is Death,” published in 1924 in The Survey , the leading journal of the social work profession.
In the first two-thirds of his article, Emerson did not even mention Jews.
Instead he drew in his reader by presenting disturbing statistics about the fifteen-fold rise in the annual death rate from diabetes between 1866 and 1923, and by targeting the social, economic, and cultural changes that were making the trend difficult to reverse.
Emerson mentioned, for example, the way the new “motorized and mechanistic existence” reduced the need for physical labor and thereby reduced the number of calories a person burned.
But what truly disturbed him were challenges to the moral fiber of the nation.
These included the growing “self-indulgence,” the increase in “lazy comforts,” the “sugar coating” of meals, the desire for little more than “the satisfaction of . . . caprice.” Indeed, if anything, Emerson’s diatribe in the first pages of his article was against “the idle rich” and their embrace of conspicuous consumption, not Jews per se.
Diabetes rates were going up, he ranted, because Americans had become “the grossest feeders among the nations . . . bulging with the money bags of the world, fairly oozing with wealth, eating every day much more than any of our allies or opponents of the war . . . and, as it were, dying of overeating.”