African Americans and Jewish Americans have interacted throughout much of the history of the United States. This relationship has included widely publicized cooperation and conflict, and it has been an area of significant academic research since the 1970s. Cooperation during the Civil Rights Movement was strategic and significant, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The relationship has also featured conflicts and controversies which are related to such topics as the Black Power movement, Zionism, affirmative action, and the antisemitic trope concerning the alleged dominant role of American and Caribbean-based Jews in the Atlantic slave trade.
History
In the Americas, interactions between Black people and Jews began during European colonization in the early modern period. Black Africans first arrived in America in the 16th century. Captives from West and Central Africa were sold to European slave traders who transported them across the Atlantic to the Americas, where they were sold to local slaveowners. A few of them were able to gain their freedom through manumission or they were able to gain their freedom by escaping from their enslavers and after they gained their freedom, they founded independent communities both before and during the American Revolution.Gomez, Michael A: Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, p. 29. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1998.
Early Jewish communities which existed in what became the United States were primarily Sephardic (Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent). Many of them were refugees and immigrants from Brazil, Amsterdam, or England. They settled in cities such as New York City, Providence, Rhode Island, Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, gradually integrating themselves into the local society. Slavery was a long-established institution in the colonies, and as a result, some Jews became slaveholders, especially in the South. Contrary to the conspiracy theory that Jews played an outsized role in the slave trade, Jews only comprised 1.25% of all Southern slaveowners. For the most part, American Jews did not feel any sense of responsibility for the larger society around them until the late 19th century. When they finally did so, Southern Jews lagged far behind Northern Jews.
Like many Christians who lived at that time, some Jews also used the Bible to justify the enslavement of Black people based on historical and scientific racism. For instance, a Jewish editor named Jacob N. Cardozo explained that "the reason the Almighty had made the colored black" was to mark him as inferior, providing an obvious, God-given approval of slavery. This scientific racism often characterized people as belonging to three broad categories or races: Caucasian, Mongoloid or Negroid. So, although Jews were often considered "other" and separate from European Christians, the Naturalization Act of 1790 classed them as "free white persons" and thus full citizens, unlike Native Americans, Africans, Pacific Islanders, and non-white Asians.
After the United States was founded in 1776, most Black people continued to be enslaved, especially in the American South; four million slaves were liberated only during and at the end of the Civil War in 1865. During Reconstruction, they gained citizenship and, in the case of adult males, the right to vote. Due to the widespread policy and ideology of white supremacy, however, Black Americans were treated as second-class citizens and soon found themselves disenfranchised in the South.
20th century In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to the United States for social and economic opportunities due to widespread violent pogroms in their countries of residence. They mainly settled in New York and other major cities.
In the Great Migration of the 1910s, Southern Black people began large-scale migration to Northern cities, where many Jews had already settled, in order to escape peonage and second-class citizenship.
Black people related to the Jews, seeing connections between slavery in America and the biblical accounts of the Israelites in Egypt. Northern Jews also began to see similar connections and began to express sympathy for the plight of Black Americans:
In the early 1900s, Northern Jewish daily and weekly publications, many of them holding radical and secular views, often reported on violence against Black people at a time when non-Jewish publications would not. Some writers in these publications compared the anti-black violence in the South to the deadly anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, even though other Jewish writers strongly objected to such comparisons.
Despite many publications taking an anti-racist stance, coverage in Jewish periodicals could be deeply ambivalent: It was often inspired by principles of justice and by a desire to change racist policies in the United States, but it sometimes used racist language, occasionally blamed Black people for their own oppression (including racist incidents such as the Tulsa massacre), and sometimes was paternalistic. Some of the ambivalence was motivated, as Uri Schreter puts it, by "anxieties about Black violence". At the same time, African-American writers often portrayed Jewish people through the lens of capitalism and exploitation of Black labor, and many Jews felt that the comparisons that Black people drew between themselves and Jews were offensive.
During this period, notable Northern Jewish leaders invested time, influence and economic resources into Black endeavors, supporting civil rights, philanthropy, social service, and organizing. Historian Hasia Diner notes that "they made sure that their actions were well publicized" as part of an effort to demonstrate increasing Jewish political clout.
Julius Rosenwald was a Northern Jewish philanthropist who donated a large part of his fortune to supporting Black education in the South by providing matching funds for construction of schools in rural areas. Northern Jews played a major role in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its early decades. Northern Jews involved in the NAACP included Joel Elias Spingarn (its first chairman), Arthur B. Spingarn, and founder Henry Moskowitz. More recently, Jack Greenberg was a leader in the organization.
On the other hand, African Americans also experienced racism and shock from newly arrived Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and they faced a lack of support from Jews in the South. Critics such as Albert Lindemann have argued that pro-black attitudes amongst Southern Jews in this time period would have provoked fierce opposition from Christian white Southerners.
Southern Jewish attitudes towards Black people only started to change in 1915, when the much publicized lynching of Leo Frank, a Jew, in Georgia by a mob of white Southerners caused many Southern Jews to "become acutely conscious of the similarities and differences between themselves and blacks." Some began feeling an increased sense of solidarity with Black people, as the trial exposed widespread antisemitism in Georgia.
However, the trial also pitted Jews against Black people because Frank's Jewish defense attorneys excluded Black jurors and exploited anti-black racism by shifting the blame for the murder of Mary Phagan, a white girl, to Jim Conley, a Black janitor and witness against Frank. Frank's lead attorney, Luther Rosser, called Conley a "dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger."Melnick, Jeffrey (2000). Black–Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2000, p. 61. Although many historians since the late 20th century have concluded that Conley did murder Phagan, most Southern Jews were quite racist towards Black people at the time and took advantage of their higher social status.
Baruch Charney Vladeck reported that, although he didn't see Jews attack Black people in the South, he did see them smile when Black people were assaulted, and argued that Jews ignored their "‘vayse’ privilegn" ("white" privilege). However, he felt that the lynching of Frank could improve relations with Black people, writing:Now, when the white body of one of ours has been hung upon a tree, we will perhaps understand that the blacks feel every day what we have felt for only one day and become better citizens.
After World War I & World War II Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) was an early promoter of pan-Africanism and African redemption and led the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. His push to celebrate Africa as the original homeland of African Americans led many Jews to compare Garvey to leaders of Zionism. An example of this was that Garvey wanted World War I peace negotiators to turn over former German colonies in southwest Africa to Black people. In that period, Zionists were promoting a "return of Jews" after 2,000 years to the historic homeland of Israel, stressing self-determination for former colonies. At the same time, Garvey regularly criticized Jews in his columns in his newspaper Negro World for allegedly trying to destroy the Black population of America.
After World War II, Federal Housing Authority policy restricted certain neighborhoods to people of the "same social and racial classes". While some of these neighborhoods excluded them based on charter, Jews were usually permitted to move into white areas, while Black people were not. This reinforced segregation at the time and deepened the economic, social and political inequalities between African Americans and other ethnic groups, including Jews."The Continuing Causes of Segregation". Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993, .
During the Civil rights movement By the middle of the 20th century, many Southern Jews were supportive of the Civil Rights Movement. About 50 percent of the civil-rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were over 50 percent of the whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow laws. These pro-black Southern Jews tended to keep a low profile on "the race issue" in order to avoid attracting the attention of the anti-black (and antisemitic) Ku Klux Klan.
However, Klan groups exploited the issue of Black integration and Jewish involvement in the struggle in order to commit violently antisemitic hate crimes. As an example of this hatred, in one year alone, from November 1957 to October 1958, temples and other Jewish communal gatherings were bombed and desecrated in Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Miami, and dynamite was found under synagogues in Birmingham, Charlotte, and Gastonia. Some rabbis received death threats, although there were no injuries following these outbursts of violence.
Commercial and residential relations Following the Civil War, Jewish shop-owners and landlords engaged in business with Black customers and tenants, often filling a need where non-Jewish, white business owners would not venture. This was true in most regions of the South, where Jews were often merchants in its small cities, as well as Northern urban cities such as New York, where they settled in high numbers. Jewish shop-owners tended to be more civil than other white people to Black customers, treating them with more dignity.Golden, Harry, "Negro and Jew: an Encounter in America", in Black people frequently had more immediate contact with Jewish people than they had with white Christians.