The whiteness of Jews in the United States has been taken as obvious, then questioned, then reasserted over the decades.
Before the mid-nineteenth century, European immigrants who came over generally assimilated into white America. This was no small thing. In the American context, to be white was to be in the part of society that traded and owned and profited from enslaved people, and not the part that was enslaved. That included European Jews, who were broadly thought of as white.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic world this was untrue. There were other parts of the western hemisphere where Jews were not predominantly white. There was, for example, Suriname, where Portuguese Jews and their descendants had autonomy within a slave society. Those Jewish men who came over from Europe to live and work in Suriname raped the women they enslaved and then had their children converted to Judaism. In this way, the “Eurafrican” Jewish population likely came to surpass the “white” Jewish population there by the early 1800s.
But the United States was not Suriname. And in the United States, Jewish whiteness allowed some Jews to play an active role in upholding America’s racist, slave-based society. In chapter one, we learned of Judah P. Benjamin, but he was hardly alone. The first Jewish member of Congress, Lewis Charles Levin, elected in 1845, founded the American Republic Party, later known as the Native American Party—and informally known as the nativist Know Nothing Party.
Other American Jews also fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War, making arguments that Judaism and slave ownership were coherent. That many Jews fought on the side of the Union and made the opposite case arguably had less to do with some inherent Jewish value and more to do with the fact that more Jews lived in the North.
Jews in the United States before the mass Jewish migration also spoke about themselves as members of a religion, not as a distinct people or a race: consider, again, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which said explicitly that to be Jewish was to belong to a faith, not a nation.
But as more Jews came to America, Jews of European descent were to be seen as something other than white. After 1880, immigration shifted to become primarily from southern and eastern Europe and from less wealthy communities, changing the makeup of cities. Immigrants and their children made up 70 percent of America’s largest cities, which in turn assumed a southern and eastern European character. Immigrants were not just disappearing into white American culture; they were changing what it looked like. This caused consternation for those white Americans who were already here who did not want the portrait of white America to change.