Is The Klan Anti-Semitic
Referring to the exclusiveness of the Klan, I am not quite prepared to
admit that the conditions stipulated for membership in the organization
set up the insuperable barrier that some people suspect. It has been
pointed out in many hostile criticisms that the Semitic race is
excluded from membership in the Klan. It is not true, for instance,
that the Klan has set up arbitrary barriers to the admission of the
Hebrew; but it is true that the orthodox Hebrew has established around
himself barriers that preclude his admission into the organization.
The orthodox Jews are perhaps the most exclusive people in the
civilized world. Their racial pride exceeds the pride of any nation or
any land. They have a right to be proud in view of all their history.
The Hebrew literature, the Hebrew religion, the Hebrew commonwealth,
and more than all, the Hebrew jurisprudence, much of which has been
adopted by our western society, entitles the race to hold to its
distinctive qualities and characteristics with a pride that all the
world respects and admires. They have everywhere been a peculiar
people. Because of marked racial distinctiveness, not to say eminence,
they have drawn a boundary line about their social and religious life,
shutting themselves in and the rest of mankind out.
Perhaps there is no patriotism in the world comparable to that of the
Jew. His attachment to his ancient home-land and to his institutions
has been through the ages a consuming passion. In the early history of
his development, when defeated in war, reduced to slavery and crushed
under mountainous oppression, his loyalty to his country and his creed
never wavered. There is no picture in history more pathetic and,
indeed, more inspiring than that of the Jew in bondage. Toiling in the
brickyards of Goshen, taunted with the despoiled glory of his country,
the taskmaster demanding, as the burning lash was laid upon his bared
shoulders, that he sing the songs of his native land, his intrepid
spirit was unconquered and his superb loyalty unbroken: "If I forget
thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning, and if I do
not esteem thee above my chiefest joy, let my tongue cleave unto the
roof of my mouth."
The Jew has brought his religion to America, establishing his temple
worship and clinging tenaciously to his creed of Theism. He has been
welcomed with a hospitality such as has been tendered the Jew by no
other nation. His religious institutions have had all the protection
of the law thrown about them, and they have been covered by the broad
mantle of American liberalism. He has been granted the right to worship
Almighty God according to the dictates of his own conscience, with none
to molest him or make him afraid. But he has organized in America no
system of evangelism to convey his religious message to the people
without the pale. He has made no proselytes or attempted to make any.
He has held his church exclusively for himself and his posterity.
To the orthodox Jew his religion is entirely an expression of his
nationality. He has never invited men without creed to inquire into
his dogmas and his doctrines. Indeed, he has held to his religion as
a heritage that belongs to the Jew and to which none other than a Jew
could subscribe as a matter of right or even as a privilege. A highly
intelligent and influential Gentile sect, the Unitarians, has built its
religious life about the doctrine of Theism. There are no fundamental
or essential differences between the orthodoxy of the Jew and that of
this Gentile sect, but even the Gentile theist has had no invitation
to Judaism, and has been tendered scant cordiality by this proud,
exclusive race that took its religion from the visible and audible
presence of Jehovah and preserved it inviolate for themselves and for
their kind.
In coming to America the orthodox Jew has brought with him all the
racial pride that distinguishes him throughout the ages. He does not
undertake to mingle his social life with that of the native people of
the country, nor does he invite those of other racial lineage to cross
his threshold. He marries and intermarries only with his kind. If the
offspring of the orthodox Jew marries a Gentile he is excommunicated
with drastic and fearful ceremony. So does the Jew keep himself apart.
Even in the remote and sparsely populated sections of the country,
where a single Jewish family is established in a village or at a
cross-roads, selling merchandise, when the time comes for the marrying
of his children, he does not seek or desire that the people with whom
he has been trading, or that the children with whom his children have
been taught in the common schools, shall be introduced into Jewish
family life. He seeks to mate his children with members of his own
race, even though the mating has to be done at long range. Sometimes a
suitable husband for a marriageable daughter, or an acceptable wife
for a marriageable son, has to be obtained in New York or Chicago or
San Francisco, from a thousand to three thousand miles away.
Perhaps this Jew has understood for ages what some of our American
sociologists will not learn from biology; that is, that the
amalgamation of two distinctive race types may lose, in the offspring,
much of the distinctive good of both. A people of mixed race is long
in establishing both the fact and the sense of unity. Its individual
minds tend to instability. Witness, for instance, the results due
to the divergent people who inhabit Ireland. Racial stability, as a
biological fact in the realm of psychology, is a precious result,
perfected only by long, very long unity of blood. A mixed race finds,
for a long period, difficulty in attaining individual balance and
social peace. With the orthodox Jew another racial purpose inclines
him, with relentless will, toward racial segregation. His people are
the chosen of Almighty God. They listen through the centuries for the
voices of angels proclaiming the advent of the true Messiah. To mix his
blood with that of the Gentile is to lose his vision, his hope and his
immortal soul.
The Klan organizes itself around the principles of Christianity, which
diverge widely from the principles of Jewish orthodoxy. If it requires
that those seeking admission into the organization should subscribe to
the tenets that are Christian, it can not be construed into hostility
toward the Jewish race. We believe that, side by side, a few Jews and
many Christians, or a few Christians and many Jews may live in peace
and contentment. For in either case the minority can never, by power
of number, challenge the basic things of civilization of the majority.
Let me here emphasize with all the power I possess: in America the Jew
must ultimately mix with the Gentile. One million Jewish immigrants
and their descendants can be, and will be, through the centuries,
absorbed into the great body of our American people. Here we touch
upon the true cause of the modern Zionism. His exclusiveness forbade
the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Roman, and the Russian, to destroy
his racial identity. To-day he is surrendering in Western Europe and
America to the liberalism of the younger generation of Jews and the
neighborliness of the modern Gentile. Liberalism and Americanization
will eventually break down the exclusiveness of even so large a number
as we now have among us. But if practically free immigration continues
and five millions, or ten millions, of Jews come to us within the
next generation--then we shall have a people within a people, a state
within a state, and the sad conditions of Poland or Roumania will
be re-enacted in America. A two per cent. Jewish population can be,
ultimately, thoroughly Americanized. A ten per cent. Jewish population
will lead us from danger unto danger. We shall have absolute Jewish
separatism on the one hand, and anti-Semitism on the other. We
shall then witness all those profound and terrible reactions which
relentlessly mark the sharp contacts of two vitally different societies
upon the same soil. I submit that when the Klan as an organization,
holding to the tenets of Christianity, provided that any white
native-born American who subscribes to its conditions may enter into
the Klan, the Jew was not arbitrarily excluded. In fact, there are some
native-born American Jews who have accepted Christianity and have at
the same time become eligible to membership in the Klan. But the hard
and fast racial organization of the orthodox Jew does not permit him
to go outside of prescribed boundaries in either his social or his
religious life. We have not excluded the Jew. The orthodox Jew has
excluded himself.
The Klan not only protests that it is not anti-Semitic. The Klan
seeks the execution of a policy which will prevent the growth of
anti-Semitism in America.