1900--and in the decades following--grew more rather than less openly antisemitic. In contrast, the German Jewish community seemed in 1900 to be making steady progress toward full acceptance in German life.
A thoughtful observer of America in 1900 might likewise have concluded that the future fate of American Jews was to be more isolated from American life, more subject to antisemitism, than had been the case in the fairly recent past. Jews had lived in the United States since before the Revolution, relatively few in number and inconspicuous, but fairly well-accepted and subject (by the standards of the time) to little overt antisemitism. But the America of 1900 was receiving a great infusion of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe.
These immigrants arrived knowing little or no English, little or nothing of their new country, and with a centuries-long history of confinement in ghettoes and stetls. Antisemitism was on the rise, popularly and institutionally; universities for example were setting quotas limiting the number of Jewish students. The possibility might have seemed quite real in 1900 that the barriers that had confined Jews in the Old World would be reproduced in the New.
In order to understand the context in which Jews and their neighbors lived in both Germany and the United States in the first four decades of the twentieth century, it may be useful to briefly sketch in the historical background of Jewish life and antisemitism in the Western world since that world began to take on its modern form in the Middle Ages. Antisemitism in the Western world initially had religious roots, and the "blood libel" remained at its root even to modern times. In the course of the Middle Ages, however, religion gave a further, indirect impetus to antisemitism. Church laws forbade Christians to lend at interest, leaving Jews as the only available bankers and moneylenders. Since creditors are seldom popular with debtors,...