MISSIONARIES PROVED JUST HOW complicated America’s mission could be, with private and public interests often differing on how it should be implemented throughout the world. Though the United States did not intervene on behalf of Armenian Christians, missionaries ensured that religious liberty had become an important issue for U.S. foreign policy. But they were not America’s only human rights advocates—indeed, they were not even the most persistent. More strenuously and urgently than Protestant missionaries, American Jews promoted the cause of religious liberty abroad. As with the missionaries, their invocation of a universal ideal and a natural right stemmed from a very particular concern for the immediate safety of Jews in Europe. And as with missionaries, once the U.S. government took the cause of religious liberty seriously, governments abroad, even international law itself, had little choice but to follow suit.
The place of Jews in American society changed dramatically following the Civil War and Reconstruction, mostly due to the arrival of waves of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe after the first of the Russian pogroms in 1881 following the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Between 1881 and 1914, when the outbreak of World War I in Europe closed off their avenue of escape, over two million Jews migrated to the United States from Galicia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, and especially Russia and Romania; the Jewish population of New York City alone soared from 80,000 to 1.4 million. Some fled pogroms, but most moved for the same reasons that have driven migrants throughout human history: economic distress and poor living standards. Russian and Romanian Jews in particular endured horrible living conditions, high unemployment, and negligible wages simply because Russian and Romanian governments had made it so. Jews had suffered such miseries for decades, but in the 1880s conditions deteriorated sharply, mostly for political reasons: in Russia, people blamed Jews for the assassination of the czar and the rise of socialist radicalism, while the government of newly independent Romania feared its Jews were a fifth column that would undermine state and nation. Eastern European Jews were desperate to leave, but no other European country would take them in. The ease with which people could now cross the Atlantic—in a matter of days rather than weeks or months, and for a relatively small sum—made the United States a realistic destination, while its religious tolerance and booming industrial revolution made it an attractive one. Russian Jews wanted to move to only two places: either the Holy Land (Palestine) or the Golden Land (America). Until World War I, almost all made their way to the Golden Land.1
At roughly the same time, American Jews were undergoing profound changes of their own. Up to the Civil War, Jews in the United States saw Americanization as their objective: they sought to erase the differences, or at least the most obvious ones, between themselves and the national mainstream. But after the Civil War, groups of Jews in Philadelphia and New York undertook efforts to recover their Jewish identity as a complement to their American nationality. At first, such efforts simply meant prioritizing Jewish religious festivals and ceremonies; the celebration of Hanukkah as a major holiday, for example, began in the 1870s. But the recovery of identity, when it unfolded against the backdrop of bloodthirsty pogroms in Russia and the naked anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus trial in Paris, assumed a harder, more assertive edge. By the 1890s, with the formation of the Federation of American Zionists and the Knights of Zion, Zionism was becoming a powerful force among American Jews. So too were other forms of Jewish nationalism, such as Bundist socialism, that conceived of the Jewish diaspora as a single nation consisting of a single people. Just as Protestant missionaries were helping create an international consciousness for Americans, Zionists and other Jewish nationalists were fusing an international consciousness for American Jews, a development enriched and accentuated by the arrival of millions of European Jewish immigrants. This global outlook propelled Jewish concerns about events in eastern Europe, which in turn brought humanitarian pressures to bear upon U.S. foreign policy.2
As Jews became more prominent, they attracted increasing attention from gentile Americans, for good and ill. Anti-Semitism was nothing new, but by the late nineteenth century it had infected, according to the subject’s leading historian, “practically every stratum in society.” This included the loftiest strata as well as the lowliest, as anti-Semitism increased among the patrician elites and governing class who feared that grasping, aspirational Jews aimed to supplant the traditional role of Protestantism in establishing a national code of conduct and mores. Brooks and Henry Adams, grandsons of John Quincy and two of America’s leading historians and public intellectuals, hated Jews because of their supposedly conspiratorial skills and malignant ambitions to harness American power to the cause of world Jewry. They also despised the Gilded Age’s nouveaux riches, who lacked style and sophistication and whose worst traits the Jews were assumed to epitomize. Writing from Paris at the height of the Dreyfus affair in the winter of 1898, Brooks blamed “a gang of dirty Jews” for stirring up controversy about Dreyfus’s probable innocence. A few months later, he could barely contain himself as Émile Zola’s impassioned defense of Dreyfus forced the controversy into the open. “The Jews and the monied class have outdone themselves,” he hissed in a letter to Henry. Henry’s feelings were just as maliciously succinct as his brother’s. “I loathe the Jew,” he confessed in a letter the following year.3
The sources of American anti-Semitism, then, could be refined as well as rough, genteel as well as crude. In such circles, Jewish immigration was unwanted and undesirable, even harmful. “You want to keep the Russian Jews out of America, a wish which, according to me, you are right.” So wrote Reverend Edward Everett Hale, Unitarian minister, chaplain to the U.S. Senate, and one of the nation’s leading liberal religious intellectuals, to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, senator from Massachusetts. Jews in the United States and Russia “say that new and very stiff statutes [pogroms] are to be made in Russia this next summer, which as things go, will send a few hundred million more of them over here.” Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms should be steered away from America and toward Palestine, in the interest of all concerned, Hale argued. The Russians would not care, the Jews would be happy, and the purity of America would be maintained. Only the Turks would object, but perhaps they could be persuaded by Secretary of State Hay’s negotiating skills. As Hale’s prejudice illustrated, one did not have to be a Christian Zionist to favor the return of the Jews to Israel.4
Unsurprisingly, anti-Semitism could be found lurking in nearly all institutions of privilege and power—including the State Department. The thoughts of William R. Castle, who would finish a distinguished diplomatic career as Under Secretary of State, swam in the most polluted currents of patrician anti-Semitism and reflected the innate hostility to Jews of many career foreign service officers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generalizing from the Jews of Poland, Castle vented to his diary that the Jews “are an incubus on the state. They are not producers. They live on driving hard bargains, on usury. They clutter the streets, because they have nothing to do except to discuss the theology of the Talmud.” Jews “are dirty and harbingers of all diseases; immoral and servants of immorality; absolutely unpatriotic.” Worse still, they were all in league with one another, all over the world, and advanced the cause of international Jewry over the interests of their home countries.5
But the anti-Semitic venom of the Adams brothers, Hale, and Castle did not monopolize American attitudes toward Jews. As Jewish immigration increased, and as American horizons stretched into the Middle East, American perceptions of Jews also became more positive, benign, even favorable. Much of this stemmed from an increasingly popular ecumenical outlook, especially among liberal mainline Protestants. Much also stemmed from the overarching inclusivity of a battle-tested civil religion. Christians and Jews should celebrate their broader “common humanity,” an Episcopal minister wrote to a Jewish rabbi in 1876, instead of concentrating on narrower points of difference. Others saw anti-Semitism as a symptom of even more serious diseases: irreligion and tyranny. The Dreyfus case, a Southern Methodist bishop explained to students, was the direct result of centuries of Catholic oppression in France, which had produced an equally strong reaction among skeptics, atheists, and other people of dubious morality. Unless France “can right her iniquity, and relearn the lessons of justice and integrity and bring herself forward, she will yet reap the full results of revolution.” Political liberty could not exist without religious tolerance, especially to those faiths and sects most vulnerable in society.6
Americans were also becoming fascinated with the Jews as a people of the Bible, and as a fellow chosen people touched by God and protected by providence. Spurred by missionary activity, and ironically also by the advent of biblical criticism, which did much to undermine the immutable authority of the Bible but stimulated interest in biblical history, post–Civil War Americans became infatuated with the Middle East and infected with Holy Land mania. In addition to the ever-present missionaries, thousands of European and American tourists embarked on a “Peaceful Crusade” to experience the ancient sites and “sacred geography” of the Bible firsthand. Others chose to move to the Holy Land, most prominently Horatio and Anna Spafford, Chicago evangelicals who established the American Colony in Jerusalem in 1881 as a place of respite for Christian pilgrims from the West. Even intellectuals like Herman Melville and Mark Twain, eccentric and skeptical in matters of faith, explored the Holy Land in person and in print, even if only to put the culture of the American mission into sharper relief. Many Americans were repelled by what they encountered in the Middle East—or rather, what they perceived they encountered—from fetid smells to lurid manners to abject poverty and religious superstition. But they were at least becoming familiar with the region, and known to it. Even if their perceptions were skewed by cultural stereotypes, parochial exceptionalism, and ignorance, Americans increasingly felt as if they had some sort of a commitment to the Middle East.7
People like the Spaffords were not mere tourists, however. They were committed to a new evangelical interpretation of the Bible, one that took prophecy, and especially the Second Coming of Christ, literally. Within British and American Protestantism, these doctrines of premillennialism (that Jesus would return to earth before the millennium, and thus imminently) and dispensationalism (that history is divided into distinct eras, or dispensations, that would culminate in the return of Christ) led to the formation of Christian Zionism, or Restorationism (to restore the Jews to Israel). Like Jewish Zionists, premillennial dispensationalist Christians agitated for the return of the Jews to the lands of ancient Israel, where they could establish a new Jewish state. Unlike Jewish Zionists, however, Christian Zionists saw the return—or ingathering, as they called it—of the Jews not as an end in itself but a necessary step in fulfilling the prophecy of Christ’s return as told in the Book of Revelation. Jews had been persecuted ruthlessly for centuries yet survived against the odds, a leading Christian Zionist observed in 1901. Why else would God spare them if not to play a providential role in the fulfillment of prophecy? “This is the reason and the only reason for the marvelous preservation of the Jews. No other can be assigned.”8
Restorationism found especially strong support among Christian conservatives. Building on the ideas of the British evangelical John Nelson Darby, American evangelicals promoted Jewish immigration to the Middle East as an essential part of God’s plan and pushed the U.S. government to assist the return of the Jews, mostly from Russia and eastern Europe, to the Holy Land. As early as 1863, Secretary of State—and ardent Restorationist—William Seward instructed U.S. diplomats to extend protection not just to American Jews, but to all “Israelites” in the Middle East; diplomats in the following decades continued Seward’s policy. In 1878, the annual Niagara Bible Conference devoted itself to returning the Jews to Israel. In 1891, William Blackstone, a wealthy Chicago evangelical, petitioned the federal government to fund and assist the resettlement of as many as two million Russian Jews in Palestine. In addition to the usual grandees of Protestant fundamentalism, signatories to this “Blackstone Memorial” of March 5, 1891, included John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, the publisher Charles Scribner, and then-congressman William McKinley. Two years later, Arthur T. Pierson, a leading Protestant conservative, published a booklet, Israel, God’s Olive Tree, that gave Blackstone’s cause some theological substance. Cyrus I. Scofield, an evangelist and friend of Dwight Moody and Pierson, provided a theological structure for premillennial dispensationalism with his annotated Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909. On a higher plane, Christian Hebrew scholars in the nation’s best universities, such as William Rainey Harper, the founding president of the University of Chicago, inculcated a philo-Semitic, biblical, Old Testament worldview among their students.9
Overall, then, there was no single view of Jews but many competing perceptions that ranged from malicious to benign, and from indifferent to ambivalent to passionate. But of course American Jews themselves held strong views about their place in society and their people’s role in the world. And underpinning them was a belief both straightforward and complicated: equality. American Jews believed they merited, and could demand, the same protections as any other U.S. citizen, and this applied abroad no less than it did at home. To Jews, it seemed as straightforward a proposition as could be; to others, it was anything but. Yet it was on this point that American Jews advanced the cause of religious liberty and helped enshrine universal human rights at the heart of American foreign policy.
THE NEED TO defend religious liberty arose from the oppression of Jews in eastern Europe, particularly Romania and Russia, in the late nineteenth century. Officials in both countries targeted Jews as threats to the political and cultural fabric because, authorities in Bucharest and St. Petersburg charged, they refused to assimilate into society as a whole. Romania, independent only in 1878 and forced by the great powers to codify religious liberty in its founding charter, felt especially insecure and vulnerable. Aside from acts of violence, calculated or otherwise, Romanian and Russian Jews suffered from severe government restrictions on their political and economic activities. Many fled to the United States and provided Jewish leaders in America with firsthand accounts of persecution, even genocide, in Europe. Already in 1870, the U.S. government protested Russia’s maltreatment of its Jewish population. In 1881, when the pogroms against Jews began, the State Department urged Russia to allow Jews to emigrate to Palestine and pressed Turkey to let them do so. Neither the Russians nor the Turks would budge, however, and the United States continued to receive Jewish refugees from Romania and Russia. That the vast majority of all Romanian and Russian immigrants in the late nineteenth century were Jews—90 percent in Romania’s case—indicated the scale and depth of the problem.10
And American officials did see it as a problem, a Jewish problem, in two rather contradictory ways: for the Jews and of the Jews. The problem for the Jews was clearly one of religious freedom: nobody doubted that they were being brutally persecuted, and humiliated as a people, purely because of their faith. In August 1902, Secretary of State John Hay issued a stiff protest on these grounds to the Romanian government. He chastised Bucharest for tolerating, even encouraging, “wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples” and pointed out that “by the cumulative effect of successive restrictions, the Jews of Roumania have become reduced to a state of wretched misery.” Hay was also unstinting in his condemnation of Romania’s affront to universal human rights. “This Government can not be a tacit party to such an international wrong,” he told American diplomats throughout Europe, who then pleaded the case of Romanian Jews to foreign offices in London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Hay stressed that the U.S. government was issuing its protest “against the treatment to which the Jews of Roumania are subjected … in the name of humanity,” because the values and rights in question “are the principles of international law and eternal justice.”11
Hay similarly deplored Russia’s “needlessly repressive treatment” of the Jews and arranged for Jewish leaders Oscar Straus, Leo Levi, and Simon Wolf to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House to present a petition to the Russian government. Not coincidentally, this period saw a sharp shift in American Christians’ perceptions of the Russian Orthodox Church. Where once Orthodoxy had been hailed as a civilizing bulwark against Muslim hordes, it was now seen as a degenerate, despotic force allied with czarist tyranny. Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon missionaries began flocking to Russia, potentially the greatest of all mission fields, where they joined the Jews in persecution.12
Hay furthermore disputed Russian distinctions between classes of foreign citizens, which extended domestic anti-Semitic laws to foreign Jews and thus denied the customary protections to visiting Jews holding American citizenship. The U.S. government “can admit no such discrimination among its own citizens, and can never assent that a foreign State, of its own volition, can apply a religious test to debar any American citizen from the favor due to all.” The harassment of American Jews traveling in Russia became one of the main sources of tension between a United States that prioritized religious freedom and a Russia that feared Jews as subversive enemies of both the Russian state and the Christian faith. In April 1904, Congress adopted a joint resolution—passed unanimously in the House—calling on Russia to respect American passports regardless of the bearer’s religious faith; Hay duly passed on the news to the U.S. embassy in St. Petersburg. More remarkably, in his 1904 Annual Message to Congress President Roosevelt openly criticized Russia’s maltreatment of Jews, and especially American Jews wishing to travel to Russia, as “unjust and irritating.” This radically moralistic contravention of normal diplomatic protocol angered but did not surprise the Russians, or other Europeans. “If such words had been employed in a speech from the throne at Berlin or Vienna it would have resulted in the recall of the Russian Minister at those courts,” a U.S. diplomat told the New York Times. “As it is, nothing will now occur. The powers have come to regard the United States as entitled to exceptional toleration in matters of this kind.” In 1911, after a continually growing torrent of criticism and effective coordinated action by Jewish rights groups, Congress unilaterally abrogated an 1832 treaty with Russia on mutual freedom of travel and commerce. The American rebuke to Russia could not have been any clearer.13
Behind the high-minded appeals to universal human rights, however, lay colder calculations of political and national interest. By the turn of the century Jews had gained political influence and with it an audience in Washington. During the Russian pogroms of 1905, Hay’s successor as secretary of state, Elihu Root, cabled his ambassador in St. Petersburg with a request for information because of the pressure from “many influential Hebrews” for news from Russia. Not for the last time, American Jews mobilized to provide relief to their Russian coreligionists and to pressure their own government to act. Fed up with the usual silence from Washington and fearful that Congress might begin to restrict Jewish immigration, activists formed the American Jewish Committee in 1906 to channel the voices of over three million American Jews in one direction. This mattered to American politicians from both parties, but especially to the Republicans, who hoped to win the allegiance of a valuable voting bloc. Such an elemental fact of political life was certainly not lost on Roosevelt.14
More astonishingly, religious prejudice also lay at the root of Hay’s appeals to Russia to respect universal human rights. This was the problem of the Jews—to America. Hay was no anti-Semite, but many within the State Department were. And what concerned them was not necessarily the immorality of Romanian anti-Semitism, but the inconvenience. Thus in his instructions of August 1902, Hay lamented that whenever the Romanians persecuted their Jewish population, the Romanian Jews fled en masse to the United States. He reminded the Romanian government that “the social law holds good that the right of each is bounded by the right of the neighbor,” which made the United States an interested party to Romania’s domestic problems. Hay did not object to Jewish immigrants per se, but “when they come as outcasts, made doubly paupers by physical and moral oppression in their native land, and thrown upon the long-suffering generosity of a more favored community, their migration lacks the essential conditions which make alien immigration either acceptable or beneficial.” Romanian Jews, in other words, were feared as a potential strain on the American body politic. Other European nations refused to accept any Jewish immigrants, which funneled them all across the Atlantic. “America,” Hay noted, “was their only goal” because “the hospitable asylum offered by this country is almost the only refuge left to them.” In a bid to stem the tide of Jewish immigration, the State Department pleaded with the Romanian government to put an end to its cause. In essence, the U.S. government promoted religious liberty abroad partly in deference to religious prejudice at home.15
Still, for everyone involved, the end justified the means. American Jews were delighted with Hay—so delighted that the B’nai B’rith planned a monument in his honor in Washington—and his efforts to extend universal notions of religious liberty into the dark recesses of anti-Semitic European politics. “As the world champion of Justice,” a Jewish memorial to Hay declared upon his death in 1905, “he stood ready to inaugurate a new diplomacy—a diplomacy of humanity—which will forever mark an epoch in the affairs of nations.”16 The Republican Party was equally delighted with Hay for making a gesture to a constituency it was trying to win over. Others applauded Hay’s attempt to limit the immigration of a most destitute and desperate people. Yet none of this had done anything to alleviate the plight of Europe’s beleaguered Jews. Rarely had fulfilling America’s mission been so complicated. Little did American politicians and diplomats realize, but such collisions of domestic politics, religion, and human rights would set the standard from now on.