Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology

7. The Rise of Sociology, Antisemitism, and the Jewish Question: The American Case

7 The Rise of Sociology, Antisemitism, and the Jewish Question The American Case RICHARD H. KING Where and to what degree antisemitism existed, flourished, and even diminished in the United States between the 1890s and the 1960s is an important issue, but it is not one I want to pursue here directly. Nor am I interested in whether antisemitism has been worse or less bad than in Europe. Rather I want to explore the way the “Jewish question” was posed in America in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, chiefly among sociologists, anthropologists, and even historians as they sought to analyze antisemitism and to conceptualize the position of Jews in the United States. This necessarily involves some discussion of the relationship between the study of the “Jewish question” and of the “race question,” specifically between antisemitism and so-called color-coded racism.1 I will conclude by identifying several different lines of inquiry about the position of Jews in the United States from the end of World War II to the end of the 1960s, the period in which the Jewish question was answered in the United States in a quite different way than it had been earlier in Europe. Disciplinary Inquiry and Antisemitism If one seeks to answer the question of when and where the Jewish question was explored systematically, the newly emerging discipline of sociology in the late nineteenth century is one place to look. Racial and ethnic tensions were at their peak in America between 1890 and World War I, the period in which sociology and anthropology emerged as academic disci- 184 King plines.2 The first sociology department in the United States was founded at the University of Kansas in 1890, while the departments at Chicago and Columbia were preeminent in the years leading up to World War I. (Émile Durkheim founded the first department of sociology in France in Bordeaux in 1896.) The American Journal of Sociology began publication in 1895, and the American Sociological Association was formed in 1905. It is surprisingly difficult to find any great empirical or theoretical concern with antisemitism in the work of sociological pioneers such as Lester Frank Ward and William Graham Sumner, who represented the liberal and conservative tendencies in the new discipline. Both thinkers were concerned with working out the proper relationship between state and civil society. Whereas Ward’s thought focused on an evolutionary ethic of cooperative action in the form of state regulation of the economy , Sumner famously contended that “stateways cannot change folkways ,” thus favoring social and economic self-regulation over the application of state power to regulate these spheres. His stateways/folkways dictum was also used to justify racial segregation in the South, but he also warned in Folkways (1907) that “modern scholars have made the mistake of attributing to race much which belongs to the ethos,” that is, national character.3 Ward himself contended that Negroes were different from whites, but he thought that with sufficient opportunities “they too would become civilized,” while Ward’s student, the feminist thinker Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “thought Jews and African Americans examples of arrested evolution.”4 But in neither case were such concerns central to Ward’s or Gilman’s thought. About the same time, Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), with its critique of the society and culture of the newly rich in America, could easily have picked out American Jews as symbols of the rampant materialism of the time, but, as we shall see, Veblen championed rather than condemned the influence of Jews in contemporary society. What linked all three of these leading sociologists was an evolutionary view of society and culture, thus giving testimony to the influence of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer , the two figures who seem to have most clearly shaped the discipline in America. Indeed the paucity of entries on antisemitism in Dorothy Ross’s The Origins of American Social Science (1991) is probably a good indication of the marginal nature of antisemitism or the Jewish question in general among American academic sociologists in these early years. The American Case 185 The relative absence of systematic studies or theoretical probes dealing with the Jewish question is not, however, a claim about the extent or depth of antisemitism in America. The ideology of Anglo-Saxonism reinforced nativist suspicion of immigrants particularly from southern and eastern Europe and included strong components of antisemitism.5...