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1 Ala­ bama’s Jews and Nazism, 1933–38 The confluence of two events, the Scottsboro case in 1931 and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933, produced antisemitic reactions and fears as strong and vibrant as had existed under the Klan in the 1920s. For Ala­ bama’s Central European and East­ ern European Jews, these two events clearly increased the awareness of their vulnerability to antisemitic violence. Where the former only raised the threat of violence against Jews, the latter vividly illustrated it. As antisemitism in the United States steadily increased during the 1930s, Leon Schwarz, the president of the Reform Sha’arai Shomayim congregation in Mobile, observed, “the Anti-­Semitic situation, wherever it exists in America at this time, may be accounted for as the ‘back-­ wash’ from Germany and other unhappy countries in Europe.”1 Indeed, the Nazi pogroms against the Jews in the 1930s, and later the exposed atrocities during the war, demonstrated the dire threat that Nazism posed to all Jews. As a result, Jews in Ala­bama worked together for the relief and rescue of persecuted German Jews, as did Jews through­ out the United States. Yet these coordinated efforts on behalf of Jews in Germany helped to bridge the divide between Ala­ bama’s East­ ern European and Central European Jews and brought together the disparate Jewish communities in the state. Scottsboro The arrest of nine Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ cans, collectively known as the Scottsboro Boys, for the rape of two white women in March 1931, began a decades-­ long legal odyssey that linked Jews, Communists, and Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ cans together to challenge Ala­ bama’s white-­ dominated judicial system. For white Alabamians, it confirmed the perception of north­ ern Jews as agitators and radicals due to the participation of defense lawyer Samuel Leibowitz and Joseph Brodsky, the lead counsel for the Communist-­sponsored International Labor Defense (ILD). As journalist Joseph Lelyveld observed, “White Ala­ bama didn’t see a Democrat and a Communist. It didn’t see two lawyers. It 20 / Chapter 1 saw two New York Jews.”2 This perception promulgated harsh antisemitic rhetoric through­ out the state. For example, an editorial in the Andalusia Star questioned Leibowitz’s patriotism and asked, “we would like to know what a man with Samuel’s last name would be expected to know about Ameri­ can ideals and traditions—we feel sure that he knows a lot about ‘the bol­ shevism of Moscow.’”3 Prosecutors at the Haywood Patterson trial, one of the nine defendants, also used this perception to great effect when Wade Wright, the Morgan County solicitor, urged the jury to “show them that Ala­ bama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York.”4 The jury quickly found Haywood Patterson guilty of rape and sentenced him to death, despite the lack of credibility of the defendants’ “victims.”5 As Oscar Adams, the editor of the Af­ ri­ can Ameri­ can Birmingham Reporter, wryly observed , “it seems it would take a whole heap of ‘Jew Money’ to overbid this sacred personal thing of violation . . . to buy ‘Ala­ bama Justice.’”6 Wright’s inflammatory speech had no effect on the jury—indeed, the verdict was a forgone conclusion—but it certainly had an impact on how white Alabamians perceived Jews. Many people in Decatur, the site of Patterson ’s trial, and those in the surrounding Morgan County, voiced their preference for Judge Lynch to “settle this damn Scottsboro case once and for all.” The targets of these threats included Leibowitz and the ILD lawyers, whom whites regarded as trying to obstruct justice and, more ominously, to overturn the racial status quo. As one Decatur citizen warned, “if them lawyers, especially that Jew lawyer, Leibowitz, comes here, it will be a one way trip.”7 Numerous others expressed contempt for “those damn Jew Bastards who are defending the ‘Niggers,’” and suggested that Decatur “ought to [lynch] the Jews to teach them a lesson.”8 Robert Burns Eleazer, who attended the Patterson trial for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, noted that “even though South­ ern Jews had ‘more free­ dom and suffer less prejudice than in the north’ . . . the shylock image was never far beneath the surface. The chant of ‘Jew money’ at Decatur had ‘damaged the standing of south­ ern Jews’ even more than the fulminations of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920’s.” Charles Feidelson, the Jewish editorial writer for...

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