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Fifty years ago the historian Oscar Handlin published a seminal article in this journal entitled "American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth Century."1 The essay discussed the ways in which Americans perceived Jews during the nineteenth century. Handlin maintained that the prevailing temper of the era was overwhelmingly tolerant toward Jews and that America's image of them exhibited none of the demonic depictions that had pervaded European attitudes toward Jews since medieval times. Handlin reiterated his contentions in Commentary magazine and in his 1954 book, Adventure in Freedom.2 His thesis influenced historians of the American-Jewish experience and reinforced the conviction that the American diaspora was different from any other in Jewish history. Although subsequent studies of American antisemitism modified some of Handlin's conclusions, none of them disputed his claim concerning the absence of demonic imagery in pretwentieth-century America.3 Beginning in the 1970s, however, a number of scholars began to examine American antisemitism more carefully. They showed that despite the remarkable economic mobility and success of nineteenth-century Jewish Americans, the United States had not been as free from stereotyping and animosity toward Jews as Handlin had surmised. A closer look at the evidence also reveals that demonic representations of the Jew appeared frequently in American culture throughout the century.4
Demonization of Jews originated in medieval Christianity. This characterization accused the Jews of crucifying Jesus and associated them with Satan and the Antichrist, who is the Devil's agent for visiting evil and destruction on mankind. By the fourteenth century European Christians were charging Jews with ritually murdering children and using Christian blood in religious ceremonies, poisoning water and food, carrying and spreading loathsome diseases and the plague, engaging in sexual perversions, and conspiring to destroy Christendom.5
In the United States during the nineteenth century, depictions of Jews similar to these can be found in sermons, in religious and secular literature, in school texts, and in the press. Whether exposure to this imagery affected American Christian attitudes and behavior toward Jews is a moot question. No doubt some people were influenced by what they heard or read and became antagonistic toward Jews, but most others hearing and reading the same things did not. Determining the extent of acceptance of these images by Christians is...