Anti-Jewish feeling in nineteenth-century America was status competition, not ideology

Evidence

To illustrate these suggestions I drew on my latest research, which the American Jewish Committee was sponsoring, on relative rates of social mobility (and accompanying status rivalries) experienced by Jews, Germans, Irish Catholics, and Norwegians in various parts of the country. I was able to show—at least to my own satisfaction—that organized nativism was not a problem for Jews in the nineteenth century, but social discrimination was. It arose inescapably from competition for social status and material advancement, which touched the daily life of Jews more intimately than all the ancient memories of Christian persecution or the nightmares of Jewish world dominion. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 2019

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s research question about whether professed ideology or material rivalry drives measured bias — echoes and complicates the Jew-as-scapegoat framing in The Frankfurt School history. — connects to: Anti-immigrant hostility in the 1880s targeted culture, not subversiveness or unassimilability — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 391; Status competition, not ancient ideology, drove daily anti-Jewish discrimination — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 2019
• SEED: A possible angle: the nineteenth-century antisemitism that was NOT ideological invites comparison with when and why anti-Jewish feeling later did become absorbed into a race-thinking ideology.