The Long And Violent History Of Anti-Semitic ‘Disloyalty’ Charges

[Guno צְבִי]

1807, Napoleon Bonaparte summoned French Jewish leaders for a conversation about loyalty.

French Jews had gained the status of full citizens 16 years earlier. Napoleon wanted to understand how, as newly empowered civilians, they saw the world. So he asked them if they truly considered France their country, and Frenchmen their countrymen.

In 1894, French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason. Two years later, incontrovertible new evidence made his innocence obvious. Even then, the French press, led by the anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole, accused Dreyfus of being part of an “international Jewish conspiracy” and disloyal to France. He was retried — and convicted again.

In September 1941, Charles Lindbergh spoke about Jewish Americans’ perceived “agitation for war.” “Their greatest danger to their country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” he said. “Their country” — not the same as ours.

In 2017, former State Department official Dennis Ross wrote in The New York Times about a colleague who asked about a peer for whom Ross was a reference. The official asked if that peer was loyal to America, then, after Ross said yes, whether he would put America’s interests before those of Israel. Ross asked why his interlocutor would ask that question. “Because he is Jewish,” he said.

And on Tuesday, President Trump made a statement that set the country aflame: “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat — I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” The following day, he clarified what exactly he meant: “If you vote for a Democrat, you’re being disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel.”

“The notion of dual loyalty is a linchpin of the anti-Semitic stereotype,” said Deborah Lipstadt, author of “Antisemitism: Here and Now” (2019). “Whether you use the world ‘cosmopolitan,’ whether you use the words ‘dual loyalty,’ that’s the charge: that Jews are loyal to one another, and they’re not loyal to the country in which they live.”

https://forward.com/culture/430010/t...semitic-trope/

[Guno צְבִי]

Jacobson said he still thinks the American Jewish community is “not only the most comfortable and secure Jewish community in the world today, but I would argue in the 2,000-year history of the diaspora.” But, he said, “In a time when white supremacy is raging, those ideas” — allegations of dual loyalty, no matter their source — “have to be taken a lot more seriously.”

[Mason Melchizedek]

Jacobson said he still thinks the American Jewish community is “not only the most comfortable and secure Jewish community in the world today, but I would argue in the 2,000-year history of the diaspora.” But, he said, “In a time when white supremacy is raging, those ideas” — allegations of dual loyalty, no matter their source — “have to be taken a lot more seriously.”

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