The Jewish problem in the United States is essentially a city problem. It is characteristic of the Jew to gather in numbers, not where land is open nor where raw materials are found, but where the greatest number of people abide. This is a noteworthy fact when considered alongside the Jews’ claim that the Gentiles have ostracized them; the Jews congregate in their greatest numbers in those places and among those people where they complain they are least wanted. The explanation most frequently given is this; the genius of the Jew is to live off people; not off land, nor off the production of commodities from raw material, but off people. Let other people till the soil; the Jew, if he can, will live off the tiller. Let other people toil at trades and manufacture; the Jew will exploit the fruits of their work. That is his peculiar genius. If this genius be described as parasitic, the term would seem to be justified by a certain fitness.
In no other city of the United States can the Jewish Problem be studied with greater profit than in the city of New York. There are more Jews in New York than in all Palestine. The communal register of the Jewish Kehillah (or Kahal) of New York sets the population at about 1,527,778. “The next largest Jewish community in the world, that of the city of Warsaw, is estimated to have been between 300,000 and 330,000 Jews, about one-fifth as many as we estimate for New York.” (Communal Register, 1917-1918.) “If we accept the estimate of the number of Jews in the world as about 14,000,000, one Jew out of every ten resides in New York.”
As a population, the Jews exert more power in New York than they have ever exerted during the Christian Era in any place, with the exception of the present Russia. The Jewish Revolution in Russia was manned from New York. The present government of Russia was transported almost as a unit from the lower East Side of New York. The New York Ghetto has long since overflowed the lower East Side. Brownsville, Brooklyn, is a Jewish town, with its own language, theaters and press. The upper East Side of New York is practically in large sections a Jewish Ghetto. The prosperous West Side and the middle class section of the city north of Central Park are practically Jewish.
With the exception of one great department store and a few lesser ones, all the large department stores in New York are Jewish. Men and women’s ready-to-wear apparel, laundries, furriers, the general run of shopkeeping is practically monopolized by Jews. The legal profession is predominantly Jewish. It is estimated that of the 27,000 news stands that control the distribution of New York’s reading matter, 25,000 are in the hands of Jews. There are 360 synagogues on the East Side of New York alone.
The New York Kehillah is a very powerful organization, whose membership strength is not accurately known. It may be described as the Jewish government of that city. It was organized in 1908 as the result of a statement by General Bingham, then police commissioner of New York, that the Jewish population, which then amounted to 600,000, contributed 50 per cent of the criminals of the city. The Kehillah is the bar before which the authorities must answer for statements or acts touching the Jewish community. Its power is very great and its methods far reaching.
Politically, while the rest of the country is entertained with the fiction that Tammany Hall rules the politics of New York, the fact is rarely published that the Jews rule Tammany.
But it is not the possession of power that constitutes an indictment of any people, it is their use or misuse of it. And if the fact of power is established, no misuse of it being found, the fact has a commendatory side. If the Jews who flock to New York become American, and if they do not work ceaselessly to twist Americanism into something else; if they strengthen the principles and traditions of America, and do not cease to vitiate the one and abolish the other, the judgement upon them must be one of friendship.
However, to establish the fact of Jewish power, one need not remain in the ghetto, nor in the mercantile districts. There are higher fields awaiting survey.
In Wall Street, the Jewish element is both numerous and powerful, as might be expected of a race which from early days has played an important part in the financial operations of the world.
