When Congress Debated Whether “Jew” Meant Faith or Race

Senator Lodge: Excuse me for interrupting you. I merely wanted to find out what your position is.

Mr. Wolf: The position we have broadly taken is that in the classification of immigrants the word “Jew” is entirely uncalled for: that those persons come from the respective countries of their birth and arrive here as other immigrants, and therefore ought not to be classified as Jews, unless you classify every immigrant by faith—a Russian of Jewish faith, a Russian of Greek faith, and so on and so forth.

If you make no discrimination, we have no objection at all, but if you are going to discriminate and mark the Jew distinctively, we do object.

The Chairman: Do you make any distinction between the terms “Jew” and “Hebrew”? The word “Hebrew” is the one used by the Department and by the Government generally in its classifications.”

Mr. Wolf: I am not prepared to answer that question intelligently as I am not a scholar to the extent of defining those words.

The Chairman: I was merely asking because of the fact that the Government invariably uses the word “Hebrew.”

Mr. Wolf: I know.

Senator Lodge: Not in any religious sense, but in a racial sense.

Mr. Wolf: Personally, I have always used the word “Jew,” and I have never shirked responsibility thereof, nor do I regard it, as it seems to have been taken by some, as a term of reproach, and who used the word “Hebrew” simply to soften the aspersion. I have never considered it in that way, and I do not think the best of our people do.

The Chairman: With you the words would be synonymous?

Mr. Wolf: Yes.

Representative Bennet: The words “Hebrew” and “Jew” describe the same people.

Mr. Wolf: Oh, yes.

Representative Bennet: The only difference being that they would apply at different times in the history of the same people. Is that not correct?

Mr. Wolf: Yes, sir; that is correct.

Mr. Wheeler: “Hebrew” is equally objectionable from your standpoint, in regard to the matter in question here?

Mr. Wolf: Equally so. These people simply come as citizens of the respective countries in which they were born and from which they have emigrated, and we here in this country claim that we are citizens of our common country and that what our faith is concerns no one but ourselves.
    Here is a pamphlet from the Jewish Historical Society, taken from the book I published—The American Jew as Soldier, Patriot, and Citizen—which gives a resume of what citizens of the Jewish faith in the United States have accomplished since the days of the Revolution up to the present. We were not enlisted as Jews, but as citizens.

Senator Lodge: Are there not a great many Jews who are not of the Jewish faith or the Israelitish religion? I have been told there are many Jews in this country at the present moment who are not of the Jewish faith.

Mr. Wolf: A man is either a Jew in faith or he is not. He may be of the orthodox or the ultraorthodox or the reform. There are agnostics among the Jews, of course, as there are in the Christian churches.

Senator Lodge: Certainly. But I was told by one of the police commissioners in New York some years ago that there are a considerable number of Jew, people who were classified as such on entering as immigrants, who are not adherents of the ancestral faith?

Mr. Wolf: Very likely. I have no doubt there are 500,000 Jews in the city of New York who, if you asked them whether I was a Jew, would say, “no,” because I do not cling to the old traditions and liturgy to which they religiously and faithfully adhere.

Senator Lodge: But those people—certainly some, I do not know how many, who are Jews, but who for one reason or another have abandoned their faith, as people in all religions frequently do—would be classified as Jews.

Mr. Wolf: Classified by whom?

Senator Lodge: In the returns of the immigration officers.

Mr. Wolf. That may be—

Senator Lodge: I have never supposed for one moment—and I do not now suppose–that the Jews who are put down in the immigration returns as such are classified according to religion.
Mr. Wolf. You classify them under the supposition, as I understand—

Senator Lodge: On that supposition that it is race.