Irish I know for sure from family lore (and not joking). My mom’s side of my family is all Irish. The oldtimers told me they personally saw signs reading “Help wanted. No Irish need apply.”
"“White only” signs goes without saying.
I don’t know about “no Jews.”
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I think RickJay was asking specifically about the “No [insert ethnic group] or Dogs” signs. I’ve heard about them, but have never seen one that had the “or Dogs” part that wasn’t intended to be a joke.[sup]1[/sup]
1 - Humor not included.
About signs. I’m 58 years old. When I was under ten there was a sign at a public beach at Lake Delevan Wis. that said NO JEWS ALLOWED. A friend of mine who is ten years older than me told me the small town he lived as a kid had a banner across the state highway that said NO NIGGERS AFTER DARK. This was in central Illinois.
The same thing is frequently claimed about Sunnyside Beach in Toronto; there used to be “NO JEWS” signs displayed, even up into the 1950s. And not a single photo of such a sign exists. How would they have enforced such a law, anyhow? Pecker checks? Nazi-style facial proportion measurements?
Thanks elmwood. That was precisely the point I was making earlier when I posted the same Jensen cite you did. The “Irish as victim” lens is only so useful, the reality, as always so much more complex.
Some of the old land deeds I’ve researched (late 19th-early 20th century) have restrictions in the sales conditions. One condition was that the purchaser could not subsequently sell the land to people of “African or Asian” ancestry. This is one reason why we in the govt. do NOT enforce deed restrictions but leave the matter to civil courts.
It’s strange, but left-leaning secularists and even guys like Sacha Baron-Cohen usually think the place to look for anti-semitism is in the American South.
In reality, Southern fundamentalist Protestants are rarely rabid anti-semites. Indeed, if a “fundie” loathes any group to an irrational degree, it’s Catholics!
The Confederacy had a Jewish Secretary of State a century before the USA did. That’s NOT an aberration.
But was he serious about him actually having horns or did he say it as a joke or insult? I think in most of the modern instances, such remarks were meant to be either jocular or hurtful and did not mean the speaker really believed Jews had horns.
Were “horns” perhaps an analogy to prominent temples in the cranium - a way to address the much-feared Jewish intelligence that bigots were loathe to acknowledge?
Mormons and Amish aren’t particularly well known in France. I’m not surprised at all that this girl confused them (both being some sort of weird American sect). I’m sure most French people have never even heard of the Amish, in fact.
As for the horns, I’m not convinced it’s antisemitic. If you have been told by your parents that Jews have horns, your peers have been told the same, and you’re not particularly well educated, why would you not believe it even into adult age, in time to teach it to your own children?
I had read (on this board) of the horns thing, which made me think that I finally understood why Moses had horns in this famous sculpture (I had wondered since I had seen a picture of it as a kid) : “Ah! People used to believe that Jews had horns!”. So, thanks for the more accurate explanation about the mistranslation.
There are large parts of the USA without jewish communities. If you grow up with people, you get to know them-bt in the Far West and Deep South, there are towns without jewish people.
The late kid’s show host (Soupy Sales) related how his was the only jewish family in his town, when he was growing up.
This may be a memory of the (very real) exclusion of Jews from Toronto’s sporting clubs. Not being a member of a club, Jews could not participate in many of the beachside activities like swimming and boating, which required club membership.
My grandfather was a reasonably well-known amateur swimmer in the 1920s - 1930s. He had lots of trouble competing, because all of swim races required one to be a member of an athletic club, and none of the clubs allowed Jews to join. Those admitting members had no trouble identifying who was Jewish.
This was guarden-variety anti-semitism, and fueled in part by the notion that Jews were not an “athletic race” and so had no need of club membership.
He decided that this iniquity should not stand, and decided to do something about it. He was a distance swimmer, and one of the set races was around Toronto Islands. He waited until all of the (club members) had set off, then he jumped in himself some time after the others - and nonetheless won. The headlines in the paper the next day were “JEWBOY WINS RACE” - my mom still has this clipping in her attic.
Are real estate ads like this, once the norm in the Buffalo area, anti-Semitic?
I’ve heard it claimed that such ads were racist “code”, in a way. The overwhelming majority of whites in Buffalo are Catholic, who would know where the apartments or houses are located, while blacks who generally aren’t Catholic would have no clue.
Also, as an urban planner, I come across a LOT of zoning codes that allow “churches”, but make no mention of synagogues, mosques, gurdwaras, and the like. They’re almost never interpreted to be exclusionary towards non-Christian organizations. It’s just old-fashioned language use, like using “he” for all genders, and a relic of less diverse times.
