ABSTRACT
The racial character of Jewishness in the New World ebbed and flowed over time. Everybody can distinguish the Jewish features in the most ancient carvings and representations, for they are the same as those seen at this day. Popular accounts of the racial Otherness of Jews, that is, at once framed, and were framed by, a scientific discourse of race on the one hand, and a set of social practices (including hiring and admissions patterns, and the barring of Jews from certain Saratoga resorts) on the other. It also attests to the similarity between the Jewish odyssey from white to Hebrew and, say, the Irish odyssey from white to Celt. Even if blame lies at the doorstep of Christians, however, the Jewish “revenge” Lowell envisions taps the popular currents of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism. Nativist discussion of immigration restriction in the 1890s and the eugenics movement of the earlier twentieth century, of course, states Jewish difference most boldly.
