Alabama's Jews and Nazism, 1933–38

The confluence of two events, the Scottsboro case in 1931 and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933, produced antisemitic reactions and fears as strong and vibrant as had existed under the Klan in the 1920s. For Alabama's Central European and Eastern European Jews, these two events clearly increased the awareness of their vulnerability to antisemitic violence. Where the former only raised the threat of violence against Jews, the latter vividly illustrated it. As antisemitism in the United States steadily increased during the 1930s, Leon Schwarz, the president of the Reform Sha'arai Shomayim congregation in Mobile, observed, "the Anti -Semitic situation, wherever it exists in America at this time, may be accounted for as the 'back-wash' from Germany and other unhappy countries in Europe." Indeed, the Nazi pogroms against the Jews in the 1930s, and later the exposed atrocities during the war, demonstrated the dire threat that Nazism posed to all Jews. As a result, Jews in Alabama worked together for the relief and rescue of persecuted German Jews, as did Jews throughout the United States. Yet these coordinated efforts on behalf of Jews in Germany helped to bridge the divide between Alabama's Eastern European and Central European Jews and brought together the disparate Jewish communities in the state.

Scottsboro

The arrest of nine African Americans, collectively known as the Scottsboro Boys, for the rape of two white women in March 1931, began a decades-long legal odyssey that linked Jews, Communists, and African Americans together to challenge Alabama's white-dominated judicial system. For white Alabamians, it confirmed the perception of northern Jews as agitators and radicals due to the participation of defense lawyer Samuel Leibowitz and Joseph Brodsky, the lead counsel for the Communist-sponsored International Labor Defense (ILD). As journalist Joseph Lelyveld observed, "White Alabama didn't see a Democrat and a Communist. It didn't see two lawyers. It saw two New York Jews." This perception promulgated harsh antisemitic rhetoric throughout the state. For example, an editorial in the Andalusia Star questioned Leibowitz's patriotism and asked, "we would like to know what a man with Samuel's last name would be expected to know about American ideals and traditions — we feel sure that he knows a lot about 'the bolshevism of Moscow.'" Prosecutors at the Haywood Patterson trial, one of the nine defendants, also used this perception to great effect when Wade Wright, the Morgan County solicitor, urged the jury to "show them that Alabama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York." The jury quickly found Haywood Patterson guilty of rape and sentenced him to death, despite the lack of credibility of the defendants' "victims." As Oscar Adams, the editor of the African American Birmingham Reporter, wryly observed, "it seems it would take a whole heap of 'Jew Money' to overbid this sacred personal thing of violation ... to buy 'Alabama Justice.'"

Wright's inflammatory speech had no effect on the jury — indeed, the verdict was a forgone conclusion — but it certainly had an impact on how white Alabamians perceived Jews. Many people in Decatur, the site of Patterson's trial, and those in the surrounding Morgan County, voiced their preference for Judge Lynch to "settle this damn Scottsboro case once and for all." The targets of these threats included Leibowitz and the ILD lawyers, whom whites regarded as trying to obstruct justice and, more ominously, to overturn the racial status quo. As one Decatur citizen warned, "if them lawyers, especially that Jew lawyer, Leibowitz, comes here, it will be a one way trip." Numerous others expressed contempt for "those damn Jew Bastards who are defending the 'Niggers,'" and suggested that Decatur "ought to [lynch] the Jews to teach them a lesson." Robert Burns Eleazer, who attended the Patterson trial for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, noted that "even though Southern Jews had 'more freedom and suffer less prejudice than in the north' ... the shylock image was never far beneath the surface. The chant of 'Jew money' at Decatur had 'damaged the standing of southern Jews' even more than the fulminations of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920's." Charles Feidelson, the Jewish editorial writer for the Birmingham Age-Herald, also noted that those in Decatur "took for granted that a Jew was a Communist or at least in secret sympathy with the reds." Because of this, Feidelson said, "Jews in Alabama leaned over backwards to show they were not sympathetic with the ILD."

Alabama's Jews did not support the Scottsboro Boys' defense or demand changes to the state's inherently discriminatory and racist judicial system, but the antisemitism Scottsboro sparked understandably alarmed Alabama's Jews and made them more self-conscious of their Jewishness, as Feidelson testified. Although this antisemitic vitriol targeted "outsiders" and radicals — northern Jews — many critics often failed to distinguish between northern and southern Jews in editorials, speeches, or private conversations, much to the consternation of Jews throughout the state. Despite such antisemitism emanating publicly from the press and politicians, and even more intense rhetoric being uttered privately, Scottsboro did not unleash a wave of antisemitic violence or increase antisemitic discrimination in the state to any perceptible degree. Of course, the same could not be said about the persecution of African Americans.

Although the Klan's power had waned by the time of the Scottsboro trials, the memory of Klan violence had not. In his study of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, Glenn Feldman notes that "at the end of the 1920s, Alabama had only about 5,500 Klan members left. Though the numbers of active, dues -paying, uniform-wearing Klansmen probably fell during the 1930s, Alabama kept a climate favorable to Ku Kluxism. Ku Kluxism and a basic propensity for vigilantism were part of Alabama's social fabric." Such a propensity for vigilante violence showed itself clearly with the desire by white citizens in Decatur and Morgan County to have the Scottsboro Boys and their lawyers lynched. Although such vigilante violence never came to fruition in and around Decatur at the time, it clearly manifested itself elsewhere in the state.

In June 1933, with Alabama still inflamed by the ongoing Scottsboro trials, the arrest of three African American men for the murder of a white woman in Tuscaloosa led to tragedy. ILD lawyers attempted to intervene in the case, but Judge Henry B. Foster barred them from court and they had to sneak out of town "in disguise, under the reluctant protection of the national guard" after rumors that Communist Jews had taken a hand in the case. The three African American defendants had no such protection...