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Still, black leaders reluctantly concede that anti-Semitism does exist in the Negro community. More than that, historians and sociologists have ample evidence that it has existed — sometimes on the surface, more often beneath it —since Jews and Negroes first came in contact with each other in the cities of the North. This confrontation took place shortly after World War I, when South ern Negroes began to move out of the plantation fields and into urban life.
More often than not, they settled in pre dominantly Jewish areas — partly be cause ghetto rents were cheap, partly because Jews were much less resistant to racial infiltration than other ethnic immigrant groups. In Chicago, for ex ample, Negroes have all but taken over neighborhoods that were formerly Jewish — but have yet to make a dent in predominantly Czech, Polish and Ukranian communities.
Many of these Southern blacks had a fundamentalist Christian background.
As songs like Go Down, Moses suggest, the Negro tended to identify with Judaism's struggle for freedom as portrayed in the Old Testament. Yet, like many conservative white Protestants, he was taught to scorn Jews as a people cursed by deicide. "All of us black people who lived in the neighborhood hated Jews," recalled the late Novelist Rich ard Wright, writing of his Southern boy hood in Black Boy, "not because they exploited us, but because we had been taught at home and in Sunday school that Jews were 'Christ killers.' We black children — seven, eight and nine years of age — used to run to the Jew's store and shout: 'Jew, Jew, Jew, what do you chew?' " This heritage of religion-bred hatred was augmented by economic resentment.
The Jews not only lived in the ghetto, but were its landlords and shopkeepers; whatever their background, landlords and shopkeepers will often be guilty of rent gouging, overpricing and selling shoddy merchandise. In his now-classic study of Chicago's Negro ghetto, Black Metropolis, Sociologist St. Clair Drake points out that as early as 1938 the area was seething with anti-Semitic resentment of Jewish merchants, who then owned three-fourths of the neighbor hood stores. "As the most highly vis ible and most immediately available white persons in the community," he wrote, "Jewish merchants tend to become the symbol of the Negroes' verbal attack on all white businessmen."
So strongly is the Jew identified with the merchant image that Negroes frequently use anti-Semitic epithets in referring to ghetto businessmen who are unmistakably not Jewish. A Negro will frequently refer to his "Jew landlord" even though the man's name may be O'Reilly, Karwolski or Santangelo. In black areas of Detroit, white storekeepers are often called "Goldberg," even though many shops are owned by Iraqis and Syrians. And a Cadillac, even if it is owned by a wealthy Negro, is still known as a "Jew canoe."