The Jewish Comparison in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Citizenship

• In Event: Jewish Citizenship and the State in the Modern Era

Abstract

In 1909, four men appeared before a federal judge in Massachusetts. Described in court filings as “Armenians by race,” the men had arrived in the United States from the Ottoman Empire and wished to become naturalized citizens. But the Federal Naturalization Service had denied their petitions on the grounds that they were not “free white persons.” Each of the men appealed, and as the judge attempted to determine whether they were “white” for the purposes of American citizenship, he began to think about Jews.

As it turned out, the judge’s recourse to Jews—or “Hebrews,” in his elocution—set in motion an early twentieth-century legal trend of Jewish comparisons. Jurists who tried to figure out how to apply a new set of naturalization policies to a large and diverse population of immigrants often lacked clear direction. In the absence, they constructed comparisons among categories of people. The comparisons functioned, first, to reify human categories, making them real through their application. Armenians were compared to “Hebrews,” suggesting that each group was a knowable entity, distinct yet comparable. Second, the comparisons produced actual relationships. Even when Jews were not the direct subject of a citizenship determination, their invocation in the legal reasoning of a ruling linked them to other scrutinized subjects of American citizenship law. Finally, the comparisons shaped precedent that, in the future, would be available to apply to other groups.

When judges and lawyers invoked “Hebrews” as an object of comparison, they scripted Jews into the racialized calculus of American national citizenship. Despite historians’ neglect of the Jewish dimensions of these cases, Jewish onlookers at the time knew to keep a close eye on them. They responded anxiously and sometimes quite vocally to the comparisons because they had direct experience with how racial scripts operated. A Jewish comparison might move in the direction of a non-Jewish petitioner, used by a judge to think through the particulars of that case. But the comparison could also ricochet back toward Jews and their legal belonging in the United States.

Author

• Lila Berman, New York University