[In the following review of Christians Only, Mencken considers anti-Semitism and ethnic prejudice in 1930s America.]

What part [coauthor George] Britt had in the confection of this book [Christians Only] I can't make out. He appears on the title page as the collaborator of the Hon. Mr. Broun, but throughout the text the latter speaks in the first person, and much of the matter presented is derived from his personal experiences. Can it be that, in his old age, Broun is turning illiterate, and so, like Henry Ford, needs a ghost-writer? If so, the phenomenon ought to get some public notice. But whatever the fact, the book itself is a very interesting work, and presents a mass of material that is not otherwise accessible. Broun shows that even in New York, with its immense Jewish population, the old prejudice against Jews is still more or less alive, and that sometimes it takes very humiliating and damaging forms. It is measurably harder for a Jew to get a job than it is for a Christian, and harder to get an education. He is constantly challenged on the ground of his faith and race, even when he has renounced the one and well nigh forgotten the other. No trade or profession, not even that of an Episcopalian clergyman, bars him completely, but in almost every one, including such apparent Jewish specialties as medicine and dealing in stocks, he faces what amounts to a quota. Most New Yorkers, I take it, commonly think of Columbia University as predominantly Jewish; indeed, there is a familiar joke to the effect that all of its professors have to know Yiddish. But even at Columbia an effort is made to keep down the ratio of Jewish students, and the means by which that end is effected are sometimes unfair, disingenuous and insulting.

Mr. Broun has gone to great pains in assembling his facts, and they make a very impressive record. Despite his recent venture into politics, he is a man naturally tolerant, just and decent, and so they annoy him excessively. But it seems to me that he comes to little when he attempts to account for them. All he has to suggest is that Christians dislike Jews for three principal reasons: (a) because the Christian mythology, as it is commonly taught in Sunday-schools, makes the Jews its inevitable villains, (b) because Christians are subtly irritated by the “rigors and complications” of the orthodox Jewish ritual, and (c) because the Jews, being the most numerous race now in process of assimilation in America, get the brunt of the ancient and apparently ineradicable American hostility to foreigners. There is something in each of these elements, but, to my way of thinking, they are not sufficient to account for the whole picture. There are probably other elements of equal importance, and one of them may be defined roughly as the tendency of Jews to remember that they are Jews at moments when the fact is really irrelevant. In other words, the sense of their separateness is kept alive, not only by Christian prejudice and suspicion, but also by their own excessive self-consciousness. They tend to stick together a shade too closely for it to be reassuring to the more skittish varieties of Goyim, especially on occasions when that sticking together is without logical motive or purpose.

This, of course, does not account for the fundamental prejudice that they encounter: it merely accounts for the recurring exacerbations of it. That fundamental prejudice, it seems to me, is so natural that it scarcely needs any accounting for at all. It is, indeed, one of the primary facts of human nature, like the sex urge or fear of the dark. Its effects, only too often, are highly discreditable to the race, but its origins are deep in normalcy. All groups of people, whether they stand on high planes or on low, have an incurable aversion to all other groups. It may be diminished by familiarity or concealed by policy, but it is never eliminated altogether. No man, however diligently he tries to rationalize his ideas and his conduct, is ever quite as comfortable in the presence of strangers as he is in the society of his own kind. Too many minute differences play upon him; he can never rid himself altogether of the unpleasant feeling that he is somehow exposed and insecure. I believe that this feeling, disregarding all logical reasons, is enough to explain the primary hostility to Jews in Christendom. They retain their differentiation better than any other intruding white race, and are thus chronic strangers. What is too often forgotten is that the thing cuts both ways—that Jews are frequently just as uneasy in the presence of Christians as Christians are in the presence of Jews. The same sense of strangeness is felt on both sides, and with it goes the same subtle and often unconscious hostility.

In the United States, where the Jews, on the whole, are safer than anywhere else, and hence under extraordinary pressure to surmount and outgrow this feeling, it nevertheless survives. Only too often, indeed, it is encouraged by their very security, for that security inspires the more truculent and foolish among them to seize upon every fancied slight, and to convert it into a deliberate insult. In nearly every considerable town in the country there are professional Jews who specialize in this imprudent business, and nearly every city editor of an American newspaper knows what nuisances they can be. They come in flanked by rabbis and advertisers, and make extravagant and inconvenient demands, thus leaving behind them an active anti-Semitism where there was none before. In some places they go to the length of exacting that the word Jew be abandoned in news writing and Hebrew substituted for it, apparently on the theory that the latter, in some mysterious way, is more elegant than the former. The Irish Catholics, led by ecclesiastics of the steam shovel variety, sometimes give the same sort of show, but on the whole the Jews are at it more often.

Some time ago, in a somewhat amusing manner, I myself became the target of this bellicose touchiness about Israel's honor. In the course of a discussion of religion I attempted an estimate of the Jewish contribution to Christianity, and after paying a tribute to the noble and unparalleled achievement of the Jews as poets adverted casually to the fact that, like any other great people, they have their compensatory lacks and defects. The passage was mild in tone and filled only a few lines, but at once certain professional Jews on the East Side began whooping about it in the Yiddish papers, and presently I was being denounced uproariously as a Judenhetzer. The transparent absurdity of the charge did not stay these heroes: the chance to butcher a Goy was more than they could resist. In consequence the passage was widely reprinted, always without its context—Mr. Broun so reprints it, in fact, in his book—and I daresay it gave a great deal of comfort, first and last, to actual anti-Semites. The net result of the whole preposterous episode was that an imaginary slander became a real one, and multitudes of people gathered the notion that the Jews had been up to something discreditable, and were being belabored for it.

Such shindigs give pain to decent Jews and do them damage, but I am not sure that anything can be done about it. Among professionals of the kind I have just mentioned there is a palpable dislike of all the doctrines and ways of thought that go under the name of Americanism, and they commonly show it, as everyone knows, by adhering to various kinds of political radicalism. I can sympathize with such dislikes, for I share this one, though it does not inspire me to radicalism. They are probably almost instinctive: one may keep them within bounds by the exercise of reason, but it is quite impossible to get rid of them altogether. Personally, I hate to have to think of any man as of a definite race, creed or color; so few men are really worth knowing that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is. But I confess frankly that when a given man begins to speak English to me with a strange accent, or to demand holidays on days when I work, or to refuse to eat such food as I eat—I confess that such acts make me feel vaguely uneasy in his presence. This natural and inescapable uneasiness is probably sufficient to account for most of the prejudice which Mr. Broun denounces. It may lie beneath layers of special ignorance and acquired malignancy, but there it is all the time. The only way to get rid of it is to remove the differences that engender it. That is being done in the case of the Jews in the United States, but the process will not be finished, I hope, for a long while.

With certain other peoples, indeed, it can never be finished. I point, for example, to the American Negroes. Their leaders struggle bravely to get them their common rights, and with no little success. Even in such savage States as Mississippi a colored man is now measurably safer among the Baptist crackers than he used to be. In the North he begins to win his way toward social as well as legal equality, especially if he happens to be superior as an individual. Perhaps in the long run intelligent and educated Negroes will be as well off in all the more civilized parts of the country as they are now, say, in Cuba or France. But I think they will be sadly misled if they look for a complete disappearance of their present disabilities. No matter how far they move from slavery, their skins will still proclaim them to be different, and that difference will be sufficient to make all whites, high or low, a shade uncomfortable in their presence. They will find certain white doors closed to them to the end of time, just as certain black doors will be closed to whites.

Some of the shrewder among the younger Negroes have taken in this fact, and proceeded to make the best of it. They argue that the intelligent thing for Negroes to do is not to try to edge nearer and nearer to the whites, but to admit and glory in their Negroism. This seems to me to be a sound position. It will probably bring them far nearer to equal rights and dignities, in the long run, than the effort of other leaders to obtain for them the complete equality that they can never really get. Beside, it is more self-respecting than the other scheme, for it involves neither charity nor patronage. Perhaps, as a member of a race lately in far worse odor among 100٪ Americans than either Jews or Negroes, I can testify on this point. The Germans who held their ground calmly and correctly during the Wilson crusade, making no effort to conceal either their race or their feelings, are generally respected today, and even suffer from a certain excess of friendly attention. But those who put on false faces and began waving the flag—happily, I believe, a minority—are now held in contempt by both Anglo-Saxon Americans and their own people. Some of them got what seemed at the time to be valuable rewards for their desertion, but I know of none who is quite easy in mind today. They all know in their hearts that they were cowards and mountebanks, and they also know that everyone else knows it.

My preference among such minority peoples is for those who face the music without protesting too much. What confronts them is less mere ignorance and malignancy than a sempiternal law of human nature. It seems to me that if I were a Jew I'd far rather miss going to this or that university, however swell, than deny or conceal my race. Moreover, if the thing really inconvenienced me I'd be disposed to blame, not the university trustees, but old Jahveh Himself, the immemorial swindler of my people. My own differentiation from the American mass is somewhat less than that of the Jews, but it is still sufficient to keep me on the fire. No week ever goes by that a letter or clipping does not come in damning me as a Hun, urging me to go back to the Kaiser's chain-gang, and deriding my surname. Nevertheless, that surname remains satisfactory to me, and I have surely never made any effort to hide it under a bushel. So far as I can make out, I am barred from quite as many clubs and other organizations as Samuel Untermyer or Julius Rosenwald. But what of it? It seems to me to be not only inevitable that this should be so, but also, in a very real sense, proper. I like to see people stick to their own. The dogma of the melting-pot has never quite convinced me: it is preached by too many palpable frauds. My belief is that it would be a calamity to the Jews, as to any other self-respecting and clearly differentiated race, to be amalgamated with the mass of Anglo-Saxon Americans. Their tenacious differentness is a valuable thing to American civilization, and on their own side it keeps the more resolute and manly qualities alive among them, and so promotes their happiness. I think that being deprived of a Yale A.B. or blackballed in some trumpery club is a small price to pay for sharing in an ancient and glorious heritage, beating the poor Anglo-Saxon at all his various games, and dining upon such magnificent victuals as those the Jews who invite me to their tables commonly eat.