Jews are commanded to love the convert. What about the immigrant?
“Make American Great Again” hats for sale before a town hall event with former President Donald Trump and Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Photo by Emily Elconin/Bloomberg/Getty Images
It would indeed be “a shame” if, as former President Donald Trump baselessly claimed during his debate last week with Vice President Kamala Harris, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs … the cats … the pets of the people that live there.”
Of course, that report — despite Trump’s insistence that he had seen “people saying it on television” — has no basis in reality. What does, unfortunately, is the truth that American xenophobia is alive and thriving.
That xenophobia is a phenomenon that should resonate with Jews — who have long been among its victims — and strongly evoke our dismay and disgust. And it insults the spirit of one of the 613 commandments we are required to observe as active members of the Jewish public: the mitzvah of loving the convert.
If any Americans should feel particularly empathy for the maligned Haitians — the vast majority of whom are here, and working, legally — it’s Jews like me, whose parents arrived in the U.S. less than a century ago. Like most immigrants today, they sought freedom, safety and opportunity.
Roughly 3 in 10 American Jewish adults are first- or second-generation immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center. Make it third and fourth generation, and you’ve covered most American members of the tribe.
Resentment of Jews was part of the rhetorical fabric of America for many decades: Men like Father Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith and Henry Ford all became powerful public figures in large part because of their avid antisemitism. We even had a blood libel here. In 1928, a 4-year-old girl wandered into the woods near the village of Massena, in upstate New York, and rumors soon erupted that Jews had kidnapped and killed the girl in a ritual murder. (Surprise, surprise: They hadn’t.)
And don’t forget the great popularity of the German American Bund, a Nazi group. On Feb. 20, 1939, just as Hitler was completing construction of his sixth concentration camp, some 20,000 supporters of the group filled Madison Square Garden for a rally, complete with attendees holding posters with slogans like “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” Speeches vilified “job-taking Jewish refugees.”
The parallels to the far-right libels of immigrants are chilling. In August, armed and masked neo-Nazis carrying flags bearing swastikas marched through downtown Springfield. A witness wrote that “Four guys who had assault rifles pointed their guns at the cars and said, ‘Get the f— back to Africa,’ and marched down the street.”
The 431st commandment, “ahavat hager,” comes from Deuteronomy. In detailing it, the Sefer HaChinuch, or Book of Training, a major Jewish text written in 13th-century Spain, cites the Talmudic admonition to not remind a convert of his pre-Jewish past, “in order to not cause him pain in any way.” It adds that anyone who is lax about helping a convert or protecting his property, or is insufficiently respectful of him or her, violates this commandment.
In addition to the mitzvah to love every fellow Jew, there is an additional one to love someone who was not born into the people, but chose to join it. The implication for our modern-day immigration discourse is clear. As the Sefer HaChinuch continues: “We are to learn from this precious mitzvah to have mercy on any person who finds himself in a foreign place” and “not ignore him when we find him alone and far from those who can help him.”
The anti-immigrant bandwagon is a large and, sadly, welcoming one. Immigration is rightly governed by rules, and border security is a legitimate and most important issue. But the Jewish attitude toward the foreign-born people who are among us, often after having risked their lives, ought to be one of mercy and concern, whether those immigrants are here legally or otherwise.
We Jews, whose immigrant forebears, strangers in a strange land, experienced pain and fear, need to recognize the similar pain and fears of others, including newer newcomers to America.
And to reject libels lobbed at them, even if they concern only dogs and cats.
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