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profile; the 1930 federal census only listed ethnicity by country of origin and race,
not by religion, ostensibly the defining characteristic of Jews. The Jewish
community of Baltimore was, nonetheless, an ethnic community. Hidden among
census statistics for Russians, Poles, Germans, Lithuanians, and others, Jews in
Baltimore may well have numbered as many as 70,000 to 80,000 at the end of the
1920s. They were probably the largest European immigrant ethnicity in the
region. "

Jews in Baltimore and in other U.S. cities formed, however, an European
immigrant ethnicity with some significantly differences from other ethnicities.
While other European immigrants came from subjugated social classes in their
homelands, or from homelands ruled by an imperial power of another nationality,
immigrant Jews were distinct in that they came from countries and regions in which
they formed ethnically-oppressed minority nationalities. The memories and myths
of this centuries-old oppression were inscribed in and permeated immigrant Jewish
culture, and passed down to the U.S. born generations. Consequently, Jewish
culture, more than other European ethnic cultures, was in part a culture of
resistance. H

Moreover, Jews were subjected to more extreme forms of ethnic oppression
in the U.S. and in Baltimore than other European minorities. Only Jews among
Baltimore's white ethnics in the 1920s, for example, were systematically and overtly
excluded from residing in certain neighborhoods. Notices that Jews were forbidden
in new housing developments even appeared on billboard advertisements.
Nominally, discrimination against Jews was based on religious difference, and
indeed, in a decade during which godliness was especially close to Americanism,
religion was particularly important. But additionally, discrimination against Jews
was reinforced by semi-racial stereotyping far more widespread than was the case
for any other white ethnic grouping. If anti-Semitism in the U.S. was distinct from
European anti-Semitism, it shared in the 1920s the resurgent tendency to cast Jews