US Founding Fathers’ Statements on Jews

US Founding Fathers’ Statements Concerning the Jews

"They (the Jews) work more effectively against us than the enemy’s armies. They
are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are
engaged in. It is much to be lamented that each state, long ago, has not hunted
them down as pests to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness
of America."

Source: Maxims of George Washington by A.A. Appleton & Co.

As the American colonies rose in revolt against political oppression occasioned by
the attempt of Jewish banking houses in Europe to consolidate their economic
foothold in the New World, no man among the Founding Fathers was more alert to
the designs of international Jewry than that shrewd elder statesman of the
American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps Ben Franklin’s most damning
indictment of Jewry was contained in his famous prophecy at the Constitutional
Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia. In one of the most anti-Jewish utterances of all
time, he declared:

"I fully agree with General Washington, that we must protect this young nation from
an insidious influence and impenetration. That menace, gentlemen, is the Jews. In
whatever country Jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its
moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and
have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian
religion upon which that nation was founded by objecting to its restrictions; have
built up a state within a state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country
to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal.

"For over 1700 hundred years, the Jews have been bewailing their sad fate in that
they have been exiled from their homeland, as they call Palestine. But, gentlemen,
did the world give it to them in fee simple, they would at once find some reason for
not returning. Why? Because they are vampires, and vampires do not live on
vampires. They cannot live only amongst themselves. They must subsist on
Christians and other people not of their race. If you do not exclude them from these
United States in the Constitution, in less than 200 years they will have swarmed
here in such great numbers that they will dominate and devour the land, and

change our form of government, for which we Americans have shed our blood,
given our lives, our substance, and jeopardized our liberty.

"If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be
working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting
houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews
for all time, your children will curse you in your graves. Jews, gentlemen, are
Asiatics, let them be born where they will or how many generations they are away
from Asia, they will never be otherwise. Their ideas do not conform to an
American’s, and will not even though they live among us ten generations. A
leopard cannot change its spots. Jews are Asiatics, are a menace to this country if
permitted entrance, and should be excluded by this Constitutional Convention."

Franklin’s remarks were recorded in "Chit Chat Around the Table During
Intermissions," a section of the Diary of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South
Carolina. Pickney (1746-1825) attended the Convention as a delegate, and took
down excerpts of some of the outstanding addresses and discourses, which he
later published in his diary. Perhaps the best proof of the Franklin prophecy--as
with any prophecy--lies in its actual fulfillment. What Benjamin Franklin foresaw as
an ominous possibility in 1787 has today--a little over two hundred years later--
become painful reality.