The history of American Jews’ citizenship makes the president’s case to eliminate birthright citizenship, now awaiting a Supreme Court decision, no surprise—but this should offer little comfort.
The central plotline of the story of Jews in the United States tends to revolve around citizenship: Jews arrived, gained citizenship, the end. Yet this story accounts for neither how citizenship has worked for Jews nor how it works in general. A far more accurate history of Jewish citizenship in the United States exposes the persistent political questions asked, answered, and unresolved when policymakers try to decide who is and isn’t “American.”
For the past 250 years, American leaders have used citizenship law to draw and re-draw the lines of individual belonging through collective categories. From the beginning, Congress granted “any alien being a free white person” access to citizenship, writing into naturalization law in 1790 broad thresholds for membership. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment revolutionized citizenship by opening it to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” Yet Congress also legislated that for the purposes of naturalization, “all persons” only included “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity…and African descent,” not Chinese people or “Asiatics.”
Jews who immigrated from Europe tended to gain access to naturalization as “white” under citizenship law, but government officials found Jews a useful—and sometimes confounding—guide to help them apply the law, even when Jews were not directly involved.
Take a 1909 naturalization appeal from four men, described in their rejected application as “Armenians by race.” The men were not Jewish, but Judge Henry Cabot Lowell, who presided over their appeal, nonetheless found himself contemplating Jewish citizenship. Harvard-educated and hailing from an elite Boston family, Lowell consulted scientific treatises to conclude that “Hebrews” and Armenians were both “Asiatic” in origin. Prevailing scientific racism of the day convinced him that neither met the threshold of whiteness. As he wrote in his decision, it was “hard to find loophole for admitting the Hebrews” to citizenship. But at least until Congress acted, he saw no reason to exclude Armenians if Jews could benefit from the loophole.
Jewish leaders panicked when they witnessed high-level government officials slotting them into racialized categories other than “white.” They understood that the historical fact of citizenship would not necessarily protect Jews in years to come, especially as eugenicist ideas gained traction among policymakers designing new restrictive immigration laws. In the early 20th century, elite Jews lobbied politicians, filed reports, intervened in naturalization cases, and testified at congressional hearings to bolster Jews’ claims to citizenship. Their efforts met partial success. As passed in the 1920s, immigration quota laws dropped the classification of Jews as “Hebrews,” instead counting Jews among others of their same “national origin.” Still, the countries from which most Jews immigrated, such as Russia and Poland, now faced some of the harshest restrictions.
In practice, the new quota laws reduced the number of Jews who could naturalize and raised suspicion about those who did. Foreign-born Americans from many different backgrounds experienced discrimination that legal status did not avert.
But accusations of foreignness and dual loyalty clung to Jews in unique ways, as illustrated by a remarkable case from 1947. That year, a naturalized Jewish man sought to return to the United States after living in British-mandate Palestine for over a decade. Detained by U.S. border control agents, the Ukrainian-born man learned that his American passport had been revoked under a 1940 law that prohibited naturalized citizens from living abroad for over five years. Native-born citizens were not subject to the same law. The ACLU, American Jewish Committee, and American Jewish Congress seized on this fact to call the law unconstitutional and defend the Jewish man on his appeal. But for the Jewish organizations, the constitutional violation was a piece of a much larger threat to Jewish citizenship in the United States. When Congress authorized the 1940 statute, it did so under pressure from a State Department official who insisted that “these Zionists” regularly manipulated the protections of American citizenship for their own nationalist ends.
The court rejected the Jewish man’s appeal, and in doing so diminished the distinctly Jewish dimension of the case by tying him to other naturalized Americans, such as Japanese-Americans, whose constitutional rights to equal protection could be overridden by national interests according to recent Supreme Court precedent.
Citizenship debates routinely entangled Jews’ status with that of other groups because the categories of citizenship were neither self-evident nor self-executing. Only in motion, by scrutinizing groups, comparing them to one another, and gauging the changing winds of national interests, did government officials bend citizenship to their will.
In a remarkable exchange on the Senate floor in the spring of 1964, two senators debated the exclusion of religion from proposed anti-discrimination legislation targeting federally-funded programs. Albert Gore, Sr., a Democrat from Tennessee, contended that Jews lacked shelter under the law’s categories of “race, color, or national origin” because Jews were a religion. Joseph Clark, a fellow Democrat from Pennsylvania, countered that those categories protected Jews just fine because many Jews lacked any faith, so whatever discrimination they faced must be race-based. Signed into law that summer as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the statute (unlike many others in the same law) did not include religion among its protected categories.
For many decades, the question of Jews’ standing under Title VI seemed to be resolved in practice, as government officials and Jewish leaders agreed that its jurisdiction did not include Jews. But it was only a matter of time before the answer faded back into a question.
Over the last two decades—and especially since Oct. 7, 2023—government officials and many Jewish leaders have argued that Jews should have standing in anti-discrimination laws on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Detractors argue that Jews—or certain expressions of Jewishness such as Zionism—do not fit squarely into those categories. The arguments matter because the categories of citizenship law are consequential, but their answers aren’t intrinsic to citizenship. Rather, citizenship remains a tool to ask questions about belonging; as political aims change so too will its meaning.
For American Jews, citizenship has not offered a singular point of arrival or a final answer to the puzzle of national belonging. This lesson from the history of American Jews may offer some reassurance that Trump’s bid to overturn birthright citizenship is just another stop on a zig-zagging journey. Whether the Supreme Court endorses the administration’s tendentious reading of the 14th Amendment or not, the twisted and entangled process of arguing over citizenship will continue.
A less sanguine lesson from the same history should warn all American citizens that an attack against birthright citizenship is an attack against them. No one is naturally or natively a citizen, wherever they were born. Political leaders are constantly remaking citizenship—just look at how the categories used to define, question, or defend Jews have changed over time. The protections of citizenship are as mutable as they are unreliable.
Faith in any fundamental meaning of citizenship not only misses the point but also carries profound risk. Even the most capacious understanding of citizenship will not resolve the question of human belonging, but the starkly narrow one on offer from the Trump administration today threatens our ability to keep asking the question.
Lila Corwin Berman is a professor of history at NYU and author of Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.
