I agree fully with General Washington – that we must protect this young nation from an insidious influence and impenetration. That menace, gentlemen, is the Jew. In whatever country Jews have settled in any great numbers, 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 is founded by objecting to its restrictions; have built up a state withina state; and, when opposed, have tried to strangle that country to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal.
For over 1,700 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 to-day 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 among themselves. They must subsist on Christians and other peoples not of their race.
If 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 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 never will 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 Constitution.
Benjamin Franklin, in his address to the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787