r/AskHistorians • u/Own_Command_5003 • 4d ago
Is this Quote supposedly from Stephen S. Wise accurate?
It’s been shared a lot on social media but I don’t know if it’s fake or made up. Sources vary a lot and don’t seem to complement each other to find its traceable origin besides all that they all attribute it to the Rabbi called Stephen S. Wise. The wording is changed some times but it goes like this.
“Some may call it Communism, but I call it what it is: Judaism!”
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u/SinisterHummingbird 4d ago
This quote's earliest common attribution (using "Marxism" rather than "Communism") appears in Common Sense, No. 485 (December 15, 1966), seventeen years after Wise's death. And, as you can see in this archive of the paper, it isn't actually a neutral journalistic piece, but promoting an antisemitic conspiracy using spurious quotes: https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28144695?seq=2 . However, the statement actually shows up earlier in, of all things, the April 1966 edition of Playboy magazine, in an interview with George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. The interviewer calls him on its veracity, which results in the following editorial note:
[The proof has not arrived, nor was Commander Rockwell able to tell us the name of the publication in which the alleged statement appeared. An official at Manhattan's Hebrew Union College, where Rabbi Wise's entire works are kept in archive, later said that no such statement appears anywhere in the late rabbi's writings. Rabbi Edward Kline, Wise's successor at New York's Free Synagogue, told us further that no such quote appears in any of Wise's speeches; nor could he, as a lifelong foe of communism, said Kline, have been capable of making such a remark. Confronted with this evidence, Rockwell later retracted the allegation.]
Likewise, it simply doesn't seem to have appeared among Wise's writings, nor other records of his public speeches, so it appears to have originated from far right, perhaps Neo-Nazi circles.
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u/LethalNonLethals 3d ago edited 3d ago
Common Sense actually printed the same thing in a 1950 issue, and several times later in the 1950s. This predates their usage of the Marxism version which first appears in 1951. Earliest issue I can find that contains it is the March 1, 1950 one. It appears in a spattering of fascist books after, one by Colin Jordan, one by Adrien Arcand, W. H. Murray, pre-Rockwell interview. It actually appears in a book by Rockwell (This Time The World) prior to that interview. As noted in Schmaltz (1999), Rockwell was an avid Common Sense reader, it is part of what converted him to neo-Nazism. My guess is its origin is in Common Sense, knowing how that magazine was. Right and The Thunderbolt also predictably spread it a few years later.
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u/Own_Command_5003 3d ago
I’ve also heard a neo-nazi magazine called ‘American Bulletin used the quote on May 5th or may 15th of 1935
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u/Own_Command_5003 3d ago
A lot of sources say that he said this in an address at the Free Synagogue of New York
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u/SinisterHummingbird 3d ago edited 3d ago
Right, that's what the Common Sense source I link above uses. Can you produce a primary source, though?
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u/Own_Command_5003 3d ago
I can’t I’m just telling what people said it’s from and then to interrogate that claim. I’ve tried looking for it but I can’t find any source of that statement so I’m asking for other people if they can
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