John Levi has shown that anti-Jewish stereotypes arrived in Australia with the convicts, and were often garnished by the mainstream colonial press, ^[18] thereby setting a media precedent which persisted throughout the period in question, ^[19] and even to the present day. Negative cultural connotations of the word ‘Jew’ encouraged many Jews to avoid it as a descriptive term for themselves, and ‘Hebrew Congregations’ became the preferred name for their faith collectives. ^[20] Even in the liberally founded Province of South Australia which was characterised by inter-faith co-operation, ^[21] Israel Getzler has stressed that Jews still had to campaign assiduously to win approval for the social and political rights accorded them. ^[22]

When free settlement sparked Jewish communal life, later to be strengthened by the immigrations of the Gold Rush, it came with a level of wariness towards the Gentile. In part this was undoubtedly affected by its ‘Exilic’ condition as verified by historical experience, and in part by the fact of being a small and nervous minority. From the beginning of Jewish communal life there was an anxious looking over the shoulder to assure that nothing be done which might upset their fellow citizens lest the fires of anti-Semitism be ignited.

Some Jewish scribes have argued that the esteem in which men such as General Sir John Monash and Sir Isaac Isaacs were generally held was a great social prophylactic against anti-Semitism in Australia. Indeed, another person of similar standing, Sir Zelman Cowen, tells the story—the truth of which he cannot verify—that in 1931 John Scullin, the Labor Prime Minister, presented the British authorities with only the above two names as candidates for the post of Governor General of Australia. ^[23] However, there is little evidence to suggest these gentlemen’s fine reputation actually diminished the degree of social and cultural anti-Semitism even in their lifetime, let alone after. Monash himself suffered its sting before reaching the apex of his military career on the Western Front in World War One. ^[24] Jews were excluded from certain clubs, organisations, and stock exchanges. No doubt, this situation was one reason behind Isaacs’s strong opposition to political Zionism. ^[25]

That Jews have scaled the heights of many of the nation’s elites even in the presence of cultural or social anti-Semitism, is not an unknown phenomenon in the West. Their very success has been a cause of jealousy that has fanned Jewish conspiracy theory. On the other hand there is the propensity of Jewish spokespeople during and since the time under examination, to proclaim how much Jews have contributed to all facets of Australian society. Though this claim can be empirically proved, the need to give it such a loud voice was, and still is, as much directed at Jews themselves as at Gentiles. It constitutes the raw evidence of worthy citizenship that would protect against current and future anti-Jewish stereotyping.

As previously mentioned, there was always present a concern that Jews should say or do nothing in their business dealings, public life, or congregationally that might offend non-Jews, thus putting their social standing in jeopardy. Such concern was evident when, in 1921, the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation refused to bury a baptised Jew in the hallowed local Jewish cemetery, ^[26] and in Melbourne during World War Two when there was a communal controversy whether Jewish ex-servicemen should be buried in separate allotments or alongside their non-Jewish comrades. ^[27] In both cases there was a worry that misunderstandings might stir the anti-Semitic pot.

Anecdotes abound about Jewish exclusion from employment in particular professional offices, government departments, clubs, and large retail stores like David Jones in Sydney. There is no way to ascertain whether this was a prevailing attitude, as those likely to infringe in this way were unlikely to openly advertise their prejudices. On the other hand, the lack of proof does not mean it did not happen, and that when it did, it was not common knowledge. Anti-Semitism was indeed part of the mix of reasons for the great opposition in the early 1940s to the appointment of the late eminent legal academic, Professor Julius Stone, to the Law School of Sydney University. ^[28] However, victimisation in the area of employment on the basis of religion was never a Jewish monopoly, and compared to the bitter Protestant/Catholic  divide,  possibly  paled  into  insignificance. ^[29]

Hilary Rubinstein ^[30] and Suzanne Rutland ^[31] have provided lists of agents of anti-Semitism—individuals, organisations, and media, both fringe and mainstream, in the period under discussion. Unhappily, individuals include such cultural luminaries as Marcus Clarke, Arthur Adams, Henry Lawson, P.R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen, and the Lindsay brothers.

Leftwing versions of old Christian anti-Jewish stereotypes entered the fledgling Australian labor movement, particularly strongly in the 1890s, under the influence of a transplanted British socialism and American populist and radical literature. ^[32] Labor politician and activist, Frank Anstey, took up these themes in his caricature of the Jew as the arch bloodsucking capitalist in his two tracts, The Kingdom of Shylock published in 1917, and Money Power published in 1923. ^[33] Anti-Jewish animus also became standard in the early 1930s rhetoric of Jack T. Lang, when Labor Premier of New South Wales, and later as maverick federal politician in the 1940s. ^[34]

Xenophobic nationalists and racists on the nationalist and racialist Right also had their versions of the evil Jew. Such views were regularly featured in The Bulletin with its emblematic fat capitalist John Bull Cohen, Smith’s Weekly, and The Truth. In1934, the imported Social Credit Movement began in Australia its main publication, The New Times which circulated excerpts from the notorious anti-Jewish fake, The Politics of the Elders of Zion. ^[35] This organisation spawned the Australian League of Rights, whose local guru and leader Eric Butler published his own version of that heinous polemic in Melbourne in 1946. ^[36] In the later half of the 1930’s there was a spread of pro-Nazi propaganda, while in 1940, ^[37] just after the outbreak of World War Two, the small Australia First Party was formed with a decidedly anti-Jewish plank. ^[38]

Jewish insecurity was no better displayed than in the patriotic rhetoric of Jewish religious and lay leaders during both world wars. Their preaching on fidelity to King, Country, and Empire, on some occasions was overreaching. ^[39] They sought to urge the maximum possible number of Jews into uniform. Performance to the highest level of bravery was demanded—if only to disprove current anti-Jewish stereotypes. Jewish support for the national war effort had to be total to demonstrate their worthiness as citizens. Not to do so, it was feared, would arouse latent anti-Semitism. ^[40] There were a few Jewish recruits in World War One who denied their religious affiliation because they feared anti-Semitism in the ranks. During World War Two anti-Semitic literature circulated at military bases in Victoria. ^[41]

Nothing, however, was felt likely to arouse anti-Jewish feelings more than the prospect of mass Jewish immigration to Australia. And this, in turn, aroused anxieties within Australia’s small and edgy Jewish communities. The first incident of note occurred in 1891, when the mere rumour of the possibility that a large number of Jews fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire might seek refuge in Australia was enough to set alarm bells ringing. ^[42] In the aftermath of the Gold Rush, colonial xenophobia was fired by a vision of hordes of non-assimilable foreigners from the north swamping Australia and undermining its British way of life. With Federation, this xenophobia became entrenched in the White Australia Policy. That selfsame 1891 rumour sent a shiver down the back of a nervous, miniscule, and fragile Anglo-Australian Jewry. It was feared that such en masse immigration might well cause a gross anti-Semitic reaction that would prove detrimental to local Jewry. Any concerns for their desperate brethren were weakened by this fear. Australian policy was to reject any proposal to create enclaves of ‘foreigners’ anywhere in the nation, and this no less for Jews. For example, Labor Prime Minister, John Curtin, in 1944 when the evils of Nazism were already well-known, refused to accept a plan to settle large numbers of refugees in the Kimberley region of Western Australia despite the fact that the Premier of the state and other non-Jewish leaders supported the scheme. ^[43] Following the death of Curtin, the acting Prime Minister, Frank Forde, stated that this decision was taken on the recommendation of a bureaucratic committee on immigration that ‘opposed segregated settlements of Alien communities’. ^[44]

Indeed, the question of Australia taking large numbers of refugees became most poignant in the 1930s, when the Nazi juggernaut with its vicious anti-Jewish program began to roll and thousands of distressed Jews applied to enter Australia. Paul Bartrop has detailed official attitudes, particularly the all-important bureaucratic response to the entrée of these ‘foreign’ Jews, and the reactions of the Jewish community. He maps the negative outlook within the Ministry of the Interior—the department that had carriage of immigration—which on occasions bordered on anti-Semitism. ^[45] The fact was that as a group, only the Jews were singled out in the application forms to enter Australia. The so-called ‘Jewish clauses’ ^[46] —Forms Nos.40 and 47—were a useful bureaucratic tool to determine which Jews were from Europe’s east and west. If Jewish immigrants were to come, those from the latter were preferred because they were considered able to assimilate much more quickly. When these clauses were finally revoked only in 1953, bureaucrats were beside themselves as to how they would now be able to prevent those Jews they saw as unacceptable from arriving to settle. ^[47] It must be remembered that in July 1938, at the Evian Conference in France dealing with the burgeoning number of refugees from Nazism, the Australian representative’s rationale for his country’s refusal to accept any of them was that Australia did not have a racial problem and didn’t want to introduce one. ^[48] It was a policy soon to be slightly eased under pressure from Great Britain and the United States of America, when permission was reluctantly given for 15,000 to enter, with some 8,000 actually doing so just before the outbreak of World War Two. Only some 5,000 of them were Jews. ^[49]

Anglo Australian Jewry’s apprehension that the presence of these Jewish émigrés might arouse anti-Semitism led to its demand that they quickly lose their outward signs of difference. English, not foreign tongues were to be used in public, and social and religious behaviour was not to attract the attention of the Gentile population. They were continually berated not to provide ammunition for those disposed towards anti-Semitism. ^[50]

On the back of the Great Depression it was not difficult to mount an argument against the influx of ‘foreign’ Jews, whatever their reason for coming. David Mossenson speaks of anti-Semitism as being mild in Western Australia, and yet causing much angst in its tiny Jewish community during an influx of ‘foreign’ Jews from 1937 to 1940, and during the post-World War Two years from 1947 to 1957. ^[51] Freda Searle recalls the street and schoolyard anti-Semitism of the 1930s in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton where ‘foreign’ Jews tended to settle. ^[52] Such sentiments still circulated there during World War Two. ^[53] The usual Jewish response was one of forbearance, one that had an extensive longevity. In 1871, the Reverend Rintel castigated his fellow Melbourne Jews for their unwillingness to challenge the anti-Semitism evident in their day. ^[54] John Levi recounts that a Jewish communal leader in 1907 was appalled by the sight of Jewish boys playing marbles in public on Sunday because it might upset their Christian neighbours. ^[55] Once World War Two broke out, Anglo-Jewish leaders felt unnecessarily compelled to advise their ‘foreign’ brethren to fully back the war effort as if they, who had already tasted Hitler’s lash, did not understand where their duty lay.

Even with World War Two over and the Holocaust stamped on the world’s psyche, barriers were still placed in the path of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) restricting the numbers who could seek refuge in Australia. That said, it is still a fact that Australia took in more per head of population than any other country other than Israel. Only a few years after the war, a poll was taken of local attitudes to people from other lands. It revealed that Germans against whom Australians had so recently fought were far more preferable to Jews who were rated only one level above the bottom category, ‘blacks’. ^[56] Andrew Markus has written that it seems that the revelation of near genocide of European Jewry had done nothing or very little to soften the attitude of the general community towards them. ^[57] A Jewish quota of 25% was applied to ships commandeered by the International Refugee Organisation to bring DPs from camps in war-torn Europe to Australia. ^[58]

Some members of Australia’s fledgling diplomatic corps also attempted to slow down, even to prevent, Jewish DP immigration. The anti-Semitic Australian Consul General in Shanghai , O.W.C. Fuhrman, specifically denied Jewish DP entry permits to Australia. ^[59] It is somewhat ironic that this gentleman was selected as Australia’s first diplomatic emissary to the new Jewish State of Israel in 1950, and from there carried on his Judeophobia that included his desire to prevent DP emigration from Israel on grounds that the migrants might be communist agents. ^[60] As well, a dispatch from the Australian Mission in Delhi caused the Department of Immigration to deny entry to Australia of ‘Jews of Middle East Origin’ on the basis that they were likely to be ‘colored’. ^[61] Doubtless, the fact that the Jews of Palestine were proving increasingly troublesome to the British administration there exacerbated the hostile feelings of some acute Anglophile Australians towards Jews. It certainly upset the prominent Catholic political journalist and radio commentator. D.G.M. Jackson, a traditional Christian anti-Semite, who feared that Jewish success would usurp Christian influence in the Holy Land. ^[62]

Support of political Zionism, the ideology which sought an autonomous Jewish homeland in Palestine, also caused divisions within the Australian Jewish corpus. Spiritual Zionism, the longing for the Zion and Jerusalem, had always played a central role in Jewish religious liturgy. Anglo-Jewry, however, had no interest in beating a path to the harsh environs of the physical Zion. Political Zionism, however, did draw support from among the ‘foreign’ Jews. Anglo-Jews feared political Zionism might have their national allegiance to Australia questioned, and that they would be pinned with the white feather of treason—dual loyalty. ^[63] In the wake of the Holocaust this schism mended.

Even at the time when the full extent of the Holocaust was being revealed to the world, there were those Jews who feared that any social or cultural creation of a discrete Jewish nature might possibly incite anti-Semitism. The decision during World War Two to create a Jewish Red Cross group created controversy in the community for this reason. ^[64] In 1945, an editorial in the Australian Jewish News warned against the formation of a Jewish day school in Melbourne:

… There is anti-Semitism in Australia, and quite a lot. But it is partly imported merchandise, which goes together with Fascism, partly home made. But we can be assured that we will just strengthen these tendencies by bringing up our children in a “foreign” way which is so suspect in the average Australian. ^[65]

Even the formation in Melbourne of Mount Scopus College which opened in 1949, caused the ageing and indomitable long-serving leader of Anglo-Jewry in that city, Rabbi Jacob Danglow of the St Kilda Synagogue, much heartache lest it might provide a pretext for some premier private schools to bar Jewish enrolment. ^[66]