On This Day in Jewish History: 25 Tishrei

On this day in 1929, the New York stock market collapsed in a single session that came to be called Black Tuesday. The selling had begun the previous Thursday and resumed on Monday, and by Tuesday's close the market had surrendered everything the boom had given it. Within three years thirteen million Americans were out of work, banks were failing by the thousand, and men who had owned businesses were standing in soup lines. Very few Jews had money in the market. The consequences reached them anyway.

In America the first blow came through the banks. In December 1930 the Bank of the United States failed, the largest bank collapse the country had yet seen. It was a Jewish bank serving Jewish neighborhoods, and its fall wiped out the savings of roughly one in five of New York's two million Jews, many of whom believed the other banks had let it die because of whose bank it was. Then came the search for someone to blame. Henry Ford had spent the twenties putting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into American circulation through his newspaper and his four volume International Jew, which was translated into German in 1922 and became one of Hitler's sources. Father Charles Coughlin carried it to the radio, where as many as forty million Americans could hear him name who was responsible for their ruin, and hear him, after 1938, defend what Germany was doing to the Jews. One historian judged American antisemitism in those years more vicious than at any time before or since.

In Germany it moved faster. American banks called in the loans that had been holding the Weimar economy upright and it gave way. The Nazi Party, a fringe with twelve seats in the Reichstag in 1928, told Germans that Jewish manipulation had done this to them, and its vote climbed with every year the Depression deepened until Hitler took power in January 1933. America, poor and frightened and listening to Coughlin, kept shut the immigration doors it had closed in 1924, through precisely the years when opening them would have saved the most lives. A collapse on the New York stock exchange was a direct catalyst for the most systematic genocide in human history.