is, when there is any impression at all, that it is a Jewish social organization like all the rest.
The Kehillah of New York is of importance to Americans everywhere because of two facts: it not only offers a real and complete instance of a government within a government in the midst of America’s largest city, but it also constitutes through its executive committee District XII of the American Jewish Committee, through which pro-Jewish and anti-Gentile propaganda is operated and Jewish pressure brought to bear against certain American ideas. That is to say, the Jewish government of New York constitutes the essential part of the Jewish government of the United States.
Both of these societies began at about the same time. The records of the Kehillah state that the immediate occasion of its organization was to make a protest against the statement by General Bingham, then police commissioner of the City of New York, that 50 per cent of the crime of the metropolis was committed by Jews. There had been a government investigation into the “White Slave Traffic,” the result of which was a direct set of public opinion into channels uncomplimentary to the Jewish name, and a defensive movement was begun. There is no intention to rake up past scandals, unless it shall become necessary; it is enough to say here that, very soon afterward, General Bingham disappeared from public life, and a national magazine of power and influence which had embarked on a series of articles setting forth the government’s findings in the White Slave investigation was forced to discontinue after the printing of the first article. This was in the year 1908. The American Jewish Committee, to whose influence the Kehillah really owes its existence, came into being in 1906.
The word “Kehillah” has the same meaning as “Kahal,” which signifies “community,” “assembly” or government. It represents the Jewish form of government in the dispersion. That is to say, since destiny has made the Jews wanderers of the earth, they have organized their own government so that it might function regardless of the governments which the so-called “Gentiles” have set up. In the Babylonian captivity, in Eastern Europe today, the Kahal is the power and
