As we have seen, in 1919 the soil of the United States was abundantly prepared for the imported seeds of anti-Semitism. Group was arrayed against group, native and alien, Nordic and South European, Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew. In addition to the local and timely fact, we must also presuppose an old inheritance of specific prejudice against the Jew of a strictly religious nature. This is by no means the immediate occasion of the present movement, as it may have been of pogroms in Russia; but it is certainly an element in the national subconsciousness and in the conscious thinking of certain more orthodox Christian churches. Granted that Horace M. Kallen exaggerates the importance of this factor, still he has done well in pointing it out. He says: [89]In the Christian system the Jews are assigned a central and dramatic status. They are the villains of the Drama of Salvation.... Nowhere in Europe could there be a village to whose inhabitants the word “Jew” did not denote the people who had denied the Savior and crucified Him, who were thus the enemies of God and of mankind.... The word “Jew” became a stimulus which touched off this emotion. It was a word to curse with.... The root of the special Jewish difficulty is the position of the Jews in the Christian religion. If you can end this teaching that the Jews are enemies of God and of mankind you will strike anti-Semitism at its foundations. Certainly the teachings of infancy and childhood have left this, residue of anti-Judaism in the minds of millions of persons, who would be the first to deny the possession of religious bigotry; certainly the Christian church, as a group mind, contains a tradition of anti-Judaism as one of its ideas. But this means merely that religion to the Jew takes the place of skin color to the Negro or language to the Czech. We have ancient warrant that so trivial a matter as the mispronunciation of the word Shibboleth was sufficient identification for one sub-group of Hebrews to kill members of another group of their own people. All that intolerance needs is some mark of identification, however irrelevant or petty, to set off the rival group. 2.