Roosevelt’s Quota

I’ve always wondered why so many liberal Jews are comfortable with racial quotas, given that historically, quotas have worked against Jews more than any other group. Roger Simon exposes a shocking instance from World War II. President Roosevelt, meeting in Casablanca in 1943, suggested a quota system for Jews in North Africa:

The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population…The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.

“Understandable,” indeed. Ed Koch notes that the source for the Roosevelt quote is unimpeachable: “the transcript appears in Foreign Relations of the United States, a multivolume series of historical documents published by the U.S. government itself.”
Roosevelt’s suggestion was never adopted, not because local rulers were tolerant, but because they preferred the more extreme measure of driving virtually all Jews out of North Africa.

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