JTA — As US President Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric against Somali immigrants in Minnesota and ordered a surge in immigration enforcement because Somalis took part in a social-service fraud scheme, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pushed back.

“When a fraud takes place, when a crime takes place, you investigate it, you prosecute it, you charge it. You arrest the person that did the fraud or the crime, you put him in jail as an individual,” Frey told NPR. “You get held accountable as an individual. That’s how this works in America. You do not, however, hold an entire community accountable for the crimes of one.”

Frey’s remarks were echoed by other state and national figures. “We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, who herself immigrated from Somalia to the United States as a child.

Frey, who is Jewish, didn’t mention his own background in standing up for Somalis, a community of whom Trump has said, “And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you.”

But had Frey turned to Jewish history, he may well have cited another instance in which a powerful political figure blamed an immigrant community for the crimes of a few, and an ethnic group was targeted by nativists who pinned the country’s ills on immigrants.

Frey might have reached back to 1908, when New York City police commissioner Theodore A. Bingham leveled what at the time was the most explicit, highest-profile accusation of Jewish criminality made by a major American official since Gen. Ulysses Grant expelled all Jews from his military district to combat allegations of cotton smuggling and corruption.

That year, in an article in the North American Review, Bingham claimed Jews accounted for half of New York’s crimes, especially picking pockets, fencing stolen goods, arson and operating gambling and vice operations.

“It is not astonishing that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one quarter of its population), perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider the ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor,” Bingham wrote with the stilted prose of a bureaucrat and the dubious authority of the then popular pseudoscience of........

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