Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

Last week, Peter Shulman, an associate professor of American history at Case Western Reserve University, caused a political stir when he tweeted results from a Fortune Magazine poll dated July 1938. “What’s your attitude towards allowing German, Austrian & other political refugees to come into the US?” Fortune asked its survey audience. Over two-thirds of respondents answered in the negative.

Shulman’s tweet went viral, igniting a spirited debate about whether opposition to welcoming Syrian refugees is morally or situationally equivalent to American indifference in the 1930s toward Jewish victims of the Nazi state. In what can only be described as a sharp reversal of prevailing norms, many conservatives, who these days seem inclined to liken every government overreach to Nazism, are incensed by the analogy, while many liberals, who have grown accustomed to rolling their eyes each time that Bill Kristol invokes the Munich Agreement, are sticking by it.


So is the analogy a good one? In short, yes. Contrary to what conservatives are saying these days, language commonly invoked in opposition to admitting Syrian refugees bears striking similarity to arguments against providing safe harbor to Jewish refugees in the late 1930s. Then as now, skepticism of religious and ethnic minorities and concerns that refugees might pose a threat to national security deeply influenced the debate over American immigration policy. For conservatives, this likeness is an inconvenient truth.

But the analogy doesn’t stop there. There may be no historic precedent for the rise of the Islamic State, but many current-day conditions in the Middle East are reminiscent of the broader context in which the Holocaust occurred. Europe in the 1930s and 1940s witnessed a systemic breakdown of national borders and civil society; brutal ethnic cleansing and population transfers; and a refugee crisis that strained the world’s creativity and resources. These human-made disasters do not just befall majority-Muslim countries.

For liberals, this raises its own inconvenient truth. Even had the United States admitted a large number of Jewish refugees in 1938, the underlying forces tearing Europe apart would not have abated. Winning this particular argument is important, but it does not resolve the larger challenge facing Syria or Iraq.

***

The most obvious parallel between the 1930s and today is popular opposition to the admission of refugees. It was strong then, and it’s strong now.

In the wake of ISIL’s attacks on Paris this month, a joint Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 54 percent of respondents oppose admitting Syrian exiles to the United States, while 52 percent doubt the government’s ability to screen potential immigrants for criminal or terrorist backgrounds. Among elected officials, hostility to resettlement is more trenchant still. Last week, the House of Representatives voted to suspend the Syria refugee program by a vote of 289 to 137. Remarkably, one-quarter of all House Democrats broke ranks with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to back the measure.

Although the 1938 Fortune poll did not specifically mention Jews, most Americans at the time likely understood that roughly 70 percent of Austrian and German refugees were, in fact, Jewish. Months later, when Sen. Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers (R-Mass.) introduced legislation that would lift immigration caps to admit 10,000 refugee children to the United States, the Nation acknowledged a “sotto voce” understanding that “this is a Jewish bill.”

In a telling augury of Gov. Chris Christie’s pitiless remark that even 5-year-old Syrian orphans should be barred from entering American shores, a Gallup poll in January 1940 found that 66 percent of respondents opposed the Wagner-Rogers bill. In May 1940, when the Cincinnati Post polled 1,000 local women—most of them housewives and mothers—a whopping 77 percent rejected the plan to resettle refugee children in the United States.

Some conservatives reject the analogy between the 1930s and today because, as David Frum argued recently in the Atlantic, “there were fewer concerns, if any, about whether [Jewish] asylum-seekers had joined a terrorist organization, or shared the liberal, democratic values of the West, or could contribute productively to the economy, or were bringing children who might grow up to be alienated from society and susceptible to radicalization.”

Frum’s argument would be compelling if only it were true. In fact, popular anti-Semitism in the 1930s was chiefly predicated on most of these concerns.

In February 1942, just two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a national poll asked respondents to identify the national, ethnic or religious groups that are a “menace [threat] to this country.” Unsurprisingly, 24 percent identified Japanese-Americans and 18 percent volunteered German-Americans. Jews ranked third, at 15 percent. Three years later, in 1945, the same question yielded more arresting results: 24 percent identified Jews as the most menacing ethnic group in America, ahead of the Japanese (9 percent) and Germans (6 percent).

Fear of Jews—not simply resentment of Jews—flowed from diverse sources. A leader of the Blue Star Mothers represented the extreme fringe of popular anti-Semitism when she warned of “200,000 Communist Jews at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country. If they are admitted they will rape every woman and child that is left unprotected.” No less than Ted Cruz, whose proposal to admit only Syrian Christians met with wide censure, or Donald Trump, whose acquiescence to the notion of registering and tracking Muslim Americans earned equally widespread condemnation, this person was a fair representative of contemporary extremism, if not necessarily of majority opinion.

Closer to the anti-Semitic mainstream, the America First Committee found deep pockets of support in the late 1930s when it excoriated Jews for pushing the United States into the European conflict. Many Americans agreed with the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who argued that Jews’ “greatest danger to this country lie in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government” and applauded when Sen. Gerald Nye initiated a Senate investigation into Hollywood war-mongering. True, most Americans did not fear Jewish violence, per se (though some clearly did). But they believed that Jews were powerful enough to send their boys off to slaughter in Europe.

More customary tropes also wound their way into mainstream political discourse. John Rankin, an influential House member from Mississippi, recycled an oldie but goodie when he warned that “Wall Street and a little group of our international Jewish brethren” were stirring up support for armed intervention. (Like many anti-Semites, Rankin was ideologically confused; he also denounced “kikes” for being hardened Communists.) His colleague, Rep. Hamilton Fish of New York, lent support to the proto-fascist Silver Shirts when he mailed their reproduction of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to constituents under his congressional frank, while Rep. Martin Dies of Texas helpfully reminded the House that it was not technically a crime to be anti-Semitic.

More generically, it was common in respectable circles to hear Jews scorned as unassimilable, “undesirable aliens,” as one Michigan newspaper framed the matter. Oregon’s Portland News echoed customary support for the strict immigration quotas that Congress had imposed in 1924 when it identified Jews as a danger to America’s “racial” and “social” unity. The exiles simply would not “make real Americans” or adopt “American principles of democratic government.” In Pennsylvania, the Allentown Chronicle and News held European Jews accountable for their own fate, blaming their “downfall” on an “inability” to fit in with “any other race.” Harsh though this opinion strikes the modern reader, in the months directly preceding Kristallnacht, polling revealed that half of all Americans shared this opinion.

Perhaps the most legitimate objection to admitting Jewish refugees was their seeming inability to provide for themselves upon arrival. Because the Nazi government expropriated all wealth and property from German and Austrian Jewish exiles, the typical refugee was quite literally without a penny to his or her name. Try as they may, representatives of American Jewish defense groups could not persuade the Roosevelt administration to lift an administrative ruling that Herbert Hoover had issued in 1930—the “likely to become a public charge” (LPC) provision that barred immigrants who could not demonstrate self-sufficiency. During the height of the Great Depression, it was politically inexpedient to fiddle with such a popular proviso.

A survey conducted in July 1939 asked respondents to characterize their position on the “Jewish question.” A plurality (39 percent) affirmed that “Jews have the same standing as any other people, and they should be treated in all ways exactly as any other Americans”; 31 percent thought that “some measures should be taken to prevent Jews from getting too much power in the business world”; 10 percent believed that “Jews are in some ways distinct from other Americans, but they make respected and useful citizens so long as they don’t try to mingle socially where they are not wanted”; and an arresting 10 percent agreed that “we should make it a policy to deport Jews from this country to some new homeland as fast as it can be done without inhumanity.”

In short, most of the elements that conservatives like David Frum cite as differentiating factors between now and then—fear of refugee violence, fear of their inability or desire to assimilate, concern over their economic dependence, suspicion of their ideological alienation and radicalism—were in fact central to the debate over admitting Jewish refugees in the 1930s.

***

The Holocaust did not occur in a vacuum. It stands out as the most horrific example of state criminality in its time and as the iconic example of modern genocide. But considering it in its own context is instructive for present-day purposes.

Between 1939 and 1945, over 36 million Europeans died of war-related causes, 19 million of whom were civilians (roughly 6 million of whom, in turn, were Jewish victims of the Holocaust). Much as fighting in Syria and Iraq has leveled entire cities and national infrastructures, a large portion of Europe in 1945 lay in ruins. In the former Soviet Union, over 70,000 towns and 40,000 miles of railroad track were reduced to smoldering ruins. Yugoslavia saw half of its livestock, three-quarters of its bridges and a quarter of its homes and apartments destroyed. In Poland, entire cities, like Warsaw, and three-quarters of rail lines lay wasted. As tempting as it may be to look at Palmyra and Damascus and to imagine their plight as uniquely Middle Eastern, recent history tells us otherwise.

Between 1939 and 1945, Germany and the Soviet Union displaced over 30 million civilians—some by expulsion or resettlement, others by deliberate economic privation. The result of this population upheaval was profound and lasting. At the start of World War II, Europe was still principally comprised of diverse states, large and small, in which citizens of different ethnic and religious backgrounds had for many centuries lived, and continued to live, alongside each other.

All of that changed. With notable exceptions like Yugoslavia, which remained multi-ethnic and multinational until its dissolution 40 years later, most European states emerged from the war with borders and populations that produced greater ethnic and religious homogeneity. Italy was more Italian, Poland more Polish, Romania more Romanian than they had been before—in large part because boundaries and people were moved, and human beings were killed in the millions. Today’s ethnic atrocities in Syria and Iraq—between Shia and Sunni; against Yazidis, Christians and Kurds—and the porousness of Middle Eastern borders find much precedent in the chaos that prevailed throughout large parts of Europe just seven decades ago.

Jews, who comprised over 30 percent of civilian deaths, were by far the greatest victims of the Europe’s Second World War. They were a marked and hunted minority nearly everywhere they lived, for whom there is no singular parallel today. But inasmuch as they were displaced, besieged, murdered and targeted, they found themselves in a position not entirely dissimilar from Syrians and Iraqis who are members of the wrong ethnic or religious group in the wrong city; who have lost their homes and livelihoods; whose families have been subjected to systematic rape, torture and execution; and who, quite literally, have nowhere else to go.

No historic analogy is perfect. But for purposes of empathy and understanding, how perfect does it need to be?

Just as conservatives are sometimes selective in their historical memory, so are liberals. Between 1933 and 1945, the United States admitted just 132,000 European Jewish refugees—only 10 percent of the total permitted by law. To those individuals who found a home in America, admission meant everything. But in the grand panoramic, they represented a minuscule number of displaced and murdered civilians, Jewish and gentile alike. Had the United States admitted its full immigration quota, Europe would still have continued its death spiral. To enact a generous immigration policy and extend a warm welcome to Syrian refugees is the right thing to do, but it does not end the conversation.

It required a massive commitment of resources and lives to end World War II and rebuild the European continent. Today, no one knows how to replicate this effort in the Middle East, or whether there is a will to do so. In this regard, history offers us little direction.