The third chapter holds what Ford saw as the core argument of the whole series: that 'the Jewish Question' was not a religious question but a national and racial one. Ford argued that Jewish identity was first an ethnic and national identity — a peoplehood — and only second a religious practice. For proof, he quoted prominent Jewish leaders themselves. He cited Justice Louis Brandeis, who said in a 1915 address: 'Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with Patriotism. Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent... There is no inconsistency between loyalty to America and loyalty to Jewry.' Ford took this as Brandeis admitting that Jews held a primary loyalty to the Jewish people as a nation.
Ford also quoted Rabbi Isaac Leeser, a leading 19th-century American Jewish figure, and Mayer Levi, a Jewish writer. Both had written about keeping Jewish national identity separate from the religious practice of Judaism. Ford's point was that Jewish identity was national at its root — a people with its own interests, its own loyalties, and its own long-term goals. So a large, organized, and wealthy Jewish community in America was, he said, a possible conflict of interest that Americans had a right to examine and discuss in public.
Ford spent a large part of Chapter 3 on what he called 'attacks on Christianity' that he blamed on Jewish cultural and intellectual influence. He started with what he described as a Jewish role in funding and promoting anti-Christian writing during the Enlightenment. He cited Voltaire, whose anti-clerical work Ford claimed was backed by Jewish financiers in Amsterdam and London. He then moved to the 19th century and the Higher Criticism movement — academic Bible scholarship, mostly from German Protestant universities, that studied the scriptures through history and textual analysis. Ford said this movement got outsized Jewish support and took part in it to weaken Christian faith by casting doubt on the literal reliability of the Bible.
Ford also pointed to what he called Jewish influence in the American Civil Liberties Union, then brand new (1920). He argued that its challenges to teaching Christianity in public schools were an organized push to secularize American life. He named Felix Frankfurter (then a Harvard law professor, later a Supreme Court Justice), Louis Marshall (president of the American Jewish Committee), and other well-known Jewish lawyers and civic leaders who fought against required Bible reading and prayer in public schools. Ford did not treat these lawsuits as fair-minded religious neutrality. He treated them as targeted attacks on Christianity by a minority that did not share the majority's faith.
Ford then took on the usual reply to these claims — that Jews had long been victims of Christian persecution, and that any Jewish effort to limit Christianity in public life was an understandable defense after centuries of oppression. Ford argued this got the cause and effect backwards. He said Jewish commercial and financial power had, over history, created friction with the societies Jews lived in, and that many persecutions were reactions to that power rather than unprovoked religious hatred. Ford was careful to say he was not excusing persecution. He was challenging what he called 'the victim narrative' as a full and accurate account of Jewish-Gentile history.