The third chapter contains what Ford considered the foundational argument of the entire series: that 'the Jewish Question' was not a religious question at all but a national and racial one. Ford argued that Jewish identity was primarily an ethnic and national identity — a peoplehood — and only secondarily a religious practice. As evidence, he cited statements from prominent Jewish leaders themselves. He quoted Justice Louis Brandeis, who had 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 cited this as evidence that Brandeis himself had acknowledged that Jews maintained a primary loyalty to the Jewish people as a national entity.
Ford also quoted Rabbi Isaac Leeser, the prominent 19th-century American Jewish leader, and Mayer Levi, a Jewish writer, both of whom had written about the importance of preserving Jewish national identity as distinct from and separate from the religious practices of Judaism. Ford's argument was that because Jewish identity was fundamentally national — a people with its own interests, its own loyalty structure, and its own long-term objectives — the presence of a large, organized, and economically powerful Jewish community in America represented a potential conflict of interest that Americans had a right to examine and discuss publicly.
Ford devoted a substantial portion of Chapter 3 to documenting what he called 'attacks on Christianity' that he attributed to Jewish cultural and intellectual influence. He began with what he described as Jewish role in financing and promoting anti-Christian literature during the Enlightenment, citing Voltaire (whose anti-clerical writings Ford claimed were supported by Jewish financial backers in Amsterdam and London). He then moved to the 19th century, citing the Higher Criticism movement — the academic biblical scholarship originating primarily in German Protestant universities that subjected the scriptures to historical and textual analysis — as a movement that had received disproportionate Jewish support and participation, with the intention of weakening Christian faith by undermining the literal reliability of the biblical text.
Ford also cited what he characterized as Jewish influence in the American Civil Liberties Union, then newly founded (1920), and argued that its challenges to the teaching of Christianity in public schools represented an organized effort to secularize American public life. He noted the involvement of Felix Frankfurter (then a Harvard law professor, later a Supreme Court Justice), Louis Marshall (president of the American Jewish Committee), and other prominent Jewish lawyers and civic leaders in challenges to mandatory Bible reading and prayer in public schools. Ford characterized these legal challenges not as expressions of principled religious neutrality but as targeted attacks on Christianity by a minority community that did not share the majority's religious tradition.
Ford then addressed the common response to these claims — that Jews were historically victims of Christian persecution, and that any Jewish efforts to limit Christian influence in public life were understandable defensive reactions to centuries of oppression. Ford argued that this framing reversed the actual historical causation: that Jewish commercial and financial power had, throughout history, generated friction with the societies in which Jews lived, and that the persecutions Jews experienced were in many cases reactions to the exercise of that power rather than unprovoked religious hostility. Ford was careful to say that he was not justifying persecution but that he was challenging what he called 'the victim narrative' as a complete and accurate account of Jewish-Gentile historical relations.