A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

There has been a spate of articles about the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) serving as the preeminent Quaker apologist group for Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist, as well as for the BDS movement.

Usually, accounts begin in 1948, when the UN invited the AFSC to run Palestinian relief in Gaza — a thankless task because of Palestinian resistance to resettlement.

Then the AFSC concentrated on the push for US unilateral nuclear disarmament and sympathy for anti-American dictators, starting with Castro. The AFSC also offered  interfaith seminars propagandizing against Israel. Jewish pupils attending the network of fine Quaker schools and summer camps were indoctrinated.

Most recently, a Palestinian-American, Joyce Ajlouny, has been appointed as the AFSC’s new General Secretary.

Before 1948, some in British and American Quaker officialdom — despite the anti-Nazi heroism of individual Quakers — came perilously close to being propaganda shills for Hitler’s Reich.

After World War I, Quakers had won German gratitude for opposing the Versailles Peace Treaty as well as helping feed starving Germans. As Rufus Jones proudly put it in 1940: “the Quakers are the only religious people who have been undisturbed during the entire Hitler Regime.”

The Quakers’ record regarding German Jews was mixed. In 1931, the German Yearly Meeting wrote a sympathetic letter to a Berlin synagogue attacked by storm troopers. The Quakers also tried to protect “Non-Aryan Christians” — Christians of Jewish origin and children of mixed Christian-Jewish parentage — from Nazi persecution. But initially, the AFSC was reluctant to finance shelters for Jews who fled Hitler.

In Berlin, American Quaker Corder Catchpool at first confronted Nazis directly for mistreatment of Jews. Soon, he decided that cultivating friendships with the Nazi elite would do more good. During the early years before Pearl Harbor, American Quakers stepped up the refugee relief efforts, especially in Vichy and German-occupied France. They also established “hostels” to help thousands of refugees adjust to the US.

Unfortunately, influential British Quakers like George Lansbury and Lord Hurtwood had openly favored appeasing the Hitler regime. They tried to use Eleanor Roosevelt’s friendships with Quakers like AFSC Executive Director Clarence Pickett to convince President Roosevelt to hold a summit with Hitler. They supported the Munich settlement. After war broke out, Quaker emissary Benjamin Heinrich Unruh pleaded with Hitler to be merciful by deporting four million Jews to Madagascar!

In December 1938, the Quaker representative in Berlin, Howard Elkinton, met with three American Quakers who arrived in Germany on what was supposed to be a secret mission. News got out, with Goebbels ridiculing “the three wise men.” They were granted a meeting at Gestapo headquarters, where Nazis gave them empty promises not to interfere with Quaker operations. Quaker publications in the US seized on this as “a miracle wrought by the way of love.”

In 1947, the AFSC and British Friends Service Council were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a publicity bonanza for Quakerdom. Yet despite their mixed record, Quakers did some good during the Holocaust — if not after.

Historian Harold Brackman is coauthor with Ephraim Isaac of From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans (Africa World Press, 2015).