There was one ethnic group, however, for whom Reuben expressed lifelong dislike and distrust—the Jewish people. In a 1942 letter to Herbert Hoover, he said the Jews "are brilliant, they are able, they are unscrupulous, and they are cruel." Part of the explanation for his anti-Semitism was personal and part political.

He expressed contempt for "the foul sewage of Europe" in his 1898 valedictory, yet Mormons had traditionally gotten along very well with the small population of Jews in Utah. His anti-Jewish attitudes apparently crystallized after he moved to New York City in 1903.

There, in his thirties, Reuben confronted a large Jewish population for the first time in his life. His enrollment at Columbia introduced him to the intense competition of law students, while at the same time he had to interact with the city's Jews. The undergraduate dean starkly and publicly acknowledged a common attitude of that time: “Isn't Columbia overrun with European Jews, who are most unpleasant persons socially? In Reuben's later law practice in Manhattan, Jewish businessmen numbered among his clients and antagonists in legal cases, and his experiences with them were not always pleasant.

Perhaps most important in the personal side of his anti-Jewish attitudes, he experienced two humiliating defeats for a Senate nomination in the 1920s at the hands of a Jewish opponent, Ernest Bamberger. Reuben was convinced that Jewish money corrupted the political process in these two elections. This followed Simon Bamberger's service as Utah's first Jewish governor, whose tenure led to an anti-Semitic backlash in Utah, including the appearance of the Ku Klux Klan.

. . .

Nevertheles, Reuben made notations in his First Presidency office diary about meeting "a typical Jew banker of the worst type" or "a glib Jew army officer." In a letter to his wife, Lute, he referred to an English lord as "a jew I believe, but a rather nice one 'they say'" As late as 1957, he wrote that one of his opponents in a ranching dispute was "a jew." As Douglas F. Tobler observed, "Traditional Mornon religious sympathy seemed to have had little influence on his thinking about Jewish matters."

. . .

Beyond whatever personal reasons Reuben had for his anti-Semitism, there was clearly a political dimension to his attitudes. Some of the most prominent radicals to his knowledge were Jews.

. . .

In these few, sensational examples of Jewish radicalism, President Clark thought he perceived the basic character of the Jewish people. He

told ex-president Hoover in 1942 that the Jews "are essentially revolutionary, but they are not statesmen." Thirty-two percent of surveyed Americans shared his view.