Were the Dodge Brothers Jewish?

There is a persistent claim that comes up every once in a while, that the Dodge brothers – founders of the famous Dodge car brand – were jewish. This seems to be based entirely on unevidenced surmise from the following Dodge logo:

Now this was indeed the Dodge company’s logo, but it was actually their second logo from 1914 to 1939 even though it began to get phased out as early as 1929.

The first Dodge company logo from 1900 to 1914 was as follows:

Now clearly if you join the points together diagonally you could easily get the star of David which is likely where the 1914 to 1939 Dodge logo comes from, but despite the local claims that this is ‘proof’ that the Dodge brothers were jewish like Citroen car company founder Andre Citroen. The simple truth is that no one who is familiar with the history of the Dodge brothers thinks they were jewish as Charles Hyde’s biography of them has demonstrated in some detail. (1) They were in fact of English descent from the county of Somerset who came over to the early English colonies in North America in 1629 and landed in the infamous town of Salem, Massachusetts. (2)

Thus, we know the Dodge brothers were not jewish but were in fact of ancient English stock and it would be a travesty to claim they were anything else.

But then what of the Dodge brother’s second logo?

Well as Hyde explains:

‘During the Middle Ages, the symbol stood for the mystical union of the body and the soul, of truth and beauty, and of other dualisms. The symbol is especially appropriate for John and Horace Dodge, since a triangle represents the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, delta. On the Dodge Brothers logo, the triangle pointing up is white, supposedly representing the soul, while the triangle pointing down is blue and stands for the body. This is not a Star of David and does not refer to Judaism in any way.’ (3)

As it turns out this mistake may have come about as the result of Henry Ford’s rivalry with the Dodge brothers and seems to have been the first to misidentify the Dodge brothers as being jewish in the ‘Dearborn Independent’ on the basis of this logo. (4)

The truth – as Hyde points out – is there is ‘not one shred of evidence’ to support the differing and competing theories that the Dodge brothers were jewish, that they were forced to adopt the logo by jewish bankers to whom they owed money nor that they adopted the symbol to ‘spite their anti-Semitic rival’ Henry Ford. (5)

Nor is this hard to discover since it is routinely pointed out by both jewish and car industry history publications and websites (6) so it is just a case of old and unchecked allegations being widely repeated with one piece of superficial and non-validated ‘evidence’ in support of them.

References

(1) Charles Hyde, 2005, The Dodge Brothers: The Men, the Motor Cars, and the Legacy’, 1st Edition, Wayne State University Press: Detroit, pp. 1-5

(2) You can find the entire Dodge family tree in Ibid., pp. 209-210

(3) Ibid., p. 125

(4) Ibid., p. 124

(5) Ibid.

(6) For example: https://www.jta.org/jewniverse/2015/why-dodges-original-logo-was-a-jewish-star; https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_840461; https://reedbrothersdodgehistory.com/2013/06/18/dodge-brothers-emblem/; https://www.jeffbelzerrosevillecdjr.com/dodge-logo-history/