A Tribe Apart: Jews of the American South

They are not the Jews of bagels and lox brunches with the Sunday New York Times. They do not necessarily get the humor of a Woody Allen movie and are as likely to salivate over a dinner of fried chicken, collard greens, sweet potato pie and iced tea as they are to crave a repast of matzoh-ball soup, pastrami on rye, side knish and glass of Dr. Brown`s.

They are the Jews of the American South, fundamentally different from their Northern cousins, and not simply because, historically, they assimilated more quickly and intermarried more frequently.

If the South, as Wilber J. Cash puts it in his classic The Mind of the South, is “part of America and yet set apart most definitely from America, a nation within a nation,” then Southern Jews likewise are part of American Jewry but distinct, a people within a people.

Southern Jews have had a disproportionate effect on the history of their region. “Though Jews never comprised more than 1 percent of the South`s population,” writes Louis Schmier in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, “few phases of the Southern experience and few places in the South escaped their influence.”

And Southern Jews displayed an almost visceral connection to the land never quite equaled by their Northern counterparts. “In the North,” noted the Southern-born writer Eli Evans (whose landmark portrait of Southern Jewry, The Provincials, has just been reissued by University of North Carolina Press), “the seamstresses and tailors worked to get their children up and out of the ghettos and to Long Island. In the South the fathers wanted to build businesses to keep their sons at home.”

The key to understanding the Jews of the South is to grasp the sense of “otherness” that has always been at the center of their lives.

“Being Jewish in the South,” according to Evans, “is like being Gentile in New York. “What I mean by that is that Jews in the South live as a minority in a majority culture. The schools close on Jewish holidays in New York; they don`t in the South. The generation of my friends in New York played stickball in the streets of the East Side while I was picking blackberries in the backyard. They were upwardly mobile; we wanted roots.”

How is the South best defined? The answer has changed significantly over the years, and in fact still depends largely on whom one asks.

The U.S. Census Bureau classifies as Southern a wide swatch of states that includes West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. Others prefer a cultural to a strictly geographical definition, such as the one suggested by John and Dale Reed in 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South – “a solid core from the Carolinas to Louisiana; some shakiness in Florida, Arkansas, Kentucky and Virginia; and a sphere of influence along the border from Delaware to Missouri. Texas and Oklahoma are marginal...”

The first Jewish settlements of note in the South were those of Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina in the closing decades of the 17th century. The numbers were minuscule – barely a handful of families – but in general Jewish immigration to the U.S. wa virtually non-existent: even a hundred years later, at the time of the Revolutionary War, the country was home to no more than 2,500 Jews, most of them residing in the Northeast.

Slowly, though, a Jewish presence was making itself felt in the lower colonies well in advance of the mass immigrations from Europe that commenced in the late 1800`s. In 1783, for example, Isaiah Isaacs and Jacob Cohen, a pair of Jewish merchants from Richmond, Virginia, commissioned the legendary explorer Daniel Boone to charter thousands of acres of land in Kentucky, thereby helping to open the vast, previously unclaimed territories of the West.

On the back of the receipt Boone signed in exchange for his cash payment, Isaacs noted and dated the translation in Yiddish – a historical tidbit left unmentioned in the various movie and television accounts of Boone`s exploits.

By 1800 there were more Jews in Charleston than in any other U.S. city, and South Carolina`s Jewish population exceeded 1,000 – making the state home to better than one in five American Jews. It was in Charleston that Germany`s Reform movement would establish its first American foothold, a harbinger of what by century`s end would be the near total dominance of Reform Judaism in the South.

Southern Jews were for the most part left alone by their non-Jewish neighbors, though life was far from easy for those who wished to maintain a ritualistically meaningful lifestyle. The flavor of the times is conveyed in a letter written in 1791 by a woman named Rebecca Samuels, whose husband owned a silversmith shop in Petersburg, Virginia, to her parents in Germany:

"We have a shochet who goes to market and buys treif food. On Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the people worship here without one sefer [Torah]. And not one wore the tallit, except my Sammy's godfather....We do not know what the Sabbath and the Holidays are. On the Sabbath, all the Jewish shops are open....

"As for the Gentiles, we have nothing to complain about. You cannot know what a wonderful country this is for the common man. People can live here peacefully."

The Jews who lived in the South in the 18th and 19th centuries were almost without exception peddlers and merchants – by the 1890`s their importance to the region`s economic well-being was such that a Georgia newspaper noted, with clumsy gratitude, “Where there are no Jews there is no money” – but in the decades immediately following the Civil War they played an increasingly prominent role in the South`s political and social life as well.

The loyalties of American Jews during the Civil War were divided along geographic lines, with the contribution of Southern Jews to the Confederate war effort deemed crucial enough for General Robert E. Lee to turn down requests for High Holiday furloughs.

As Lee put it in a letter to a Virgina rabbi, “Neither you nor any other member of the Jewish congregation would wish to jeopardize a cause you have so much at heart by the withdrawal, even for a season, of a portion of its defenders.”

The dominant Jewish personality of the Confederate South was Judah P. Benjamin, described by one writer as the “most important American-Jewish diplomat before Henry Kissinger, the most eminent lawyer before Brandeis, the leading figure in martial affairs before Hyman Rickover, the greatest American-Jewish orator, and the most influential Jew ever to take a seat in the United States Senate.”

The son of an English Jewish father and a Portuguese Jewish mother, Benjamin became a senator in 1852 and a year later was offered a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, an appointment he declined in favor of continuing his career as a legislator and one of the South`s most vociferous voices on behalf of slavery. Benjamin would fill several key posts in the Confederate government – attrney general, secretary of war and, finally, secretary of state – before escaping to England when the South lost the war.

Southern Jews were neither more nor less likely to own slaves than their Christian neighbors, though on an individual basis Jews tended to treat blacks with an empathy unusual for Southern whites of the era, and they would continue to do so long after the abolition of slavery.

In a perverse way, the persecution of blacks in the South served to deflect many potential problems from the region`s Jews. Bertram Korn, a prominent scholar of Southern Jewry, argued that blacks “acted as an escape valve in Southern society. The Jews gained in status and security from the very presence of this large mass of defenseless victims who were compelled to absorb all of the prejudices which might otherwise have been expressed more frequently in anti-Jewish sentiment.”

Approximately 40,000 Jews, most of them German immigrants, made their way to the South in the fifty years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I. The entrepreneurial and business skills of this group made the words “Jew” and “shopkeeper” synonymous in the Southern mind, and their names lived on long after they themselves were gone: the Rich brothers in Georgia, the Thalhimers in Virginia, the Godchaux family in Louisiana, the Levine brothers in North Carolina, Neiman and Marcus in Texas.

And then there were men like Oscar Straus and Adolph Ochs, who would go on to bigger and better things elsewhere only after their forebears had first carved a niche for themselves in the South. Straus, whose father was a peddler in Georgia, eventually became the owner of R.H. Macy`s in New York; Ochs, whose mother was a charter member of Chattanooga`s United Daughters of the Confederacy, bought The New York Times and turned it into a journalistic institution.

Further highlighting the accomplishments of the region`s Jews: no fewer than two dozen Southern towns are named for Jewish peddlers or landowners, among them Marks, Mississippi; Kaplan, Louisiana; and historic Manassas, Virginia.

Of the various changes that marked the day-to-day lives of 20th century Southern Jews, two stand out, one internal, the other external.

Internally, the staunchly anti-Zionist mindset of the community – “For the majority of Southern Jews and their rabbis,” wrote Malcolm Stern, “America was their Zion, and they wanted no other” – was reversed over time, with the 1967 Six-Day War in particular triggering an avalanche of emotion and pride.

Externally, there was an appreciable drop in anti-Jewish sentiment among non-Jewish Southerners, and along with that a reduction in the number of anti-Semitic incidents.

Not that violence against Jews was ever a pressing problem in the South; even taking into account the infamous lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915 and a flurry of synagogue bombings at the height of the Civil Rights movement, attacks on Southern Jews and Jewish property were notable for their infrequency. Even the Ku Klux Klan, with rare exceptions, chose to harass Jews verbally rather than physically.

The phenomenon of hardened white racists harboring a relatively benign attitude when it came to Jews was typified by Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham, Alabama commissioner of public safety whose dogs and fire hoses became internationally recognized symbols of Southern racism in the 1960`s. At a law enforcement conference organized after the first wave of the aforementioned synagogue bombings, a perplexed Connor drawled, “Nigras, maybe, but Jews – why?”

Just as Israel`s military victories helped do away with Southern Jewry`s tradition of anti-Zionism, so too did the Jewish state`s success on the battlefield dispel some myths about Jews long held by the general public.

“The State of Israel,” wrote Eli Evans, “profoundly changed the image of the Jew in the South.The underdog region, celebrated for the fierceness of the [Confederate army] against the overwhelming odds of Yankee cannons and superior numbers, deeply admired the Israeli courage when outmanned and, above all, respected a winner.”

A legislator from a Southern state relished telling the story of the time, shortly after the Six-Day War, an admitted Ku Klux Klan member visited his office and noticed a newspaper photo of Moshe Dayan lying on the desk. The Klansman pointed to the picture and said, “I admire that man more than anyone else in the world today except for George Wallace.”

Fundamentalist, Bible-based religion has played a major role in the South`s embrace of Israel. When Flonnie Maddox, mother of the rabidly segregationist Georgia governor Lester Maddox, visited Israel in the late 1960`s, a hawkish Israeli boasted to her, “One day we`ll have Jordan.” To which the devout Mrs. Maddox replied, “You`ll have every inch of it. God said you would.”

With increased acceptance came the inevitable downside of intermarriage and assimilation, and in those departments Southern Jews had about a 50-year jump on Jews in the rest of the country. The result was an epidemic of synagogue closings throughout the South over the second half of the 20th century, particularly in towns whose Jewish populations were too small to sustain anything approaching a communal infrastructure.

And yet, thanks in no small measure to a resurgence of Orthodoxy in areas long thought inhospitable, vibrant Jewish communities can be found in a number of large Southern cities. The situation looks even brighter if one goes by the Census Bureau`s definition of Dixie and adds the Jews of Texas and Florida to the mix.

The South`s Jewish population, Evans recently noted, “has tripled in size since I first started writing about it in 1970 – from 382,000 to an estimated 1,200,000 in 2004. Atlanta is now one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in America, growing from 16,000 and three congregations when I first wrote about in 1969 to well over 100,000 and thirty-seven congregations today. Austin, Texas, has grown from 500 Jews when I was first writing about it to 15,000 to 18,000 today....The Research Triangle of the Durham-Chapel Hill-Raleigh area has quadrupled in the last twenty years and Charlotte is well on its way to becoming the Atlanta of the twenty-first century. The Jacksonville-Tampa-Orlando area is also growing dramatically.”

The late Harry Golden, editor of the Carolina Israelite and self-styled bard of Southern Jewry, liked to say that “there were Jews in the South before there was a South.”

Nearly a quarter-century after Golden`s death one can add that there are more Jews than ever in the South no matter how you define the South.

-- Jason Maoz is senior editor of The Jewish Press. He can be contacted at jmaoz@jewishpress.com.

It goes both ways.

I knew a former Federal LEO, (a pretty high up one too), who told me that when he lived in Atlanta, his next door neighbor was Jewish. He said he was the best neighbor he ever had.

On the other hand he lived in New York at one time and moved into a mostly Jewish neighborhood. When they found out he was from Georgia, they were invariably rude and hostile to him.

reference: "the wrong end of a horse",rotflmRao!

that reminds me of the unexpurgeated definition of a horseshow:

"HORSESHOW, n., an event where a lot of pretty horses show their @sses to a bunch of horses@sses, that show horses."

free dixie,sw

My family have never been joiners, except for professional associations. My grandparents refused to let my mother make her debut at the PDC, they did not want her running with that crowd.

My great aunt was a member so as a child I wound up over there more than once with a miniature tie on. Blah. East Lake had summer camps a great pool and a golf course. Better.

>>It goes both ways.

I knew a former Federal LEO, (a pretty high up one too), who told me that when he lived in Atlanta, his next door neighbor was Jewish. He said he was the best neighbor he ever had.

On the other hand he lived in New York at one time and moved into a mostly Jewish neighborhood. When they found out he was from Georgia, they were invariably rude and hostile to him.<<

I haven't experience outright hostility but I've spent some time in Cambridge and Pasadena and I've seen some normally level headed scientists begin speaking slower when they find out I live in Georgia. :)

On the other hand I spent some time in Greenville in 1984 and asked to join a basketball game that was forming that had 9 guys - seemed like a perfect opportunity. One of the white guys asked if I was stupid or couldn't count. Even with me there were only 4 white guys and 6 black guys so they were about to flip a coin to see who got the court - they never considered the possibility of dividing any other way except white versus black.

So the black guys won the coin flip and the white guys left but I asked if I could stay and play. The white guys gave me really dirty looks as they left and the black guys were really suspicious. One of them said "you're not from around here are you?" I said I was from Atlanta and he oh, like Martin Luther King... and they looked at each other and let me play.

Go figure.

>>Funny. My old line Southern mother always taught me the Jews were God's chosen people.<<

And my grandmother told me the same thing.

I'm not trying to be sweepingly negative - I'm just saying I saw some anti-semitism growing up and there is still some here now.

Surely some of those feelings were reciprocated by many Jews of the same generation. Ethnic New York was a very tribal place where many immigrants only really trusted their own. I really doubt the ill-feelings or hostility were all on one side, especially if all you're talking about is grumbling after outsiders have left the room.

BTW, as long as I'm on the thread, the Jewish military cemetery in Richmond was a section of the older Hebrew Cemetery on Shockoe Hill. I don't know if that makes it so different from other Jewish cemeteries where soldiers are buried or military cemeteries where Jewish veterans are buried. There were other Jewish military cemetery in the world, in Poland and Ukraine before the Nazis destroyed them.

Historically, where you have one great dividing line separating people, newcomers can be more readily accepted if they fall on the "right" side of the dividing line and make a contribution to that side. You can see the same phenomenon in South Africa, where Jews were quite successful in the early days of the country. Where society is more homogeneous or where it's fragmented along many different lines, each group tends to look out more for its own.

During the civil war there were 150,000 Jews in both the north and south, of that population, only ten percent, or 15,000 resided in the confederacy, versus 135,000 in the north."

There were actually about 25,000 of them in the South then. That brings the ratio to nearly the same on each of the two sides.

From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America (Library of Congress)

And most of those who enlisted in the South were recent immigrants who were out to prove their worth to their new neighbors."

Below excerpted from: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:5f2JxEgDAlAJ:www.iahushua.com/JQ/slaves.html+civil+war+enlistment+of+jews+in+the+north+and+south&hl=en

"...Only ten percent of the 150,000 American Jews at the time of the Civil War lived in the South."

That controversy was the biggest bunch of B.S. that ever came down the pike.

It was driven entirely by somebody with a connection to the AJC on the board, who was mad at the school for other reasons. (IIRC, the school didn't admit their kid or the kid of a close friend.) The AJC crusaded over that for months and months and convinced everybody it was some sort of anti-semitic plot.

The school in question is a Presbyterian school, and they were within their rights to hire only Presbyterian or only Christian teachers. The Atlanta Jewish families always sent their kids there for the best available education, but if I sent my kid to the Hebrew Academy, I wouldn't demand that they hire Catholics just because I am one . . .

>> The school in question is a Presbyterian school, and they were within their rights to hire only Presbyterian or only Christian teachers. The Atlanta Jewish families always sent their kids there for the best available education, but if I sent my kid to the Hebrew Academy, I wouldn't demand that they hire Catholics just because I am one . . .<<

The Hebrew Acadamy hires Christians for non-religious subjects.

I'm not sure what crowd you were running with, but I went to the same school and probably grew up in the same neighborhoods, and I recall ZERO anti-Jewish sentiment. A good friend of my mom's had her baby two days after mom had me, Suzie and I basically grew up together and were best friends all through school until her family moved to Maryland while we were in high school. She was Jewish. So what. Of my good friends in high school, one was Catholic, two Jewish, a couple of Presbys and a Baptist, and one prided herself on being an agnostic. It just didn't matter. Maybe we all had exceptionally enlightened parents, but I don't think so.

That's their choice; it may also be a function of being unable to find qualified teachers (I have a friend who was on the board over there, and that's the impression I got from him.)

Point is, I have no right to go over there and demand that they hire Christians. The people (one person in particular) who were involved in doing that at our school were classless, nasty, and exploited a religious issue AND an "in" with the Journal Constitution for their own purposes. If they hadn't been stirring the pot night and day for months, nobody would ever have given two flips.

I did not see any anti-Jewish sentiment while at that school, if you look back I said I saw it mainly in the small towns where my family is from.

At that school there was a French teacher who made a joke about "the new german oven that seats 8" but no one responded and the subject never came up again. I was unaware while I was in school there that they would not hire Jews. But I was aware that several of clubs the kid's family's belonged to (including some of my uncles and cousins) would not permit Jews to join.

So just to clarify, before this gets back to the alumni newsletter, I only saw that one incident (the oven joke) during all my years there. In fact, I mentioned that in my ignorence about Jewish last names I had no idea there a significant Jewish percentage in the student body because there were no visible tensions.

Well, I'm ahead of you, because I know of one teacher who told a Jewish kid in my carpool that he would go to Hell if he didn't accept Jesus Christ as his personal saviour.

The kid confided in me, I told him that Mr. X was just a jerk and full of it and that God would never break his promises to Abraham.

He was a jerk all round, the school did get rid of him (not specifically for that, they had plenty of reasons) and hired someone much better in his place.

I never heard the one about the French teacher. But you're always going to have individuals who make thoughtless or malicious remarks, nothing you can do about that except call them on it when it happens.

But as for any sort of general or institutionalized anti-Semitism, didn't happen. In fact there was an institutional effort to include the Jewish kids. I was there under the original headmaster, and he always made a big, big point in any public address of emphasizing the connection between Judaism and Christianity. They had a rabbi in to talk to us about Passover in our OT Bible class, a Succoth booth, etc. etc. My daughter's there now, and it's the same deal.

. . . I wouldn't rat out anybody to the alumni news anyway. Talk about classless!

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