THE JEWISH SOUTH

The children of Israel, down in Dixie.

In an 1899 essay, “Concerning the Jews,” Mark Twain wrote of the “immense Jewish population” of the United States—“down to the least little village.” Rabin’s engaging study confirms Twain’s assessment by documenting throughout the South the breadth of Jewish settlement, from the colonial era to modern times. Rabin is a scholar at Oberlin College, but her prose is light on theory and mostly free of academic jargon, and her deep archival research reveals how Jews participated in and were shaped by a dominant culture in which their status could be uncertain. Jews began to arrive in the South by the early 18th century and were usually afforded the same political rights as white Protestants. This privileged status enabled Jews to hold enslaved people, and they did so in roughly the same proportion as the rest of the white population. Cultural norms could disadvantage Jews (e.g., Sunday closing laws), but the fact that Charleston’s Hebrew Benevolent Society and Hebrew Orphan Society marched in the funeral cortege of pro-slavery Sen. John C. Calhoun shows that Jews were often eager to be seen as “proud white South Carolinians.” Reflecting Enlightenment values, Jewish synagogues and religious practice transformed to reflect the culture Jews hoped to join. Support for the Civil War and later the Lost Cause narrative, though not universal, ran deep. Indeed, during the Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre of 1898, a coup d’etat that forcibly removed the elected biracial government, former Mayor Solomon Fishblate declared, “The choice in this election is between white rule and Negro rule. And I am with the white man, every time!” Yet as the gathering antisemitism of the early 20th century made abundantly clear, Jews could never rest easy. In Rabin’s words, they “were privileged and vulnerable, political powerbrokers and targets of hate crimes.”

A rich account of how the Jewish minority claimed its place in Southern culture even as it retained its identity.