A MULTITHEMATIC APPROACH TO SOUTHERN JEWISH HISTORY
Various interpretations have been employed to explicate immigration and ethnic history, and American Jewish history in particular, many of which underwent challenge or modification. Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted, which emphasized the wrenching immigration experience with its destruction of Old World culture, has been replaced by John Bodnar’s The Transplanted, with its greater recognition of continuity as well as change. Jacob Rader Marcus organized American Jewish history in terms of waves of immigration dominated by specific groups that placed their mark on an era. Now historians, particularly Hasia Diner, recognize overlap across waves, variations within them, and greater diversity. Did Jews find a Haven and Home, as Abraham J. Karp argued, or has the story of acceptance versus discrimination been more problematic? Discussions of degrees of acculturation in relation to the maintenance of tradition are normative. Cliometricians of the 1960s introduced analysis of statistical sources that helped plot, among many things, socioeconomic and geographic mobility patterns of ethnic groups in cities. In recent decades authors have emphasized changing and multiple identities and memory. Today historians debate “whiteness” studies and ask when, how, and why Jews became “white.”
During the last thirty years the dominant theme in southern Jewish historiography has been regional distinctiveness. Frequently contrasting the story of central European Jews in the South with that of east European Jews in New York, historians have described the ways in which adaptation to a unique region and circumstances shape divergent mores and behavior. From this perspective, southern Jewish life appears provincial and exotic. Yes, Jews resided in the South and they were different.1
Since the early 1990s this interpretation has been challenged and remains a bone of contention. Challengers maintain variations always exist, but the more surprising phenomenon is the confluence of southern and American Jewish experiences. This essay describes how southern Jews provided leadership and participated in national Jewish affairs and, with few exceptions, followed national models of Jewish institutional development, economic and civic advancement, and life within a parallel social world. More important, it responds to the question, “Why did Jews replicate the national patterns as much as they did given the seemingly overwhelming local forces for assimilation?” Keys to the answer are family, business, and institutional ties, senses of peoplehood and religious identity, and the constant flow of population. The picture that emerges is of dynamism and movement, repeated rejuvenation and transformation, and cross-regional, national, and international networks. Much here is familiar to specialists and harks back to the business and genealogical emphases of Jacob R. Marcus and his students Bertram W. Korn and Malcolm Stern. This essay breaks new ground by tracing the patterns across periods and making them central to understanding.2
FROM THE COLONIAL TO THE EARLY NATIONAL ERAS
Colonial ties of family, business, and religion spanned America, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. The Spanish and Portuguese congregations in London and Amsterdam served as centers for frontier, periphery communities. They encouraged colonization, provided financing, credit, and brokerage functions, helped combat antisemitism, and offered ritual items, assistance in congregation building, and expertise in questions of halacha (Jewish law) and ritual. The first Jews in the western hemisphere went to the Caribbean, South America, and future American South, although in Spanish, Portuguese, and French territories they had to practice their religion secretly to avoid the Inquisition and French Code Noir, respectively. Scattered Jews like the Monsanto family moved freely along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and to the Caribbean for business and trade opportunities. Few in number, highly mobile, and mostly men, their religious needs, if they perceived any, were met by Sephardic congregations established on the islands.3
Leaders of London’s Bevis Marks Congregation, two of whom were trustees, ignored the orders of the trustees who controlled Georgia and sent Sephardim and Ashkenazim to Savannah in 1733, only months after the colony began. The inclusion of a physician and a Portuguese vintner among the immigrants, and the fact that these people’s financing was guaranteed in a colony partly settled as a refuge for debtors, transformed colonial leader James Oglethorpe into a champion of toleration for the Jews against trustee protestations. Reflecting national identity, Jews from the Germanic states welcomed Lutherans from their homeland. The two Jewish subcommunities attempted to unite to form a congregation and other Jewish institutions partly in response to Christian proselytizing, but splintered into competing factions; one supporting the Portuguese and the other the Ashkenazic rite. Both struggled without a synagogue. Only two Ashkenazic families remained when others fled because of fear the Spanish would overtake the colony during the War of Jenkins Ear and impose the Inquisition on crypto-Jews who had practiced their religion openly in the British domain. Some may have also opposed trustee policy against slavery and traveled north to Charleston and other colonies for opportunity and religious security. The loss of Savannah’s Sephardic population incapacitated K.K. Mikve Israel at the same time it nurtured Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia Jewry. Yet a reverse migration followed. Americanized and more observant Sephardim moved from Charleston to Savannah, and Old World differences lost their edge.4
London Jews who supported Georgia Jewry helped create the Charleston community to which most early Jews emigrated from London or the Caribbean. Thereafter the population mixture changed repeatedly and frequently. Reflecting identical centripetal and centrifugal forces, Charleston (originally Charles Town), like Savannah, temporarily supported two congregations. Incorporated in response to changes in state government policy in 1790, K.K. Mikve Israel and Charleston’s K.K. Beth Elohim used the mother congregation’s Sephardic rite although both had Ashkenazic members. Religious functionaries came from London or Amsterdam. Charleston Jews allied with Huguenots (French Protestants) for rights but limitations were more often de jure than de facto. Acumen in trade marked Jews as desirable residents, and, small in number, they posed little threat to authority. The latter remained true through the Revolution when most Jews joined patriot ranks.5
Multiple transcolonial and international ties stand out. Mordecai Sheftall chose trustees from Savannah, Charleston, New York, Newport, and London for the Savannah community’s second cemetery. Many of Savannah’s and Charleston’s Jews, moving to avoid British occupation, resided in Philadelphia during and after the American Revolution. Several leaders of Philadelphia’s congregation had roots in southern cities. The constitution of Savannah’s Mikve Israel drew on the guidelines of its Philadelphia sister Mikveh Israel and New York’s Shearith Israel. Savannah prayer leader Emanuel De la Motta helped develop Charleston’s K.K. Beth Elohim. New York hazan Gershom Mendes Seixas’s brother was a charter member of Mikve Israel. When Savannah’s Levi Sheftall, representing the congregation, sent a letter to George Washington congratulating him on his inauguration, the four other extant congregations followed using similar language. Certainly variations from community to community reflected local circumstances, but the overwhelming similarities across colonies illustrated this constant movement of people and, with them, ideas and institutions, patterns replicated repeatedly over American Jewish history.
Business failure was routine, and some arrived with the lowly status as one of the hundred or so Jews who bound themselves to others as indentured servants in return for passage to colonial Maryland.6 Nonetheless, the dominant economic story is of success. Such success can be attributed to Old World backgrounds in commerce that were easily applicable to colonial conditions, partnerships and other financial and trade dealings with friends and family, mobility, and relative tolerance, and because Jews fit into important niches. Most Jews in the colonies became merchants or factors who performed middleman services of buying and selling goods and offering credit. Some trade took place with Native Americans, and facility with foreign languages led a few Jews to become translators and work as indian agents. In an area dominated by agriculture, some merchants purchased plantations usually as secondary sources of income. Such purchases symbolized upward mobility.
During the colonial era and thereafter, Jews mixed their merchandising expertise with agriculture and became innovators. Moses Lindo facilitated South Carolina indigo production. In Florida Moses Elias Levy experimented with sugar production as did the Kempner family in Texas. Raphael J. Moses introduced peach sales to the Georgia marketplace. The Levy and Kempner families also illustrate the roles of Jews in land development, railroads, and finance.7
1800 TO THE 1880s
Second-and third-generation Jews acculturated and aspired to upper-class status. Ashkenazim intermarried with Sephardim and, although in the majority, accepted Sephardic rites, with some even claiming the seemingly superior Sephardic lineage. Scions of early families attained a level of culture, education, and affluence that allowed many to become professionals. Jews became doctors and lawyers and ran private educational academies. In Charleston Isaac Harby achieved acclaim as a journalist and literary critic, and Penina Müise wrote as the first American Jewish woman poet.8
The ascension of these Jacksonian Jews had several ramifications. Few in number, scions of the colonial settlers chose between intermarriage, marriage within their group, or life as single individuals. In a tolerant society non-Jews of their class saw them as worthy partners, and many traveled the first path. Children of intermarriages were often raised as Christians and later generations were lost to the faith. Those marrying within the fold established the ranks of the first Jewish families of America. Transcending regional boundaries, these familial bonds were augmented during the 1850s with Jewish immigrants who had begun arriving in the 1820s but who had to acculturate and rise in status before being viewed as eligible partners.9
Newcomers came from the Germanic states and Alsace-Lorraine and, in lesser numbers, from Poland, England, and eastern Europe. Chain migration patterns replicated by later immigrants dominated so that Jewish communities in towns and small cities were typically composed of a few extended families and people from the same areas in Europe. National identity remained important as Jews from Alsace and Lorraine moved to Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta, where the French culture was strong, and those from the Germanic states interacted with fellow Germans, especially in Texas but really throughout the South. Germania societies proliferated, and Jews organized English-Hebrew-German academies.10
The webs of family and place of origin facilitated business and mobility. Starting as peddlers and small shopkeepers or arriving with sufficient resources and contacts to open larger businesses, Jews spread out with westward expansion. As exemplified by the Seligmans and Lehmans, they obtained credit from Jewish wholesalers in Baltimore, Cincinnati, New York, and New Orleans, became financiers, and formed partnerships, which included the creation of satellite stores in surrounding communities and across regions. Jews relocated frequently as some areas declined and others showed potential because of new land development, the building of railroads, or the opening of natural resources.11
Acculturation and economic mobility in a relatively tolerant environment facilitated participation in civic and political life. Jews joined others in charitable societies and won election as sheriffs, city councilmen, and in numerous other local offices. They worked prominently in state common councils during the American Revolution. Joseph Henry was even elected to the North Carolina legislature before restrictions were removed. David Levy Yulee, a pivotal figure in Florida statehood, became its first United States senator. Henry Hyams became lieutenant governor of Louisiana, and Judah P. Benjamin and Benjamin Franklin Jonas served that state in the United States Senate.
Although the newcomers brought a reinfusion of tradition, lacking powerful rabbinic authorities to either thwart or encourage their path, Jacksonian Jews sought change. Americanized, educated Jews on the rise encouraged Charleston’s K.K. Beth Elohim to improve decorum in the service and undertake other reforms to align Jewish practices more closely with middle-class Protestant norms. Aware of similar reforms in Europe, Charlestonian changes paralleled these more than they were influenced by them. Rebuffed by the congregation, the reformers established the Reform Society of Israelites and composed the first Reform prayer book. Although women were not in positions of power, their participation was manifested in numerous decisions. Ultimately, the separate society dissolved and the congregation accepted reforms under Reverend Gustavus Poznanski. Yet reform was wrought with further division. The first traditional congregation to split from a reforming synagogue, Shearith Israel, formed when Beth Elohim installed an organ.12
From the 1820s Charleston gradually declined economically while Baltimore rose during the 1840s and 1850s. Its Jewish community followed the same trajectory. With a larger and more robust Jewish population, Baltimore succeeded Charleston as a center of Reform and innovation. The first ordained rabbi in America fought a rearguard battle for tradition and rabbinic authority in that border city, which housed the first congregation in America, started as what was perceived at the time as Reform. But Reform at Baltimore’s Har Sinai Verein, like Reform under Poznanski, was transmitted from Hamburg, which became a model for both lay-and rabbinic-led change in American congregations. Radical reformer David Einhorn was welcomed to the congregation’s pulpit until his abolitionist views brought him into danger. Baltimore, like New York and Philadelphia, continued to house Orthodox congregations and even a quasi-Conservative rabbi and congregation called the city home.13
In the decades before the Civil War, Charleston, Baltimore, Richmond, and New Orleans functioned as centers, as did Philadelphia and Cincinnati, in a complex matrix. With Charleston’s decline, Jews moved to Columbia, South Carolina, New Orleans, Louisiana, Galveston, Texas, and San Francisco, California, and helped found peripheral congregations. Har Sinai Verein of Baltimore members transmitted their congregation’s rites to Wheeling in western Virginia. Members of the Harby, Labatt, Dyer, and Hyams families from these cities crossed back and forth moving frontiers. North Carolina’s Jewish enclaves “tended to be colonial outposts of . . . the places of first settlement.” Peddlers and shopkeepers went to Baltimore, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York for merchandise that nationalized southern tastes. They also returned with ideas of religious development and spouses who extended the family/business network.14
Organizations and rabbis/reverends acted as agents of the network. Leeser, Isaac M. Wise, and Rebecca Gratz, the most important institution builders of nineteenth-century Jewry, exemplify the national model for local events. Educational curriculum, prayer books, and personal newspapers with correspondents reporting on local events were but the most formal instruments of national communication, even in the absence of organized union in a factious land. Leeser and Wise traveled the South officiating at weddings and other events, and used the occasions to encourage the creation and expansion of congregations. Southern Jews actively participated in and followed the national conferences aimed to forge union that ultimately attempted to define Reform. They joined Wise’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations and sent money to his rabbinical seminary, Hebrew Union College. Gratz’s Sunday schools, curriculum materials, and Hebrew ladies benevolent societies spread to Charleston, Savannah, and Kentucky, through her family members and friends, and from those cities throughout the South. The sense of sisterhood engendered was a palpable tool for networking. Like the men’s benevolent societies, the women sent funds to the needy and to institutions throughout the country. Besides raising money for their own congregations, they routinely allocated donations to others building sanctuaries. Correspondence and visits fostered camaraderie and further overcame provincialism. B’nai B’rith lodges and other fraternities played similar roles besides reinforcing networks through national conferences. The first Jewish orphans’ and widows’ home in America was founded in New Orleans during the 1850s in response to yellow fever epidemics. The home and ultimately B’nai B’rith’s district orphanages drew national support and clients from peripheral communities.15
Indeed philanthropy acted as a major tool of identity, unity, and organizational development. After accumulating wealth in New Orleans, Rhode Island-born Jacob Touro bequeathed his fortune to synagogues and other Jewish institutions in the United States and Palestine. Rosanna Dyer Osterman moved from Baltimore to Texas and conducted business so successfully after her husband’s death that she was able to follow Touro’s lead with major bequests to create new and support existing congregations and benevolent societies in far-flung communities.16
Rabbinic power and religious practices were in a muddled state during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Lacking an ordained rabbinate, congregations had acclimated to lay governance. Congregations hired ordained and less formally trained religious leaders who frequently came into conflict with recalcitrant laymen. Friction over the nature and degree of Reform and tradition exacerbated tensions as one faction or the other wrestled control. Consequently a peripatetic clergy crossing sectional lines became the rule. A few rabbis and laymen also edited regional newspapers to supplement national Jewish media coverage. In 1885 rabbis in the South, emulating a New York-based organization, created a union that served as a precursor of the Central Conference of American rabbis, the national organization of Reform rabbis. These happenings were made possible by communications across regional lines and, in turn, facilitated them.17
Compared to European communal control, American Judaism lacked formal unity and structure. Nonetheless national and international events precipitated significant interaction among Jews and a sense of identity as a people transcending national borders. Protestations against the Swiss Treaty, the Damascus incident, and the Mortara affair occurred haphazardly, but illustrated communications between individuals and congregations and the integral part played by Jews in the South. Scion of colonial businessmen of the Atlantic world and hazanim in New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, Gershom Kursheedt, who had been influenced by Leeser and who, in turn, influenced Touro, represented American congregations in negotiations with the Vatican in the last incident along with Sir Moses Montefiore. As joint executors of Touro’s bequests, Kursheedt and Montiore, tied by family bonds, also traveled to the Holy Land to distribute tzedakah (communal charity) and found a hospital. James K. Guttheim, a Reform rabbi for synagogues in Cincinnati and New York, worked with traditionalist Kursheedt in New Orleans in the protest and in behalf of the New Orleans Jewish Widows and Orphans Home. Guttheim helped establish the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, a direct result of the ineffectiveness of the Mortara protest and the first long-term national American Jewish organization.18
The Board of Delegates began on the eve of the Civil War, and southerners attended the first meeting in New York in 1860. Although the organization did not unify all of American Jewry, it stands in stark contrast to the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian denominations that had already divided along sectional lines. Yet differences existed. Most Jews shared opinions on slavery, secession, and the Civil War with other southerners, just as Jews in the North conformed to the positions of their adopted region. A few among an elite fought duels of honor, but a larger though still small group manumitted slaves and lived with African Americans in family relationships, practices not necessarily at variance with those of their gentile counterparts.19
However, adaptation typically had an ethnically Jewish slant. Although Jewish slave ownership reflected that of others in similar positions, the high percentage of Jews involved in commerce, uncharacteristic of their non-Jewish neighbors, meant that the majority of Jews who owned slaves did so in the cities rather than on small farms and plantations. Jews and those of Jewish descent prominent in politics, even as they supported the region and however much they had assimilated, had to defend themselves against antisemitic attacks. Robert Rosen finds that the typical Jewish Confederate was a recent German immigrant who peddled or worked in a dry goods store in Louisiana and who was better educated and more cosmopolitan than the usual private. Although Jews had served in the military and some even pursued military careers, as city dwellers employed in merchandising they were less likely to join the cavalry and more likely to become commissary officers than other southerners. Regardless of sectional divisions that rent some families apart, numerous stories are told of Jews helping Jews across regions or traveling to the North for safety. During Reconstruction and thereafter some Jewish women participated in Confederate memorial associations, even serving as officers. The few Jewish Republicans who participated in Reconstruction notwithstanding, congregations like Richmond’s Beth Ahabah, which established Confederate burial memorial areas in their cemeteries, more closely reflected southern Jewish opinion. Yet after the war Hebrew benevolent societies, congregations, and other Jewish organizations concentrated on their missions and hardly otherwise mentioned Reconstruction and the Lost Cause.20 None of these provisos negate the identity of Jews in the South with the South. Rather they place that identity in the perspective of Jewish history.
Indeed in many ways the war and its aftermath exerted a decidedly different impact on Jews than other southerners because of the disproportionate propensity of Jews to be urban merchants. Although Louisiana boasted numerous die-hard Jewish Confederates, in Tennessee and Texas the arrival of federal troops during the war led to the rapid resumption of business with prewar Jewish associates in the North. Jewish soldiers returned to clerk or run businesses. Although the southern economy was shattered, and this influenced trade and profit, resumption of the road to middle-class status for Jews appears to have been rapid. Jewish business and financial ties assisted the rebuilding of the southern credit system through the medium of Jewish storekeepers and wholesale houses. Northern Jewish financiers with ties to European Jewish banking firms and to fellow Jews in the South helped finance the rebuilding and expansion of the southern railroad system.21
The growth of cities and the economic initiative of Jewish merchants contributed to the transformation of the specialized dry goods store into the giant department store. Jewish, family-owned department stores with innovative merchandising techniques dominated retail streets in almost every small town and city. They were joined by Jewish-owned jewelry and hardware stores and, by the 1880s and 1890s, Jewish-owned factories like Fulton Bag and Cotton in Atlanta and Cone Mills in North Carolina. Like their non-Jewish counterparts, Jewish factory owners built company housing, stores, schools, and churches, employed spies to oversee employee actions, and opposed unionization. In Galveston and along the Mississippi River towns, Jews worked as cotton and sugar jobbers and factors, occupations dating to the antebellum era. In fact, diversity marked the Jewish businesses that epitomized the New South Creed.22
As successful businessmen who valued education, and efficient, ethical government, Jews helped establish and won election as officers of hospitals, school systems, chambers of commerce, and music associations. Jews served as progressive mayors of numerous southern cities, and Isaac Kempner fostered the Galveston managerial plan of government copied widely by many municipalities. Because Jews tended to reside in ethnic clusters, their concentrated voting strength and contributions led to “Jewish seats” on schools boards, city councils, and later draft boards in some locations, although they were a tiny minority of the general population. Besides civic improvements, they opposed Sunday blue laws, prayer in the public schools, and high school reading of the Merchant of Venice with its antisemitic caricature of Shylock, all illustrating identity as Jews.23
These Jews were not all old-time southerners and their descendents. Jews from other parts of the country, many because of exposure to the South during the war, flocked to southern cities after the war. They quickly and easily integrated into the Jewish business, social, and religious scene. The lack of Civil War or Reconstruction antagonism between old and new residents is remarkable until one recognizes the continuing impact of Jewish networks and the fact that they shared national background and other attributes.
With increased population, the size and number of B’nai B’rith lodges and benevolent societies increased dramatically. A wave of congregation creation and ultimately sanctuary building washed over the South from about 1868 through the 1890s. Although much of this represented rejuvenation of existing Jewish communities from in-migration, many congregations began in secondary areas of Jewish residence. Instead of going through the conflict-ridden stage of tradition versus Reform, these communities, from Anniston, Alabama to Dallas, Texas, started with Reform temples without debate. They had already learned their lessons the hard way in the core communities.24
Many women had worked side by side with their husbands in the small shops or ran businesses, if their husbands died before the war, and continued to do so in its aftermath. Yet upper-and middle-class status for Jewish and gentile women alike translated into limited roles and options within the household. Ladies benevolent societies provided an outlet that gradually pressed boundaries in the postbellum decades. This may have been especially true for southern Jewish women who did not want or have the outlets of missionary or temperance societies open to Protestant women. Male concentration on business also nurtured a tiny vacuum in many congregations, especially in small Jewish communities. Through their initiative or as a result of entreaties by their husbands, Jewish women became major fundraisers for building and maintaining congregation structures and even pressured the men to act. Fund-raising acumen led to inroads in terms of influence and, occasionally, congregation decision making.25
The benevolent societies laid the groundwork for the later sisterhoods, the National Council of Jewish Women, and activism that belies the image of southern Jewish parochialism and hesitancy to challenge the status quo. Sections of the NCJW spread rapidly through the South as young rabbis trained at Hebrew Union College filled southern pulpits, solidified Reform, and encouraged the women’s efforts. Rabbis from outside who married local women from established families gained acceptance and support by doing so. Marriage ties again forged alliances. The NCJW pressed women’s boundaries further than the benevolent societies by expanding lobbying efforts, reaching out to others in need among newly arrived eastern European Jews and the general population, working with secular women’s societies, and sponsoring conferences and educational programs for members. Free kindergartens and social settlements designed to Americanize immigrants and combat proselytizing typified activities. Jewish women in Atlanta, Memphis, and Goldsboro, North Carolina, as elsewhere, were committed leaders in the drive for passage of the women’s suffrage constitutional amendment. Thereafter they actively participated in the League of Women Voters and the interwar women’s league for peace and disarmament.
The women’s activities fit in line with those of the rabbis who became ambassadors to the gentiles and emphasized the prophetic Jewish social gospel of the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. Variations abounded. Max Heller of New Orleans fought urban corruption, opposed lynching, and supported Zionism. Preferring the title doctor to rabbi, most opposed Zionism, espoused social reforms including education and implementations of the findings of social work experts, and were moderates concerning black rights and unions. Morris Newfield of Birmingham generally fit this profile but limited his support for workers’ rights because of community and congregation pressures. From his Galveston pulpit, Henry Cohen became the major southern agent for immigrant relocation from New York into the heartland. Unlike their predecessors, these men usually held their pulpits—and power—for decades. They were also cosmopolitan, highly educated, well-read men of culture who traveled frequently, created and led local Jewish and secular organizations, remained cognizant of and active on behalf of national and international Jewish causes, and conducted extensive correspondence. Like Jewish club men and women in the South, their networks spanned the nation.26
The rabbis who held national positions in the Reform movement and helped found and lead organizations like the American Jewish Historical Society worked with laymen illustrated by Texan Leo N. Levi who presided over B’nai B’rith, and lobbied Washington on policies affecting Jews overseas. While the American Jewish Committee remained an elite, selective organization centered in New York and Philadelphia, it included southerners like Levi and later Coca-Cola lead attorney and Atlantan Harold Hirsch.
Although many Protestant churches in the region espoused evangelicalism, eschewed the social gospel, and maintained their patriarchy, Reform temples emphasized rationalism, social activism, and limited feminization of the synagogue, as they simultaneously rejected traditional ceremonies, customs, rituals, and what today would be called spirituality. The actions of Reform Jews in the South, reflecting the middle-/upper-class background and values of their members, were more aligned with their northern Jewish and Christian counterparts and the minority of Christians in the South who shared their urban/commercial values. Yet they still differed with the latter over such issues as temperance and Sunday blue laws.
Immigration of eastern European Jews into the region increased dramatically after 1881. Family and landsleit chain migration patterns dominated location choice even when agents of the Industrial Removal Office, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and Galveston movement relocated people from New York into the heartland.27 The experiences of this immigrant cohort reflected that of their counterparts throughout America in similar environments. Less educated, poorer, Orthodox, Zionist, Yiddish-speaking, and beginning the process of acculturation, they differed dramatically from their already established brethren. Shared religious identity and immigration background drew them together and almost everything else set the two apart.
The newcomers established a parallel infrastructure with variations between urban and small-town environments. Cities from Atlanta and Baltimore to New Orleans and Memphis, where the Jewish populations exceeded one thousand, housed ethnic clusters in which Yiddish culture, ethnic businesses, and multiple congregations and associated institutions flourished. Many congregations were formed by people from the same European locale, others by people who arrived in the early 1900s because members of synagogues formed during the 1880s and 1890s had already begun to acculturate and rise economically. Widespread Anshi S’fard synagogues, many of whose members came from Romania and surrounding areas, followed the mystical rite of Isaac Luria of Safed, Palestine. Split-off congregations and mergers were more the rule than the exception.28
Forces of movement and rejuvenation played out in the small towns as they had since the colonial era. The Columbia, South Carolina Jewish community virtually moved away with the Civil War but was reborn with new people in the war’s aftermath. “German” Jews who had found success in small towns retired to larger Jewish communities in the decades around 1900, but the small communities were either reinvigorated or entirely reconstituted when east Europeans restarted the process. Constant in-and out-migration continued through the twentieth century, and ethnic population clusters even developed in smaller Orthodox enclaves like Knoxville. The single Orthodox congregations in small towns often relied on survival mechanisms. These included sharing facilities and even rabbis with Reform Jews whose congregation’s existence was also precarious. Women again served as a driving force behind congregations, even providing Torah scrolls.29
Twentieth-century survival mechanisms for Reform and Orthodox Jews in far-flung areas included the use of circuit-riding rabbis, the creation of statewide Jewish federations, as in Arkansas where local communities could not support their own agencies, the Texas Kallal of Rabbis (an association that brought together rabbis regularly for intellectual stimulation and camaraderie),30 and the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women (with laymen’s and rabbinic offshoots) that claimed to be the first state institution of its kind to transcend denominational differences.
Peripheral communities also depended on larger centers. Orthodox rabbis like Tobias Geffen in Atlanta provided Talmudic decisions and kosher food, supervised religious courts, and conducted ceremonies for traditionalists across state lines. Reform and Orthodox congregations and auxiliary organizations including sisterhoods provided services and drew people from surrounding communities unable to support their own institutions.31
Eastern European Jews in the cities tended to live near African Americans. Their grocery stores, secondhand clothing, pawn, and liquor businesses served poor blacks and whites much as they had as peddlers. These people started their rise up the economic ladder using kin and landsleit ties, obtaining small loans from free loan associations, borrowing from Morris Plan banks where two character references substituted for collateral, and gradually investing in real estate. Socialism, communism, and labor unionism were topics of debate rather than actual pursuits, and the Arbeiter Ring/Workmen’s Circle was known for Yiddish schools rather than overt activism, since few Jews in the South worked in factories and the capitalist marketplace provided an enticing lure.
Beginning in 1906, Ashkenazim were joined by Sephardim from the Ottoman Empire in Atlanta and Montgomery. Their Ladino language, music, liturgy, and even foodways were so different that other Jews questioned whether they were brethren. These immigrants, who lived near Greeks, opened grocery stores, fruit stands, delicatessens, and hat, shoe, and clothing businesses, besides their own Jewish institutions.32
Jewish benevolence had been geared to self-help for people with common national background. By the late nineteenth century demand among this group had declined in line with its economic rise. Now the needs of the newcomers were addressed by a myriad of agencies including Jewish education alliances. “German” Jewish aid typically stressed Americanization and was given in patronizing fashion. Following in Boston’s steps, federations of Jewish social services formed in virtually every southern city during the first decades of the twentieth century. The established Jews attempted to centralize fund-raising, rationalize the delivery of services, and switch from direct volunteer intervention to professional service providers. Nonetheless, representatives of the different subgroups served on federation boards, and interaction, in spite of clashes, gradually eroded differences.33
An event that clearly shattered the image of Jewish acceptance in the South, and one of the most notorious episodes of antisemitism in American history, is the Leo Frank case. From the perspectives of this essay the case takes on new meaning. Born in Texas but raised in New York, Frank managed a relative’s pencil factory in Atlanta. Married to a member of the Jewish establishment, Frank became president of the local B’nai B’rith shortly after his arrival. Thus his life illustrated both the movement of Jews across sectional lines and the impact of networks. When a young female employee was found murdered in the factory basement, Frank was falsely accused and convicted of the crime. Governor John Slaton commuted the sentence to life in prison, but Frank was subsequently kidnapped from the penitentiary and lynched. Frank symbolized a transplanted northern Jewish businessman out to exploit poor white womanhood to those who hated him. But, to the American Jewish community, he was one of their own, and his struggle for justice was theirs. Petitions and letters from throughout the country flooded the governor, and Jews in New York and Chicago provided direct aid. That the avalanche of support compounded the anger of southerners and likely even hurt his cause reinforces the fact that the sense of peoplehood made the reaction logical, and the networks made it possible. The Frank case led to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League and the reborn Ku Klux Klan, both representing the impact of events in the South on the national stage.34
Was it an aberration or just a dramatic manifestation of long term antisemitism? Undoubtedly, Jews in the South found a tolerant environment compared to Jews in Europe or African Americans. A small minority that made substantial contributions and did not compete with other groups economically, Jews found acceptance in business, government and civic affairs, and, with few exceptions until the late nineteenth century, society. Some argue that prejudice against blacks shielded Jews and that acceptance was purchased at the cost of acculturation to southern mores and silence in the face of social injustices. On the other hand, Jews had to fight for passage of the Maryland Jew Bill, and North Carolina did not grant full political rights until 1868, the next to last state to do so. Jews had to contend with antisemitic attacks on numerous occasions and were murdered in Florida and Tennessee during Reconstruction partly as a consequence of prejudice. Terms like Jew store were commonly used and, regardless of how completely individuals attempted to assimilate, they were still thought of as Jews. Radical fringe groups and individuals found ready audiences in the South. Jewish autobiographers and interviewees usually remark about the lack of antisemitism they experienced during much of the twentieth century but also comment about incidents of insensitivity and prejudice and living in a separate social world.35 With all the exceptions and counteracting evidence and arguments, perhaps a nuanced conclusion that Jews were both relatively tolerated, if not accepted, and yet also often felt marginalized is as close as the historian can get. The Frank case thus stands out as an unusual manifestation of a dangerous, usually subdued undercurrent. It also showed that Jews of all persuasions could be lumped together in the gentile mind.
The decline of immigration with World War I and the exclusionary laws of the 1920s led to an era of acculturation. What were then called modern Orthodox rabbis, like Harry Epstein at Atlanta’s Ahavath Achim, conducted Talmudic discourses for the traditionalists and gave English-language sermons for their children and the more Americanized first generation. These rabbis raised the interest in and quality of Jewish education for the youth and adults, led Zionist programs, and participated in ecumenical activities. Influenced by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, they viewed Judaism as a civilization and culture. From the late 1930s into the 1950s many such rabbis, including Epstein and Abraham J. Mesch of Birmingham’s Beth-El, led their congregations into the Conservative movement. However much they may have followed Orthodoxy personally, these rabbis saw few practical differences between their programs and the observance of ritual among their congregants and the programs and practices of Conservative congregations and their members. Although the next decades proved them wrong, they believed that Orthodoxy was doomed. They did not want their congregants to depart too far from Judaism, so the rabbis eased their members’ way into a branch of Judaism that seemed to fit better with their needs.36
Southern Jews moved to new suburbs and brought their institutions with them as ethnic clustering continued. They played cards and fielded sports teams as well as creating country clubs and mechanisms for Jewish youth to interact and find partners. The latter included summer camps, affiliation with national Jewish youth groups, the formation of Jewish college fraternity and sorority chapters, and the holding of Falcon, Jubilee, Hollyday, and Ballyhoo-type events in which young people socialized at dances and picnics.37 Jews lived in a parallel social universe to their Christian counterparts and still divided among themselves. Scions of old and new immigrants maintained separate country clubs, Harmonie/ Concordia/Standard Clubs were for the German Jews and Progressive Clubs for the east Europeans, and Zionist groups failed to attract many old timers. Hadassah proved the exception as Jewish women, regardless of background, were drawn to the organization’s humanitarian mission in Palestine.
Economic success was marked by diversity during these and later decades. Jewish-owned department stores lined downtown streets. Jewish men attained national offices in professional associations and Jewish women worked as lawyers, teachers, and social workers. Family and religious ties remained the foundation of numerous enterprises as exemplified by Zale’s jewelry stores, the Chattanooga and New York Times of the Ochs family, and twentieth-century conglomerate National Service Industries.38
The Depression and World War II only temporarily derailed gains. Void of a working class, perhaps Jews in the South weathered the Depression better than Jewish workers in industrial centers. Rabbis accepted salary cuts, pledge went unpaid, and Jewish building infrastructure was neglected. Charter members of community chests, during the 1930s successful Jewish institutions often shared their leaders with those charities. New Deal agencies freed Jewish social service organizations from the relief burden and mission. Following contemporary trends, foster care replaced Hebrew orphans’ homes. Preparedness and entrance into the world war included the expansion of military facilities, which contributed to economic recovery. It also brought Jewish military personnel from elsewhere in the United States who were catered to by their Jewish hosts and returned as spouses and business partners after the war.
The rise of Hitler, the Third Reich persecution of European Jewry, and the creation of Israel directly impacted southern Jewish community structures and missions. Jewish social service federations reorganized, especially during the mid to late 1930s and again after the war. The first transformation occurred to unify fund-raising on behalf of European Jews and to concentrate efforts to combat antisemitism at home and abroad. The second reflected new realities and desire for community control. With the exception of assistance and Americanization for Holocaust survivors and refugees, charity for local Jews was now perceived as a minor need. improvements in Jewish education for adults and children, rebuilding the long-neglected infrastructure, and moving from Jewish education alliances to community centers and from Hebrew orphans’ homes to family and vocation services became core local missions. Homes for senior citizens also expanded dramatically as multigenerational family housing patterns changed. Nationally recognized experts were hired, and every move was analyzed and planned. Urban Jewish population studies and community calendars became normative. Congregations built new facilities in almost every city. Overseas relief to Jews remaining in Europe was quickly overshadowed with support for Israel, and fundraising campaigns skyrocketed.
Structural and mission changes illustrated new and old patterns. Southern Jews held offices in virtually every national Jewish organization, participating in and hosting conventions. Centers like Atlanta housed state and regional headquarters of national groups and provided expertise to peripheral communities. Through these networks Jews in the South both followed and led national models. Whereas individual laypeople and Reform rabbis formerly dominated decision making, organization building, and spokesperson roles, now numerous individuals from the various subcommunities came forward, and federation executives solidified their hegemony. Although anti-Zionism remained strong within some Reform circles, as illustrated by support for the American Council for Judaism, Hitler’s persecution of European Jewry, the entrance of Jews of east European descent into the Reform rabbinate, the Reform movement’s acceptance of Zionism in the Columbus Platform (1937), and the rise of Israel lowered barriers between subcommunities. Differences over socioeconomic, education, and charity-giving levels and language disappeared, and marriages between children of the subcommunities further eroded former divisions.
Patterns in towns and smaller cities varied. Military spending and migration of northern Jews after the war translated into temporary renewal. But children who went away to college found economic opportunity and spouses in cities. Cities and suburbs also drew retirees who sought enhanced Jewish life and culture or moved to be nearer to children. The rise of national chain stores and federated department store ownership, suburban malls, credit card companies, and fallout from civil rights demonstrations marked the decline of small-town and, gradually too, inner-city Jewish life.
Nonetheless, counteracting forces were also at work. Internal migrations benefited suburban growth in southern and northern communities. During the last thirty-five years small Jewish communities succumbed to declining economic opportunity as suburbs flourished, but smaller communities also rose or expanded. South Florida proved the harbinger of future dynamics. With air conditioning and the end of discriminatory policies, Miami became a haven for northern vacationers and retirees. The Jewish population expanded exponentially along southeastern Florida, as it has in resort and retirement areas from the coastal islands to the Appalachians. The migrants both created a market for medical facilities manned by Jewish physicians and located where such facilities already existed. The North Carolina Research Triangle and the academic rise of southern universities drew Jewish academics with different ideas of Jewish community. The decline of the Snowbelt economy and rise of the Sunbelt coupled with the Americanization of Dixie brought young, educated northern Jews along the well-traveled path south.39
The civil rights movement exerted substantial impact on events. It engendered the movement of some Jews away from what they perceived as reactionary communities, the southern migration of northerners by making the South a more acceptable environment, and the creation of an egalitarian South more hospitable also to native southern Jews. The relationship between blacks and Jews in the region can best be described using historian Arnold Shankman’s phrase, ambivalent friendship. Jews owned slaves and supported the Confederacy, but also conducted business with African Americans on a respectful basis. Divergence from the southern norm reflected a shared sense of historical prejudice, prophetic social justice, and generated profit as well. Rabbi Max Heller opposed lynching and segregation as early as the 1890s in New Orleans. Rabbi David Marx advocated reason, law, and order in the wake of the Atlanta race riot of 1906. During the 1920s and 1930s Jews joined the Urban League, and mayor Arnold Bernstein emphasized a policy of toleration and rights in Monroe, Louisiana. Dora Sterne in Montgomery and Morris Abram from Fitzgerald, Georgia exemplified those who opposed the poll tax and advocated equality. Harry Golden of the Carolina Israelite, Sylvan Meyer of the Gainesville [Georgia ] Times, and Louis Jaffe of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot won renown as crusading journalists. In Durham, North Carolina and Keystone, West Virginia blacks and Jews even formed close political and economic relationships on a relatively equitable basis. During the heyday of the civil rights movement, although some Jews accepted southern racial mores and even became ardent segregationists like Charles Bloch of Georgia and Solomon Blatt of South Carolina, the majority belonged to the moderate camp, and a minority openly advocated black rights.40
Jewish responses to the civil rights movement represented continuity of national networks and leadership as well as perhaps the greatest example of breakdown. Among the activists, many southern rabbis and especially Jewish women supported desegregation, equitable rights, and keeping open the schools. Some were smeared with the communist label, threats were made, and temples bombed. The fear was so palpable that rabbis were warned to remain silent, and some lost pulpits. The relationship between blacks and Jews from the mid-u}60s into the 1970s was strained on the national and local level, but black-Jewish coalition organizations appeared by the early 1980s. Although influenced by southern mores and residence in the region and differing on tactics with northern Jews, southern Jewish opinion tended to be closer to the views of their coreligionists on civil rights and other cosmopolitan issues than typical southern whites. Rabbis, including Jacob Rothschild in Atlanta and Charles Mantinband in Mississippi, emerged as respected national leaders, but even they preferred working behind the scenes to marching and demonstrating and questioned the tactics of national Jewish organizations. A few congregations left national Jewish organizations, in protest of what they saw as outside agitation that could precipitate antisemitic repercussions, and many more cringed at what they perceived as a lack of understanding on the part of northern Jews for the precarious position of Jews in the South. For their part, northern Jews and national Jewish organizations found it difficult to comprehend the inaction and reactions of so many of their southern brethren.
Other events since the 1960s return the southern experience to the national mold. Immigrants from Cuba, Iran, Russia, South Africa, and Israel have joined northern migrants and southerners, creating diverse congregations and newly braided identities where economic opportunity and freedom beckoned.41 Advocacy for Russian refuseniks and Israel’s wars for survival illustrated continuing senses of peoplehood and comfort that Jews in America and the South have felt since the colonial era. Southern rabbis have headed each of the denominational rabbinic associations. Since the 1980s Jewish women have become presidents of congregations and federations, executives of Jewish institutions, rabbis, and cantors. Dramatic increases in day schools, havurot, Chabad centers, ritual observance even within Reform congregations, philanthropy, concern for Israel, and national and international networks have marked the last decades of southern Jewish history as have high rates of intermarriage and secularization and low rates of affiliation. With these trends and more, Jews in the South join Jews elsewhere.
When Jews from different areas meet, they play Jewish geography. Not unusually they identify common friends and relatives. The intricate networks of families, businesses, organizations, meetings, camps, social clubs, travel, and newspapers link people together. In the region perhaps most likely to divide Jew from Jew, the networks have also meant that Jewish life and experience frequently mirrored and led national norms to a remarkable extent.
NOTES
1. Eli N. Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of the Jews in the South (New Yo, 1998 [1973]).
2. Lee Shai Weissbach, “Kentucky’s Jewish History in National Perspective: The Era of Mass Migration,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 69 (July 1995): 255–74; Mark K. Bauman, The Southerner as American, Jewish Style (Cincinnati, 1996). Some themes expanded in this essay were outlined in Mark K. Bauman, “Perspectives: History from a Variety of Vantage Points,” American Jewish History 90 (March 2002): 3–12. See also Mark K. Bauman, “The Flowering of Interest in Southern Jewish History,” in Corrie E. Norman and Don S. Armentrout, eds., Religion in the Contemporary South (Knoxville, 2005), 159–90; Mark K. Bauman, ed, Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish History (Tuscaloosa, 2006). Presentations at the October 2003 conference of the Southern Jewish Historical Society by Micah Greenstein and at the April 2003 conference of the Organization of American Historians by Leonard Dinnerstein stimulated my thought concerning the rejuvenating force of migration from small towns to cities, and from North to South, respectively. I also benefited greatly from conversations with Leonard Rogoff concerning contemporary growth in small towns and cities and migrations.
3. Bertram Wallace Korn, The Early Jews of New Orleans (Waltham, MA, 1969), The Jews of Mobile, Alabama, 1763–1841 (Cincinnati, 1970), and “Jews in Eighteenth-Century West Florida,” in Samuel Proctor, ed., Eighteenth-Century Florida: Life on the Frontier (Gainesville, 1976), 50–59; Malvina W. Liebman, Jewish Frontiersmen: Historical Highlights of Early South Florida Jewish Communities (Miami Beach, 1979); Chris Monaco, Moses Levy of Florida (Baton Rouge, 2005); Natalie Ornish, Pioneer Jewish Texans, 1590—1990 (Dallas, 1989); Samuel Proctor, “Pioneer Jewish Settlement in Florida, 1765–1900,” Proceedings of the Conference on the Writing of Regional History in the South (Miami, 1956); Leo and Evelyn Turitz, Jews in Early Mississippi (Jackson, 1983); Ruthe Winegarten and Cathy Schecter, Deep in the Heart: The Lives and Legends of Texas Jews (Austin, 1990). Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth D. Roseman, eds., Lone Stars of Texas: The Jews of Texas (Hanover and London, 2007).
4. For this and following see Saul Jacob Rubin, Third to None: The Saga of Savannah Jewry (Savannah, 1983); Mark I. Greenberg, “A ‘Haven for Benignity’: Conflict and Cooperation Between Eighteenth-Century Savannah Jews,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 86 (Winter 2002): 544–68.
5. For this and following see James William Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum Charleston (Tuscaloosa, 1993); Theodore Rosengarten and Dale Rosengarten, eds., A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life (Columbia, SC, 2002); Solomon Breibart, “Two Jewish Congregations in Charleston, SC, before 1791: A New Conclusion,” Explorations in Charleston’s Jewish History (Charleston, 2005). Hagy’s population tables in chapter 1 depict the varied and changing origins of the population. The largest number of native-born, early Charlestonian Jews hailed from New York, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, respectively, but sixteen present and future states were represented including California. The foreign born originated in twenty-one countries and eight Caribbean islands.
6. Eric L. Goldstein, Traders and Transports: The Jews of Colonial Maryland (Baltimore, 1993).
7. For Lindo, see Hagy, This Happy Land; and Rosengarten and Rosengarten, A Portion of the People; Chris Monaco, “A Sugar Utopia on the Florida Frontier: Moses Elias Levy’s Pilgrimage Plantation,” Southern Jewish History 5 (2002): 103–40, Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer (Baton Rouge, 2005); Harold Hyman, Oleander Odyssey: The Kempners of Galveston, Texas, 1854—198os (College Station, TX, 1990); for Moses, Raphael Jacob Moses, Last Order of the Lost Cause: The Civil War Memoirs of a Jewish Family from the “Old South,” ed. Mel Young (Lanham, MD, 1995). See also Gary R. Freeze, “Roots, Barks, Berries and Jews: The Herb Trade in Guilded-Age North Carolina,” Essays in Economic and Business History 13 (1995): 107–27.
8. On this and following see Myron Berman, The Last of the Jews? (Lanham, MD, 1998); Kaye Kole, The Minis Family of Georgia, 1733—1992 (Savannah, 1992); Emily Bingham, Mordecai: An Early American Family (New York, 2003); Jean E. Friedman, Ways of Wisdom: Moral Education in the Early National Period (Athens, 2001); Sheldon Hanft, “Mordecai’s Female Academy,” American Jewish History 79 (Autumn 1989): 7293; Milton M. Gottesman, Hoopskirts and Huppas: A Chronicle of the Early Years of the Garfunkel-Trager Family in America, 1856—1920 (New York, 1999); Gary Phillip Zola, Isaac Harby of Charleston, 1788—1828: Jewish Reformer and Intellectual (Tuscaloosa, 1994); Solomon Breibart, “Penina Müise: Southern Jewish Poetess,” in Samuel Proctor and Louis Schmier with Malcolm Stern, eds., Jews of the South (Macon, 1984), 31–43. Bingham offers the unusual example of Jews who converted out of conviction. The following discussion of Jacksonian Jews is influenced by Zola and Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York, 1981). Herein I will use the term loosely and, in fact, Hagy points to the influence of Jeffersonian Republican values on Charleston reformers discussed below.
9. For the concept of the first Jewish families of America, with reference to the South, see Myron Berman, Richmond’s Jewry, 1769—1976: Shabbat in Shockoe (Charlottesville, 1979); Louis Ginsburg, History of the Jews of Petersburg, 1789—1950 (Petersburg, 1954).
10. Anny Bloch, “Mercy on Rude Streams: Jewish Immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine to the Lower Mississippi Region and the Concept of Fidelity,” Southern Jewish History 2 (1999) : 81–110; Hollace A. Weiner, Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work (College Station, TX, 1999).
11. Elliott Ashkenazi, The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840—1875 (Tuscaloosa, 1988), “Jewish Commercial Interests Between North and South: The Case of the Lehmans and Seligmans,” American Jewish Archives 39 (Spring/Summer 1991): 25–39; Hasia Diner, “Entering the Mainstream of Modern Jewish History: Peddlers and the American Jewish South,” Southern Jewish History 8 (2008): 1–30; Richard Hawkins, “Lynchburg’s Swabian Jewish Entrepreneurs in War and Peace,” Southern Jewish History 3 (2000) : 45–82; Morton Rothstein, “Sugar and Secession: A New York Firm in Antebellum Louisiana,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 5 (1968): 115–31; Louis Schmier, “Helloo! Peddler Man! Helloo!” in Jerrell H. Schofner, ed., Ethnic Minorities in Gulf Coast Society (Pensacola, 1979), 75–88.
12. Besides Zola, Isaac Harby of Charleston; Hagy, This Happy Land; and Rosengarten and Rosengarten, A Portion of the People, cited above, see Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in American Judaism (New York, 1988); Leon Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue: 1820—1870 (Hanover, 1992 [1976]); Zola, “The First Reform Prayer Book in America: The Liturgy of the Reform Society of Israelites,” in Dana Evan Kaplan, ed., Platforms and Prayer Books (Lanham, MD, 2002): 99–118; Robert Liberles, “Conflict Over Reforms: The Case of Beth Elohim, Charleston, South Carolina,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Cambridge, 1987), 274–96; Solomon Breibart, The Rev. Mr. Gustavus Poznanski: First American Jewish Reform Minister (Charleston, 1979); Allan Tarshish, “The Charleston Organ Case,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 54 (July 1965): 411–49.
13. Isaac M. Fein, The Making of an American Jewish Community: The History of Baltimore Jewry from 1773 to 1920 (Philadelphia, 1971); Abraham Shusterman, Legacy of a Liberal: The Miracle of Har Sinai Congregation (Baltimore, 1967); I. Harold Sharfman, The First Rabbi: Origins of Conflict Between Orthodox and Reform, Jewish Polemic Warfare in Pre—Civil War America (N.p., 1988); Israel Tabak, “Rabbi Abraham Rice of Baltimore: Pioneer of Orthodox Judaism in America,” Tradition 7 (Summer 1965): 100–20; Marsha Rozenblit, “Choosing a Synagogue,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Cambridge, 1987): 327–63; Israel Goldman, “Henry W. Schneeberger: His Role in American Judaism,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 57 (December 1967): 153–90; Abraham J. Karp, “Simon Tuska Becomes a Rabbi,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 50 (December 1960): 79–97.
14. Leonard Rogoff, Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Tuscaloosa, 2001), 12, 32 (quotation); Amy Hill Shevitz, “Religious Reforms, the National Road, and the Dismemberment of Virginia: A Study in Cultural Transmission,” Fourth Biennial Scholars’ Conference on American Jewish History, Denver, June 5, 2000; Belinda Gergel and Richard Gergel, In Pursuit of the Tree of Life: A History of the Early Jews of Columbia, South Carolina, and the Tree of Life Congregation (Columbia, SC, 1996).
15. Lance Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (Detroit, 1995); Dianne Ashton, Rebecca Gratz: Woman and Judaism in Antebellum America (Detroit, 1997); Mark K. Bauman, “Southern Jewish Women and Their Social Service Organizations,” Journal of American Ethnic History 22 (Spring 2003): 34–78. Much of this and other material is gleaned from state and local histories. See, for example, Steven Hertzberg, Strangers Within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845—1915 (Philadelphia, 1978); Medora Small Frank, Five Families and Eight Young Men: Nashville and Her Jewry, 1850—1861 (Nashville, 1962), Beginnings on Market Street: Nashville and Her Jewry, 1861—1901 (Nashville, 1976); Andrea Greenbaum, ed., Jews of South Florida (Waltham, 2005); Martin I. Hinchin, Fourscore and Eleven: A History of the Jews of Rapides Parish, 1828—1919 (Alexandria, LA, 1984); Marsha Kass, “Jewish Life in Alabama, the Formative Stages,” Alabama Heritage 36 (Spring 1995): 6–13; Carolyn Gray LeMaster, A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas, 1820s—1990s (Fayetteville, 1994); Gertrude Phillipsborn, The History of the Jewish Community of Vicksburg from 1820 to 1968 (Vicksburg, 1969); Ira Rosenwaike, “The First Jewish Settlers in Louisville,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 53 (January 1979): 37–44; Melvin I. Urofsky, Commonwealth and Community: The Jewish Experience in Virginia (Richmond 1997); The Story of the Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans (New Orleans, 1905); Anne Rochell Konigsmark, Isadore Newman School: One Hundred Years (New Orleans, 2004); Wendy Besmann, “The ‘Typical Home Kid Overachievers,’ “Southern Jewish History 8 (2005): 121–60.
16. Henry Cohen, One Hundred Years of Texas Jewry (Dallas, 1936); Rosanna Dyer Osterman biography files, Jacob R. Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives.
17. Janice R. Blumberg, “Rabbi Alphabet Browne: The Atlanta Years,” Southern Jewish History 5 (2003): 1–42; Irwin Lachoff, “Rabbi Bernard Illowy: Counter Reformer,” Southern Jewish History 5 (2003): 43–68; Dana Evan Kaplan, “The Determination of Jewish Identity Below the Mason-Dixon Line,” Journal of Jewish Studies 52 (Spring 2001): 98–121; Scott M. Langston, “James K. Gutheim as Southern Reform Rabbi, Community Leader, and Symbol,” Southern Jewish History 5 (2003): 69–102, “Interaction and Identity: Jews and Christians in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” Southern Jewish History 3 (2000): 83–124; Karla Goldman, “The Path to Reform Judaism: An Examination of Religious Leadership in Cincinnati, 1841–1855,” American Jewish History 90 (March 2002): 35–50 (both Gutheim and Jacob Rosenfeld of Charleston preceded Wise in the pulpit at Cincinnati’s B’nai Yeshurun, and their actions in the congregation prepared the way for his acceptance and success); Bryan Stone, “Edgar Goldberg and the Texas Jewish Herald: Changing Coverage and Blended Identity,” Southern Jewish History 7 (2004): 71–108; Louis Schmier, ed., Reflections on Southern Jewry: The Letters of Charles Wessolowsky, 1878—1879 (Macon 1982); Gary P. Zola, “Southern Rabbis and the Founding of the First National Association of Rabbis,” American Jewish History 85 (December 1997): 353–72.
18. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (New York, 1997); Bertram W. Korn, The American Reaction to the Mortara Case, 1858—59 (Cincinnati, 1957); Mark K. Bauman, “Variations on the Mortara Case in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” American Jewish Archives Journal 60 (2003): 43–58; Eliza R. R. McGraw, Two Covenants: Representations of Southern Jewishness (Baton Rouge, 2005); Kenneth Libo and Abigail Kursheedt Hoffman, The Seixas-Kursheedts and the Rise of American Jewry (N.p., 2001). The last illustrates the transnational and intercontinental ties of family, business, and religion discussed throughout this essay.
19. Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787—1861 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Mark I. Greenberg, “Becoming Southern: The Jews of Savannah, Georgia, 1830–1870,” American Jewish History 86 (March 1998): 55–75.
20. Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (Columbia, SC, 2002); Eli Evans, Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate (New York, 1988); Bertram W. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1951), Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789—1865 (Elkins Park, 1961); David T. Morgan, “Eugenia Levy Phillips: The Civil War Experiences of a Southern Jewish Woman,” in Proctor and Schmier, Jews of the South, 95–106, “Philip Phillips, Jurist and Statesman,” in Proctor and Schmier, Jews of the South, 107–20; Jason H. Silverman, “Stars, Bars, and Foreigners: The Immigrant and the Making of the Confederacy,” Journal of Confederate History 1 (Fall 1988): 26585, “‘The Law of the Land Is the Law,’ Antebellum Jews, Slavery and the Old South,” in Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land (New York, 1997), 73–86, “Ashley Wilkes Revisited: The Immigrant as Slaveholder in the Old South,” Journal of Confederate History 7 (1991): 123–35; Mel Young, Where They Lie: A Story of the Jewish Soldiers of the North and South (Lanham, MD, 1991); Joan M. Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890—1930 (Gainesville, 2004).
21. Richard E. Sapon-White, “A Polish Jew on the Florida Frontier and in Occupied Tennessee: Excerpts from the Memoirs of Max White,” Southern Jewish History 4 (2001): 93–122; Thomas D. Clark, Pills, Petticoats, and Plows (Indianapolis, 1944), “The Post-Civil War Economy in the South,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55 (1966); Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860—80 (Urbana, 1990); Rose G. Biderman, They Came to Stay: The Story of the Jews of Dallas, 1870—1997 (Austin, 2002); Selma S. Lewis, A Biblical People of the Bible Belt: The Jewish Community of Memphis, Tennessee, 1840s—1960s (Macon, 1998). On kinship networks and Jews in banking, see Larry Schweikart, Banking in the American South from the Age of Jackson to Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1987), 213–17.
22. Leon Harris, Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of the Jewish Families who Built Great Department Stores (New York, 1979); Don M. Coever and Linda D. Hall, “Neiman-Marcus: Innovators in Fashion and Advertising,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 66 (September 1976): 123–36; Leon Joseph Rosenberg, Sangers’: Pioneer Texas Merchants (Austin, 1978); Leona Rostenberg, “Portrait from a Family Archive: Leon Dreyfus, 1842–1898,” Manuscripts 37 (1985): 283–94 (a jeweler, an occupation in which southern Jews played a prominent role); Stephen J. Whitfield, “Commercial Passions: The Southern Jew as Businessman,” American Jewish History 71 (March 1982): 342–57.
23. Ronald Bayor, “Ethnic Residential Patterns in Atlanta, 1880–1940,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 63 (Winter 1979): 435–46; Margaret Armbrester, “Samuel Ullman [1840–1924]: Birmingham Progressive,” Alabama Review 47 (January 1994): 29–43; Mark K. Bauman, “Factionalism and Ethnic Politics in Atlanta: German Jews from the Civil War through the Progressive Era,” in Glenn Feldman, ed., Politics and Religion in the White South (Knoxville, 2005), 35–56; Canter Brown Jr., Jewish Pioneers of the Tampa Bay (Tampa, 1999), “Philip and Morris Dzialynski: Jewish Contributions to the Rebuilding of the New South,” American Jewish Archives 39 (Spring/Summer 1992): 517–39; Mark I. Greenberg, “Tampa Mayor Herman Glogowski: Jewish Leadership in Gilded Age Florida,” in Mark I. Greenberg and Canter Brown Jr., eds., Florida’s Heritage of Diversity: Essays in Honor of Samuel Proctor (Tallahassee, 1997); Hyman, Oleander Odyssey; Gertrude Samet, “Harry Reyner: Individualism and Community in Newport News, Virginia,” Southern Jewish History 1 (1998): 109–19; Patricia A. Smith, “Rhoda Kaufman: A Southern Progressive’s Career, 1913–1956,” Atlanta Historical Bulletin 18 (Spring/Summer 1973): 43–50; Arlene G. Rotter, “Climbing the Crystal Stair: Annie T. Wise’s Success as an Immigrant in Atlanta’s Public School System (1872–1925),” Southern Jewish History 4 (2001): 45–70; Susan Mayer, “Amelia Greenwald and Regina Kaplan: Jewish Nursing Pioneers,” Southern Jewish History 1 (1998): 83–108. For southern distinctiveness, see Greenberg, “Becoming Southern”; Charles Joyner, “A Community of Memory; Assimiliation and Identity among the Jews of Georgetown,” in Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (Urbana, 1999), 177–92.
24. For this and following see, among other works, Gerry Cristol, A Light on the Prairie: Temple Emanu-El of Dallas, 1872—1977 (Fort Worth, 1998); Marc Lee Raphael, Towards a ‘National Shrine’: A Centennial History of Washington Hebrew Congregation, 1855—1955 (Williamsburg, 2005); Hollace A. Weiner, Beth-El Congregation, Fort Worth: Centennial, 1902—2002 (Fort Worth, 2002); Sherry Blanton, “Lives of Quiet Affirmation: The Jewish Women of Early Anniston,” Southern Jewish History 2 (1999): 25–54. Before the influx of east European Jews late in the nineteenth century, only one Texas congregation, Beth Israel of Houston, started as traditional. It was also the only one officially begun before the Civil War. The literature emphasizes fluid population movement related to the opening of railroads and economic expansion. Weiner discusses chain migration and familial ties at length.
25. Stanley R. Brav, “The Jewish Woman, 1861–1865,” American Jewish Archives (April 1965): 34–75; Bauman, “Southern Jewish Women”; Janice R. Blumberg, “Sophie Weil Browne,” Southern Jewish History 9 (2006): 1–33; Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge, 2000); Mark I. Greenberg, “Savannah’s Jewish Women and the Shaping of Ethnic and Gender Identity, 1830–1900,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 82 (Winter 1998): 751–74; Beth Wenger, “Jewish Women and Voluntarism: Beyond the Myth of Enablers,” American Jewish History 79 (Autumn 1989): 16–36, “Jewish Women of the Club: The Changing Public Roles of Atlanta’s Jewish Women (1870–1930),” American Jewish History 76 (March 1987): 311–33.
26. Myron Berman, “Rabbi Edward N. Calisch and the Debate over Zionism in Richmond, VA,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 62 (March 1973): 295–305; Mark Cowett, Birmingham’s Rabbi: Morris Newfield and Alabama, 1895—1940 (Tuscaloosa, 1986); A. Stanley Dreyfus, Henry Cohen: Messenger of the Lord (New York, 1963); Berkley Kalin, “Rabbi William Fineshriber: The Memphis Years,” West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 25 (1971): 47–62; Bobbie S. Malone, Rabbi Max Heller: Reformer, Zionist, Southerner (Tuscaloosa, 1997); Karl Preuss, “Personality, Politics, and the Price of Justice: Ephraim Frisch, San Antonio’s ‘Radical’ Rabbi,” American Jewish History 85 (September 1997): 263–88; Marc Lee Raphael, “‘Training Men and Women in Dignity, in Civic Righteousness, and the Responsibilities of American Citizenship”: The Thought of Rabbi Abram Simon, 1897–1938,” American Jewish Archives Journal 49 (1997): 62–77; Gladys Rosen, “The Rabbi in Miami: A Case History,” in Nathan M. Kaganoff and Melvin I. Urofsky, eds., Turn to the South (Charlottesville, 1979), 33–40; Bryan Sherwin, “Portrait of a Romantic Rebel: Bernard C. Ehrenreich (1876–1955),” in Kaganoff and Urofsky, Turn to the South, 1–12; Harold S. Wechsler, “Rabbi Bernard C. Ehrenreich: A Northern Progressive Goes South,” in Proctor and Schmier, Jews of the South, 45–64; Malcolm S. Stern, “The Role of the Rabbi in the South,” in Kaganoff and Urofsky, Turn to the South, 21–32; Mark K. Bauman and Arnold Shankman, “The Rabbi as Ethnic Broker: The Case of David Marx,” Journal of American Ethnic History 3 (Spring 1983): 51–68; George Wilkes, “Rabbi Dr. David Marx and the Unity Club,” Southern Jewish History 9 (2006): 35–68; Ellen M. Umansky, “Christian Science, Jewish Science, and Abraham Geiger Moses,” Southern Jewish History 6 (2003): 1–36, From Christian Science to Jewish Science (New York, 2005).
27. Gary Dean Best, “Jacob H. Schiff’s Galveston Movement: An Experiment in Immigrant Deflection, 1907–1914,” American Jewish Archives 30 (April 1978): 43–79; Eugene Kaufmann, Half a Century of HIAS in Baltimore, 1903—1953 (Baltimore, 1953); Bernard Marinbach, Galveston: Ellis island of the West (Albany, 1983); Hollace A. Weiner, “Removal Approval: The Industrial Removal Office Experience in Fort Worth, Texas,” Southern Jewish History 4 (2001): 1–44.
28. Mark K. Bauman, “Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces Facing the People of Many Communities: Atlanta Jewry from the Frank Case to the Great Depression,” Atlanta Historical Journal 23 (Fall 1979): 25–54; Wendy Lowe Besmann, A Separate Circle: Jewish Life in Knoxville, Tennessee (Knoxville, 2001); Gilbert Sandler, Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album (Baltimore, 2000); Jessica Elfenbein, “Uptown and Traditional,” Southern Jewish History 9 (2006): 69–102; Peggy Kronsberg Pearlstein, “Macey Kronsberg: Institution Builder of Conservative Judaism in Charleston, S.C. and the Southeast,” Southern Jewish History 8 (2005): 161–204, “Israel Fine: Baltimore Businessman and Hebrew Poet,” Southern Jewish History 9 (2006): 103–39; Kenneth W. Stein, A History of Ahavath Achim Congregation, 1887—1977 (Atlanta, 1978). The name Anshi S’fard, or men of S’fard (often spelled in different ways even by the same congregation), implying Sephardic origin, is somewhat problematic. The acronym for Luria is actually ARI, or Ashkenazi Rabbi Isaac, although his mother was Sephardic. See Martin A. Cohen, “The Sephardic Phenomenon: A Reappraisal,” American Jewish Archives 44 (Spring/ Summer 1992): 62–63.
29. Edward Cohen, The Peddler’s Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi (Jackson, 1999); Stanley E. Ely, In Jewish Texas: A Family Memoir (Fort Worth, 1998); Susan Gross, Wings Toward the South: The First Hundred Years of Congregation Agudath Achim (Shreveport, 1999); Abraham Landau, “First-Person History: American Ghetto,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 72 (1998): 193–98 (Louisville); Benjamin Kaplan, The Eternal Stranger: A Study of Jewish Life in the Small Community (New York, 1957; three towns in Louisiana); Richard L. Zweigenhaft, “Two Cities in North Carolina: A Comparative Study of Jews in the Upper Class,” Jewish Social Studies 41 (1979); James Leb-eau, “Profile of a Southern Jewish Community: Waycross, Georgia,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 58 (June 1969): 429–44; Theodore Lowi, “Southern Jews: The Two Communities,” in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eds., Jews in the South (Baton Rouge, 1973), 264–82; Leonard Rogoff, “Synagogue and Jewish Church: A Congregational History of North Carolina,” Southern Jewish History 1 (1998): 43–81, Homelands; Louis Schmier, “Jews and Gentiles in a South Georgia Towns,” in Proctor and Schmier, Jews of the South, 1–16; Karen Falk and Avi Y. Dector, eds., We Call This Place Home: Jewish Life in Maryland’s Small Towns (Baltimore, 2002); Deborah R. Weiner, “The Jews of Clarksburg: Community Adaptation and Survival, 1900–60,” West Virginia History 54 (1995): 59–77, “Jewish Women of the Central Appalachian Coal Fields, 1880–1960: From Breadwinners to Community Builders,” American Jewish Archives Journal 52 (2000): 10–33, “Middlemen of the Coalfields: The Role of Jews in the Economy of the Southern West Virginia Coal Towns, 1890–1950,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 4 (Spring 1998): 29–56, Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History (Urbana, 2006); Lee Shai Weissbach, “Stability and Mobility in the Small Jewish Community: Examples from Kentucky History,” American Jewish History 79 (Spring 1990): 355–75, “Decline in an Age of Expansion: Disappearing Jewish Communities in the Era of Mass Migration,” American Jewish Archives Journal 49 (1997): 39–61, Jewish Life in Small-Town America (New Haven, 2005).
30. For the derivation of the term kallal, see Hollace A. Weiner, “The Mixers: The Roles of Rabbis Deep in the Heart of Texas,” American Jewish History 85 (September 1997): 292–93, note 13.
31. Joel Ziff, ed., Lev Tuviah: On the Life and Work of Rabbi Tobias Geffen (Newton, MA, 1988); David Geffen, “The Literary Legacy of Rabbi Tobias Geffen in Atlanta, 1910–1970,” Atlanta Historical Journal 23 (Fall 1979): 85–90; Nathan M. Kaganoff, “An Orthodox Rabbinate in the South: Tobias Geffen, 1870–1970,” American Jewish History 73 (September 1983): 56–70.
32. Sol Beton, Sephardim and a History of Congregation OrVeShalom (Atlanta, 1981), “Sephardim—Atlanta,” Atlanta Historical Journal 23 (Fall 1979): 119–27; Miriam Cohen, ed., Congregation Etz Ahayem: Tree of Life, 1912—1987 (Montgomery, 1987); Rubin M. Hanan, The History of the Etz Ahayem Congregation, 1906—1912 (Montgomery, 1962); Yitzchak Kerem, “The Settlement of Rhodesian and Other Sephardic Jews in Montgomery and Atlanta in the Twentieth Century,” American Jewish History 85 (December 1997): 373–91; Marcie Cohen Ferris, “From the Recipe File of Luba Cohen: A Study of Southern Jewish Foodways and Cultural Identity,” Southern Jewish History 2 (1999): 129–64, “Feeding the Jewish Soul in the Delta Diaspora,” Southern Cultures 10 (Fall 2004): 52–85, Matzah Ball Gumbo (Chapel Hill, 2005).
33. Peter K. Opper, “Like a Giant Oak”: A History of the Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Association and Jewish Family Services of Richmond, Virginia, 1849—1999 (Richmond, 1999); Max Gettinger, Coming of Age: The Atlanta Jewish Federation, 1962—1982 (Hobo-ken, 1994); Mark K. Bauman, “The Emergence of Jewish Social Service Agencies in Atlanta,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 69 (Winter 1985): 488–508, “The Transformation of Jewish Social services in Atlanta, 1928–1948,” American Jewish Archives Journal 53 (2001): 83–111, “Role Theory and History: Ethnic Brokerage in the Atlanta Jewish Community,” American Jewish History 73 (September 1983): 71–96, “Victor H. Kriegshaber, Community Builder,” American Jewish History 79 (Autumn 1989): 94–110.
34. Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York, 2003); Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York, 1968); Jeffrey Melnick, Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (Jackson, MS, 2000); Nancy McLean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 917–48; Harry Golden A Little Girl is Dead (New York, 1965); Stephen J. Goldfarb, “The Slaton Memorandum: A Governor Looks Back at His Decision to Commute the Death Sentence of Leo Frank,” American Jewish History 88 (September 2000): 325–40; Mary Phagan Kean, The Murder of Little Mary Pha-gan (Far Hills, NJ, 1987); Eugene Levy, “‘Is the Jew a White Man?’: Press Reaction to the Leo Frank Case, 1913–1915” Phylon 35 (1974): 212–22; Robert Seitz Frey, “Christian Responses to the Trial and Lynching of Leo Frank,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 71 (1987): 461–76; Cliff Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914—1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills (Chapel Hill, 2001).
35. Howard N. Rabinowitz, “Nativism, Bigotry, and Anti-Semitism in the South,” American Jewish History 72 (March 1988): 437–51 summarizes the literature. See also Abraham J. Peck, “‘That Other Peculiar Institution’: Jews and Judaism in the Nineteenth Century South,” Modern Judaism 7 (February 1987): 99–114; Rosen, Jewish Confederates, chapter 5; Bertram W. Korn, “American Judaeophobia: Confederate Version,” in Din-nerstein and Palsson, Jews in the South , 135–56; Mark I. Greenberg, “Ambivalent Relations: Acceptance and Anti-Semitism in Confederate Thomasville,” American Jewish Archives 65 (Spring/Summer 1993): 13–30; Richard McMurray, “Rebels, Extortioners, and Counterfeiters: A Note on Confederate Judaeophobia,” Atlanta Historical Journal 22 (Fall-Winter 1978): 45–52; Louis Schmier, “An Unbecoming Act: Anti-Semitic Uprising in Thomas County, Georgia,” Civil War Times Illustrated 23 (October 1984), “Notes and Documents on the 1862 Expulsion of Jews from Thomasville, Georgia,” American Jewish Archives 32 (April 1980): 9–22; Lewis S. Feuer, “America’s First Jewish Professor: James Joseph Sylvester at the University of Virginia,” American Jewish Archives 36 (November 1984): 152–201; Morton Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels (Chapel Hill, 1984); Leonard Dinnerstein, Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience (New York, 1987); Leonard Rogoff, “Is the Jew White? The Racial Place of the Southern Jew,” American Jewish History 85 (September 1997): 195–230; Carlton Moseley, “Latent Klanism in Georgia, 1890–1915,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 56 (1972): 365–86; Rosalind Benjet, “The Ku Klux Klan and the Jewish Community of Dallas, 1921–23,” Southern Jewish History 6 (2003): 133–62; Till Van Rahden, “Beyond Ambivalence: Variations of Catholic Anti-Semitism in Turn-of-the-Century Baltimore,” American Jewish History 82 (1994): 7–42; Edward C. Halperin, “Frank Porter Graham, Isaac Hall Manning, and the Jewish Quota at the University of North Carolina Medical School,” North Carolina Historical Review 67 (1990): 385–410; Edward S. Shapiro, “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style,” in David A. Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana, 1986), 129–51; Marcia Graham Synnott, “Anti-Semitism and American Universities: Did Quotas Follow the Jews?” in Gerber, Anti-Semitism in American History, 233–74; Beverly Williams, “Anti-Semitism and Shreveport, Louisiana: The Situation in the 1920s,” Louisiana History 21 (Fall 1980): 387–98; Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana (Chapel Hill, 2000); Tom Keating, Saturday School: How One Town Kept out the “Jewish,” 1902—1932 (Bloomington, 1999). On violence see Daniel R. Weinfield, “Samuel Fleishman: Tragedy in Reconstruction-Era Florida,” Southern Jewish History 8 (2005): 31–76; Patrick Q. Mason, “Anti-Jewish Violence in the New South,” Southern Jewish History 8 (2005): 77–120.
36. Mark K. Bauman, Harry H. Epstein and the Rabbinate as Conduit for Change (Rutherford, 1994), especially 52–57, including discussion of Mesch; Henry M. Green, Gesher VaGesher/Bridges and Bonds: The Life of Leon Kronish (Atlanta, 1996).
37. Carolyn Lipson-Walker, “Shalom Y’all: The Folklore and Culture of Southern Jews,” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1986.
38. Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, The Trusts: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (Boston, 1999); Bernard Rapoport, as told to Don Carleton, Being Rapoport, Capitalist with a Conscience (Austin, 2002); Burton Alan Boxerman, “The Edison Brothers, Shoe Merchants: Their Georgia Years,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 57 (Winter 1973): 511–25.
39. The end of discriminatory quotas in colleges and medical facilities served as a prerequisite for these changes. Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Dream in Los Angeles and Miami (New York, 1994); Terry Barr, “A Shtetl Grew in Bessemer: Temple Beth-El and Jewish Life in Small-Town Alabama,” Southern Jewish History 3 (2000): 1–44; Gerald L. Gold, “A Tale of Two Communities: The Growth and Decline of Small-Town Jewish Communities in Northern Ontario and Southwestern Louisiana,” in Moses Rischin, ed., The Jews of North American (Detroit, 1987), 224–34; Jacob Koch, “A Special Heritage: The Demopolis Jewish Community,” in Jerry Elijah Brown, ed., An Alabama Humanities Reader (Macon, 1985), 137–45; Ira M. Sheskin, “The Dixie Diaspora: The ‘Loss’ of Small Southern Jewish Communities,” Southeastern Geographer 40 (May 2000): 52–74; John Egerton, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (New York, 1974).
40. On this and following, Phillip J. Johnson, “The Limits of Interracial Compromise: Louisiana, 1941,” Journal of Southern History 69 (May 2003): 319–48; Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman, “The Second Battle for Woman Suffrage: Alabama White Women, the Poll Tax, and V. O. Key’s Master Narrative of Southern Politics,” Journal of Southern History 68 (May 2002): 333–74; Mark K. Bauman, “Morris B. Abram,” in Jack Fischel and Sanford Pinsker, eds., Jewish-American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (New York, 1991); Mark K. Bauman and Berkley Kalin, eds., Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights (Tuscaloosa, 1997); Clive Webb, Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (Athens, 2001); Alexander S. Leidholdt, The Life of Louis Jaffe: Editor for Justice (Baton Rouge, 2002); Deborah R. Weiner, “The Jews of Keystone: Life in a Multicultural Boomtown,” Southern Jewish History 2 (1999): 1–24; Raymond Arsenault, “Charles Jacobson of Arkansas: A Jewish Politician in the Land of the Razorbacks, 1891–1915,” in Kaganoff and Urofsky, Turn to the South, 55–75; Karl Preuss, “Personality, Politics, and the Price of Justice: Ephraim Frisch, San Antonio’s ‘Radical’ Rabbi,” American Jewish History 85 (September 1997): 263–88; Debra L. Schultz, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2001); Deborah Dash Moore, “Separate Paths: Blacks and Jews in the Twentieth-Century South,” in Salzman and West, Struggles in the Promised Land, 275–93; Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Negotiating Coalitions: Black and Jewish Civil Rights Agencies in the Twentieth Century,” in Salzman and West, Struggles in the Promised Land, “The Southern Jewish Community and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” in V. P. Franklin, ed, African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century (Columbia, MO, 1998); Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, 2006); Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, 2006); Herman Pollack, “A Forgotten Fighter for Justice: Ben Goldstein-Lowell,” Jewish Currents 30 (June 1976): 14–18; Mary Stanton, “At One with the Majority,” Southern Jewish History 9 (2006): 141–99; Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (Tuscaloosa, 2001). Raymond A. Mohl, South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945—1960 (Gainesville, 2003); Adam Mendelsohn, “Two Far South: Rabbinical Responses to Apartheid and Segregation in South Africa and the American South,” Southern Jewish History 6 (2003): 63–132; Melissa Fay Greene, The Temple Bombing (Reading, MA, 1996).
41. caroline bettinger-lopez, cuban-jewish journeys: searching for identity, home, and history in miami (knoxville, 2000).