An essential fable concerning the place of Jews within the American South throughout the slavery and Jim Crow eras continues to closely affect widespread perceptions concerning the function of Jews as victims of hatred and bigotry. Elementary to the favored legend is the idea that Jews within the South have been by some means outsiders in a peculiarly evil tradition and thus extra liable to be victimized by the swirl of regional race hatreds. Almost each revealed dealing with of that historical past is framed by the presumption that the well-known anti-Black racism of the South additionally prolonged to Jews, however the historical past of the American South reveals that the “ambiance” for Jews within the apartheid South was not simply enticing however particularly welcoming and, most of all, extraordinarily worthwhile.
One of the crucial standard writers on twentieth-century Southern Jewry, Harry Golden, addressed a persistent theme about Southern Jewish historical past he was decided to debunk:
“The purpose I hope to determine…is that this ‘most Gentile’ part of America has offered essentially the most favorable “ambiance” the Jewish folks have identified within the trendy world.”
Golden was talking particularly concerning the American South. The reverence that almost all bible belt evangelical Christians held for the “Folks of the Ebook” positioned Jewish immigrants in an particularly favored class. Their presence was even taken by many ignorant southern Gentiles as an indication of God’s sacred endorsement of their slave-based society. So Christians within the American South have been repeatedly militantly protecting of their Jewish inhabitants.
One of many a whole lot of slave ads within the Nation of Islam guide, JEWS SELLING BLACKS.
A century and a half earlier than New York grew to become the epicenter of Jewish American life, rich and cultured Jews thrived within the giant elite group of Charleston, South Carolina. The town was each a significant slave-trading heart and the birthplace of Reform Judaism, the department of faith with which most Jews determine in the present day. It was additionally the home-base of a number of slave-trading Jews who had enthusiastically carried out their sacred Southern duties as slave masters and slave sellers, and all had shared in the advantages of the African slave commerce. The Jewish Encyclopedia made an astounding declare that put Jewish People on the coronary heart of the slavocracy:
“[T]he cotton-plantations in lots of components of the South have been wholly within the palms of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery discovered its advocates amongst them.”
In 1841, the slaveholding Charleston rabbi Gustavus Poznanski summed up the Southern Jewish American credo:
“This [Charleston] synagogue is our temple, this metropolis our Jerusalem, this completely happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that metropolis, and that land, so will our sons defend this temple, this metropolis, and this land.”
After the Civil Battle Atlanta grew to become the area’s new city and industrial heart, attracting sufficient of their religion to have the biggest inhabitants of Jews of any metropolis within the South. Jewish upward mobility was described by historian Albert Lindemann as “extra hanging in Atlanta than in most northern cities,” and Jews routinely held positions of public belief on this ultra-Christian, militantly white supremacist area. Not less than twelve Jews held workplace in Jim Crow Atlanta between 1874 and 1911—appreciable illustration for a gaggle that by no means exceeded three p.c of the whole inhabitants.
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews, Vol. 2: How Jews Gained Management of the Black American Financial system
Scholar of Southern Jewry Dr. Mark Ok. Bauman maintains that of all of the immigrant teams, the German Jewish group significantly “exerted energy past its measurement in order that it wielded appreciable political affect and preferment.” Jews performed a disproportionate function within the metropolis’s economic system, a excessive proportion being retailers, wholesalers, and tradesmen. Based on one scholar:
“[Jewish] enterprise leaders owned lots of the largest industrial and manufacturing enterprises that offered employment for a lot of native residents…”
Jews have been companions in their very own and Gentile legislation companies; they sat on grand juries; they served as financial institution founders, presidents, and officers; they usually grew to become officers within the chamber of commerce. “From 25 to over 35 p.c” of Freemasons and lots of the highest officers within the Masonic order have been Jews. Reward of Jews by their Gentile neighbors was effusive, as on this 1890 assertion from an Alabama service provider extolling the “Hebrews of Atlanta,” within the pages of the Atlanta Structure:
“[T]right here is nobody component on this metropolis’s make-up extra highly effective than that. Go searching you in any and each enterprise, in each stroll of life, and you will note that the leaders are the Hebrews. Everyone should admire the great enterprise capability with which the race appears imbued, and everyone who makes any research of their house life will agree with me once I say that no folks on the planet are happier of their houses, none are higher to their kinfolk, and none are higher to the poor and needy….No faith has such effectively organized, such smart and such lovely charities…”
In that very same yr, a Jewish man surveying his personal folks’s accomplishments crowed:
“Right here in Atlanta, they [Jews] are present in all walks of life, they usually personal, I suppose, between two [to] three million {dollars}’ price of property. That may be a conservative estimate.”
The editor of the Atlanta-based Jewish South was bursting with justifiable optimism concerning the fortunes of Southern Jews when he wrote in 1878:
“[A]lthough [Judaism’s] progress in all sections of this land of the free has been most affluent, nonetheless the South succeeded in producing the loftiest of fruits, of the best bounty and grandeur.“The Jews in Georgia, nonetheless, did greater than merely grow to be part of the present Georgia custom. In lots of situations, they created, formed, and influenced each the character and course of a lot of these traditions and establishments.”[Emphasis ours]
Jews embraced the race legal guidelines of America voluntarily and inspired their Gentile neighbors to stick to them unquestionably. It might take the Thirteenth Modification, handed in 1865, to finish American slavery legally, however a full thirty years later in 1896 the editors of the Jewish South newspaper opined,
“Negroes are intellectually, morally, and bodily an inferior race—a reality none can deny.”
As lynching grew to become the white nationwide pastime the Jewish press turned on essentially the most weak and simple goal. The Jewish Sentiment editor Frank Cohen cheer-led the lynchers and wrote in 1898:
“…The white man isn’t solely superior to the black man however will assert his supremicy (sic) on the correct time and within the correct method…”
It solely improved for Jews as they moved into the twentieth century. When the house of Jewish furnishings magnate Oscar Pappenheimer burned down in Could of 1914, the Atlanta police fashioned a cordon round the home to protect it in a single day. It appears that evidently Pappenheimer’s jewellery assortment was one of the precious within the metropolis. Destroyed have been “the best pipe organ in a personal house in Atlanta,” three Steinway pianos, and “prized violins and cellos.”
In 1906, that very same Oscar Pappenheimer proposed a legislation focusing on all Blacks:
“I suggest the registration of negroes within the southern states 14 years of age and extra….Every individual so registered ought to possess…a certificates…wherein needs to be entered description, date and homeland and, at every registration, document of abode, employment, conduct and reference….Let others determine whether or not it’s authorized to go legal guidelines bearing on this topic just about the coloured race solely…”
Pappenheimer’s Atlanta proposal was practically an identical to that which Adolf Hitler enforced in opposition to Jews in Nazi Germany 30 years later.
Jews reveled of their place as leaders among the many many ethnic Europeans that settled the American South. No public place was denied to them, and the positions they attained discovered them eagerly swearing a solemn oath to uphold the sacred tenets of the apartheid authorized system. They participated within the violence and terror that framed the slave system and stood elbow to elbow with all whites as slavery’s most ardent enforcers.
It’s true that the corrupt forces of historic revisionism have succeeded in burying this unsavory Jewish previous, however all of those uncomfortable realities are effectively documented all through the Jewish historic document. The Jewish function within the institution and progress of apartheid societies goes even additional again than Christopher Columbus and is far wider in scope than simply the American South. It’s a testomony to the ability and attain of the Jewish myth-makers that a lot race-hating Jewish historical past has been erased from the favored American consciousness.
Notes
Harry L. Golden, Jewish Roots within the Carolinas: A Sample of American Philo-Semitism (Greensboro, NC: Deal Printing, 1955), 6. He calls the Carolinas a “fully free society” and a “300-year-old ‘laboratory of philo-semitism.’”
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews, vol. 2.
Jewish Encyclopedia (1901), s.v. “agriculture.”
David Philipson, The Reform Motion in Judaism (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 466-67.
Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 230.
Steven Hertzberg, “The Jewish Neighborhood of Atlanta: From the Finish of the Civil Battle till the Eve of the Frank Case,” American Jewish Historic Quarterly 62, no. 3 (March 1973): 267.
Steve Oney, And The Lifeless Shall Rise (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 7, writes that “a lot of Atlanta’s factories…have been Jewish-owned.”
Mark Ok. Bauman, “Jewish Neighborhood of Atlanta,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, March 15, 2004, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org: “Jews routinely held seats on the aldermanic board, the college board, and within the state legislature.”
“Hebrews of Atlanta: The Vital Half They Have Taken,” Atlanta Structure, Jan. 12, 1890, 16.
Jewish South, Feb. 8, 1878, and Nov. 7, 1879. Additionally, Abraham J. Peck, “That Different ‘Peculiar Establishment’: Jews and Judaism within the Nineteenth Century South,” Trendy Judaism 7, no. 1 (Feb. 1987): 101, 102.
“A Historical past of Jews in Georgia,” William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, http://www.the
breman.org/analysis/stategeorgia.htm (retrieved April 9, 2009).
“Pappenheimer House Burned to Floor with $25,000 Loss,” Atlanta Journal, Could 31, 1914, 1; Atlanta Structure, Could 31, 1914, 1.
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews, vol. 2.
Lindemann, The Jew Accused, 225.
