Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History (review)

Representations of Appalachia make it difficult to imagine Appalachia as anything other than a culturally and ethnically homogeneous place where, it has often been claimed, time stood still. Even when one is able to think beyond the tired, old depictions of dirt-poor mountaineers, moonshiners, feudists like the Hatfields and McCoys, Protestant fundamentalists and snake-handlers, or the singers of old-time British ballads to the region's famously embattled coal miners, commonplace images, nonetheless, are of white "Anglo-Saxons." Appalachia's once large African American population is frequently overlooked. So too are Jewish labor organizers like Harry Simms who was murdered in "Bloody Harlan" Kentucky in 1932 for trying to organize a communist-led labor union there. Also overlooked are the many Jewish retailers who marketed consumer goods in places like Harlan County and elsewhere throughout the Appalachian coalfields prior to the mid-twentieth century.

Deborah Weiner's social history of the Jewish commercial class in Appalachia is an important contribution to a new wave in Appalachian studies that profoundly challenges such omissions. In this new scholarship, many Appalachian coalfield communities are now seen as having once been global or transnational villages where, by the time of the First World War in the case of southern West Virginia, a quarter of the coal mining labor force was drawn from southern and eastern Europe and another quarter was comprised of African Americans from other regions of the U. S. South. Weiner's work, in particular, significantly rethinks Appalachian history by looking at Jewish migration into the region while contributing, more broadly, to the understanding of Jewish community life in American small towns by looking at how Appalachian Jews adapted to and helped to transform "a seemingly unlikely place" (7).

Ironically, according to Weiner, global forces and tensions of capitalist industrialization simultaneously pushed Jews from shtetl origins in Eastern Europe while pulling them to the newly industrializing coalfields of Central Appalachia. Here, she shows, they drew upon old-country, "middlemen" traditions of commerce to play a prominent role in the emergence of middle-class institutions, the advance of consumer culture, and the civic, religious, and political life of the region's small towns. (Almost no Jews worked as coal miners and only a few, mostly doctors, worked as professionals for coal companies or invested in mining.) Many first entered the region on horseback as pack peddlers but soon became small-town retailers. Kinship ties and family labor, network connections with Jewish coastal wholesalers (especially in Baltimore, Maryland), and an ethic of communal obligation and social responsibility enabled them to thrive and prosper. More than anything else, Weiner contends that the boom town atmosphere of rapid economic and social change in Appalachia enabled them to successfully establish a commercial niche in coalfield communities that distinguished them from Jewish merchants in other areas of the South who catered to an outcast population or in northern communities where they were often discriminated against by already well-established elites. By exhaustively and skillfully analyzing oral histories (most that she collected herself), correspondence, public documents, census records, and newspaper accounts (including advertisements, editorials, and reports on civic life), she concludes that coalfield Jews, numbering in the thousands, encountered relatively few barriers to full participation in Appalachian society, especially in the region's more ethnically diversified communities.

According to Weiner, the key to Jewish success in Appalachia came initially by securing a viable economic niche separate from the competition of company-owned stores in the "coal camps" and from already established merchants in the older county-seat towns of the region. Jews first did best in the boom-town milieu of Appalachia's small, independent towns. Once such place was Keystone, West Virginia, where they comprised at least ten percent of the population in 1900—"a larger percentage of Jews than any major U. S. city outside of New York" (36)—and played important economic, social and political leadership roles. By the 1920s, a second generation of Appalachian Jews had begun to re-concentrate in county...