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>> 1 Introduction Loving Kindness and Cultural Citizenship in the Jewish South Jews have desired to fit in, to be like everyone else. The problem is that there is an excess expressed in this desire that is aptly captured in the joke that says that Jews are like everyone else, only more so. —Laura Levitt, Jews and Feminism, 1997 It is impossible to write a history of the Jews of the South without re-creating the history of the South itself. —Harry Golden, Our Southern Landsman, 1974 Ralph A. Sonn, Bavarian-born superintendent of the Hebrew Orphans Home of Atlanta, addressed the Board of Trustees on New Year’s Eve, 1917, on the subject of aiding poor Jews within the institution’s five-state region. Opened in 1889 in the up-and-coming “Gate City” of the New South, the home was designed for needy Jewish children whose parents were either deceased or unable to care for them. Most of its 111 young charges were sons and daughters of the immigrants who had made the South their home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many having fled the pogroms of Russia to establish a permanent home in the “golden land” of America.1 It was up to Sonn and the other comparatively privileged and acculturated members of the Orphans Home Board to ensure that these future Jewish citizens did not become wards of Christian institutions or burdens to the public purse. In his speech, Sonn disparaged what he perceived as a “conservative” tendency to “let good enough alone.” Invoking the familiar wooden fence posts that surrounded many of the nearby middle-class homes in Atlanta’s growing 2 > 3 perspectives on American Jewish history by looking south to uncover the roots of Jewish benevolent traditions and to explore the ways in which region shaped a minoritized people’s pursuit of belonging. For Jews living in the Jim Crow South, charity and social uplift served as a vital citizenship project, a complex give-and-take whereby relatively privileged, established Jews worked to support and educate their poor, immigrant coreligionists. Theirs was also an effort to protect collective Jewishness from association with poverty and cultural degeneration, and their work on behalf of poor brethren reveals how the lessons of regional belonging and social mobility assumed concrete form.6 This book shows how Jewish southerners responded to the precariousness of their lives by instituting a sophisticated network of social uplift organizations to ensure that their poorest coreligionists did not endanger collective Jewish prosperity and belonging. Through a complex dialectic of benevolence characterized by simultaneous self-interest and altruism, southern Jews navigated their relationship with regional authenticity by proving themselves to be exemplars of charity. This book argues that their exceptional performance of gemilut hasadim—Hebrew for “giving loving kindness”—provided the vehicle through which they negotiated the politics of belonging, particularly the cultural and symbolic properties of citizenship, in a time and place of extreme insecurity and social transformation. Ultimately, poor southern Jews’ encounters with their benevolent coreligionists confirm that the history of southern Jewishness is not simply that of Jews fitting in despite their cultural and religious differences. Rather, this is a story of how Jewish southerners absorbed the social mores of their adoptive homeland while shaping them, in journalist Harry Golden’s words, “recreating the history of the South itself.”7 The migration of roughly two million eastern European Jews between 1881 and 1924 sparked national anti-Semitic speculation about Jewish inassimilability, driving native-born coreligionists to step up efforts to provide material support as well as guidance on the finer points of becoming American. Jewish benevolence was thus a “categorical imperative ” nationwide.8 Yet, in the post-Reconstruction South, the effort to take care of impoverished coreligionists was amplified at the crossroads of economic turmoil, profound shifts in the way racial differences were known, and violent policing of the color line, creating for southern Jews 4 > 5 tile intersection of immigrant acculturation, social uplift, and regional racial norms. An active and ongoing investment in charity has long constituted a vital component of Jewish citizenship, yet the effort took on additional urgency in spaces where anti-Semitism, anti-immigration backlash, and Jim Crow culture coexisted. This book therefore looks south to understand how charity served as an essential defense against the cultural, social, and political uncertainties of Jewish belonging. While scholars of American Jewish history have documented the range and depth of Jewish charity as a collective effort to assuage...

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