A Biblical People in the Bible Belt: The Jewish Community of Memphis, Tennessee, 1840s 1960s (review)

The turbulent waters of the Mississippi River, steamboats, cotton bales, white planters and Black laborers, Beale Street and the Blues, all evoke the world of Memphis, Tennessee where Jewish families have prospered since the early 1840s. Selma Lewis, a Jewish southerner, whose ancestors journeyed from Russia to New York to Nashville, was commissioned by the Jewish Historical Society of Memphis and the Mid-South to write this history of Memphis Jewry from their humble origins through the 1960s.

Lewis's underlying premise is that the Protestant majority welcomed the Jews, the "Biblical people," to Memphis, and that this uniquely positive experience created in Memphis a favorable climate for the Jews. Lewis explores the strong leadership role that Jews assumed in the city's business, political, and institutional life; Jewish support for cultural and philanthropic activities in the community; and Jewish leadership in desegregating businesses and public facilities in the 1960s. She attributes the acceptance of Memphis Jews to their small numbers within the overall population; their respected position as early leaders and builders of the city; and to the fact that Black Memphians displaced Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities as the targets for prejudice and racial violence.

Lewis describes the arrival of German and Eastern European immigrants in Memphis, their founding of religious institutions, the development of Jewish organizations, and their philanthropic activity. The study offers a wealth of information on Memphis business history through the stories of German and Eastern European Jews who created institutions such as Seessel's, a successful supermarket chain; Goldsmith's, Memphis' largest department store; Schwab's, a dry goods store that still prospers in its original Beale Street location; and Lansky's, a Beale Street clothing store that catered to Black and white clientele, including aspiring musicians Elvis Presley and B.B. King.

While Lewis states that this is not a "compendium of names of members of the Jewish community" of Memphis, her study features people who made important contributions to the community's history (p. xi). It would be difficult to write a history of the Memphis Jewish community not centered on the individuals who shaped that experience.

The first German-Jewish immigrants arrived in Memphis in the 1840s, drawn by the economic opportunity of a thriving river port located in the heart of the country's richest cotton-growing region. By the 1820s, Memphis was the largest city in the mid-South and a vital transportation hub for cotton and lumber shipped out of the Deep South. Lewis argues that the earliest Jewish immigrants came to Tennessee as peddlers, where they "discerned an opening in the economic spectrum and inserted themselves as mediators between the landed aristocracy and poor farmers" (p. 7).

Joseph Andrews, the founder of the Jewish community in Memphis, presents a familiar Jewish immigrant story. Prospering as a Memphis merchant, Andrews was involved in cotton, banking, and brokerage; served as an early city alderman; built the first three-story home in Memphis; and donated land for the Jewish cemetery. In the 1850s, other German-Jewish immigrants followed, and the city's first Jewish community was established. It soon boasted a Hebrew Benevolent Society, Ladies Aid Society, and Congregation B'nai Israel, founded in1853, and later renamed Temple Israel. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise traveled from Cincinnati to dedicate its sanctuary, affirming the strong ties between Jews in the Deep South and Cincinnati, a center of nineteenth-century American Jewish life.

Lewis chronicles the development of the Memphis Jewish community as she discusses the community's first rabbis and religious schools, Jewish involvement in the Civil War, and the reaction of Memphis Jews to slavery and abolitionism. She argues that Reconstruction and the yellow fever outbreak in 1878 did more to destroy the city and its Jewish population than...