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BOOK REVIEWS181 ies on other states would be well advised—especially if they could be produced in such attractively printed volumes as this one. Elisabeth Joan Doyle St. John's University Jews in the South. Edited by Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson . (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. Pp. 392. $12.50.) This informative collection of twenty-one articles and essays, most of them previously published, treats the experiences of Jews in the South from the seventeenth century to the present. As the editors explain in their introduction, Jews, although always comprising less than 1 per cent of the South's population and consequently receiving scant scholarly attention, nevertheless made significant contributions to the region 's development. More important, Jews themselves were deeply affected by the South. Its agrarian economy, predominantly fundamentalist Protestantism and especially slavery caused the southern Jewish experience to diverge significantly from that of their northern coreligionists . The selections, arranged in five sections, each preceded by a brief introduction and the whole containing a useful bibliographical essay, make strikingly clear that Jews sought to appear and frequently were little different from other southerners. In the first group of articles, for example, dealing with the antebellum and Confederate South (there is only one piece on the colonial period) Leon Hühner describes the proslavery views of Florida's Senator David L. Yulee and Benjamin Kaplan traces the services rendered the Confederacy by Judah P. Benjamin . Despite the contributions of these men, as well as general southern Jewish support of slavery, thoroughly documented by Bertram Wallace Korn, the Jews became the objects of wartime anti-Semitism, a sorry episode which Korn also analyzes. In the second section, "Jews in the New South," Dinnerstein provides a convenient summary of another outburst of anti-Semitism, the Leo Frank case, and Thomas D. Clark reveals in an especially perceptive essay the contributions of Jewish merchants, shopkeepers and itinerant peddlars to the evolution of the region's post-Civil War economy. Following a brief section dealing with southern views of the Jew, in which the most interesting piece is the almost quaintly sentimental picture of southern Jewry by Lucian Lamar Knight, a philo-Semite, Presbyterian minister and literary editor of the Atlanta Constitution between 1892 and 1902, the final portion of the book is devoted to the contemporary South. Although most of the selections are by sociologists , political scientists and journalists whose evidence is frequently impressionistic, all are provocative. The authors in the several selec- tions in "Life in the Twentieth-Century South," for example, probe the ideological heterogeneity and leadership struggles in Jewish communities which to outsiders may appear monolithic. As the contributors in the final section, "Jews and Desegregation," point out, however, the issue of integration has created a crisis for all southern Jews. Although a few are ardent segregationists and others staunch integrationists, most Jews are caught in a dilemma. Sympathetic to the black cause but fearing economic pressure or overt anti-Semitism, the majority, including rabbis, are "closet liberals." Prizing their hard-earned and precarious status in the South and yet conscious of the plight of blacks, Jews are gnawed by guilt from two contradictory directions—that they are secretly questioning the southern way of life to which they wish to belong and at the same time silently condoning injustice which their principles should lead them to protest. As Joshua A. Fishman writes about this predicament, "how cruel the South can be." Henry B. Leonard Kent State University £ 182 ...

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