Introduction: Directions in Southern Jewish History

The study of southern Jewish history has come a long way in the 25 years since the late Arnold Shankman entitled an article, “Southern Jews: People in Need of a History.” ¹ Shankman lamented, “The bulk of that which can be called southern Jewish history has been filiopietistic, inaccurate, or irrelevant.” He expressed his optimism that the situation was changing as he recognized the work of Bertram Korn, Jacob Rader Marcus, Leonard Dinnerstein, Harry Golden, and Stanley Chyet, and encouraged others to join their efforts in shedding light on the field. Today Shankman would be pleased to find numerous scholars and amateurs bringing southern Jewish history into the mainstream. While this special issue of American Jewish History celebrates regional identity, the themes of the articles extend far beyond southern boundaries. The questions associated with southern Jewish history typically focus on the impact of the region on what is perceived to be a truly divergent form of Jewish identity and a peculiar variant of the American Jewish experience. What role did southern mores and culture play? What defined the Jewish response to slavery? To the Civil War? How did language and cuisine refiect the emergence of a southern Jewish community? How did southern Jews respond to the presence of African Americans? What was the southern Jewish community’s response to the Ku Klux Klan? To the Civil Rights movement?

The underlying hypothesis implies that Jews living in the South acquired separate and definable cultural characteristics from their regional context. The conference that launched the Southern Jewish Historical Society in 1976 also gave birth to an anthology. Lawrence H. Fuchs explicated this assumption in his foreword to the volume, “To be a Jew in the American South is to be affected by the culture of the South.” In his preface to the same work, Melvin Urofsky added, “It appears that the Southern-Jewish experience differed qualitatively and quantitatively from that of Northern Jewry” ²

That many southern Jewish families may serve fried rather than baked chicken on Friday nights or eat bagels alongside grits does not indicate complete acculturation to southern mores. While it is true that southern Jews manifest attributes of their southern environment (the “Shalom y’all” factor), ³ these superficial traits may not in and of themselves define a distinctive southern Jewish identity. Can anyone imagine examining New York Jewish history through anecdotes about the way Jews from the Bronx pronounced Thirty-third Street or how Long Island Jews routinely went to Chinese restaurants on weekend nights? Were the relationships between African American women from Brooklyn and Queens who helped Jewish women with housekeeping and childcare in the 1950s vastly different from their southern counterparts portrayed in Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy? And if so, in what ways?

Southern Jews deserve a more serious probing of their cultural environment. Despite the romanticism generally attached to anything southern, region may not play the key role in analyzing issues of southern Jewish identity, and it may prove more productive to examine other factors. Factors like local environment and the make-up of the Jewish community may be more critical. An immigrant in turn-of-the-century Atlanta would have faced a very different set of acculturation factors than in an older port city like New Orleans or a small town like Hattiesburg, Mississippi or a village like Jonesboro, Arkansas. Perhaps similarities may loom larger than differences in Jewish life in small towns (or in commercial or industrial cities) across the South or across regional lines. But that comparative scholarship remains to be done. This perspective may yield not a defining southern (or midwestern or northern) Jewish experience, but a variety of patterns which transcend region. ⁴

Demography assumes greater importance in a comparative framework, and the Jewish percentage of the total population of a community may tell us more about Jewish life there than other kinds of data. How were Jewish sub-communities defined by such factors as country or place of origin, denominational affiliation (or non-affiliation), community institutional allegiance, attitudes toward a Jewish homeland, philanthropic priorities? How did the presence...