That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South by Caroline Light (review)

Regional histories often make the case for their importance by arguing that they fill a lacuna in our knowledge, broaden our view, or decenter the geography in our narratives. Caroline Light’s recent book on Jewish charity in the South does each of these things, but what makes it exceptional is that its scholarship is not merely additive, but transformative. That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South reconceptualizes the relationship of gender and race in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American Jewish history. It uses the history of organized Jewish efforts at gemilut hasadim (charity) to explore how Jews saw themselves and other Jews and how they positioned themselves in a society overdetermined by notions of race, gender, and class.

The centerpiece of the book is an institutional history of two southern orphanages, Hebrew Orphans Home of Atlanta and the Hebrew Orphans Home in New Orleans. It begins with an overview of their founding in the wake of the Civil War and subsequently presents the stories from both the viewpoints of the caregivers and the cared for. The cared for extended beyond today’s ideas of the orphan. Some “orphans” had widowed mothers, others had living fathers, and others still had no living parents. Some children were institutionalized in an orphanage, while others lived in foster care arrangements; some even (contrary to policy) lived with a parent who received financial support from one of the orphans’ homes. These orphans’ homes even sometimes helped widows, who were adults. Despite sometimes flexible senses of who, exactly, was to be helped, these institutions consistently privileged helping women, especially widows, and children. Jewish men, Light argues, were culturally expected to help themselves and their own families. In this way, the gendered politics of charity become clear. Southern Jews saw benevolence as a duty toward women and children and self-help and productivity as duties of men.

But if the book’s goal is to understand the contested place of Jews in broader southern society, especially with respect to race, why look at gemilut hasadim, a practice conducted by Jews for the benefit of other Jews? Here Light is subtle, but her argument convinces. Through a sophisticated analysis of archival documents, Light shows how culturally established (white) Jews established these charitable organizations in the post-Reconstruction era for two purposes: first, to aid Jewish women and children in need, and second, to demonstrate to non-Jewish southerners that Jews were still “exemplary citizens” even in the presence of many new Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (57). That is, even though the story of gemilut hasadim is a story of Jews helping other Jews, it was also a very public story about how Jews sought to portray themselves to non-Jews, how acculturated Jews saw themselves as white but also recognized the importance of complying with the norms of social and racial belonging, and how economically advantaged Jews sought to shape the lives—from their very intimate to their most public manifestations—of poor Jews in their region so that non-Jews saw the benevolence and self-sufficiency of the Jews as a people.

Light explains that the book “shows how Jewish southerners responded to the precariousness of their lives by instituting a sophisticated network of social uplift organizations” (3). Given the historical background, this account is plausible, but if the argument is that the precariousness of racial belonging is the driver of benevolent institutions, readers might want more primary source evidence of this racial anxiety. In this sense, however, Light’s scholarship in is good company. When historians describe the reasons behind broad cultural formations, they often describe them as the product of “anxiety” or “precariousness.” Masculinity, if one reads widely in American history, is described as “in crisis” in every historical period. The renegotiation of race, the changing...