Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (review)

Homelands is everything that excellent local history should be—an appealing narrative of community building that includes colorful anecdotes, a wide array of characters and personalities, and links to larger historical trends and issues. In Leonard Rogoff's hands, the study grew from a centennially-inspired commemorative history of the Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish community into an interpretive social history in which disparately garnered strands from requisite sources—newspaper accounts, synagogue records, family reminiscences, and oral histories—are deftly woven into a seamless whole. It gives readers an intimate look at the growth of the Durham-Chapel Hill area from small town and university community to the base of today's fast growing Research Triangle. This thoroughly researched, comprehensive study traces the chronology of Jewish residents there from the late nineteenth century's few merchants to several thousand Sun Belt professionals today. In the process, Rogoff argues, these mobile generations of Jews who settled (at least for a time) in this area, were like others elsewhere in the four centuries of Jewish settlement of North Carolina who "have constantly renegotiated and reinvented identities for themselves" (p. 1). He often raises questions of identity, placing this evolving redefinition of individual and community substantially in the context of southern, American, and Jewish history.

With its poor harbors and non-navigable rivers, North Carolina had little to attract newcomers—Jew or gentile—during the colonial era. The state's topography inspired a Jewish demography unlike its neighboring state, South Carolina, which supported colonial America's largest Jewish population. Mercantile Jews from Sephardic and German backgrounds did not settle in the Durham-Chapel Hill area until more than a century later, when the region began to grow through boom-and-bust economic cycles after recovering from the twin traumas of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the 1870s, as tobacco became Durham's key industry, the town's German Jewish community flourished, not in tobacco, but in traditional roles in small businesses, such as dry goods and groceries.

When "Buck" Duke realized that he could not compete with the popular Bull Durham tobaccos, he decided to go into the cigarette business and went to New York to lure skilled Russian Jewish immigrant cigarette rollers down to Durham. These were the first Russian Jews to arrive, and they formed a "proletarian interlude" (p. 39) in the 1880s that was short-lived, contentious, and markedly different from the experience of their co-religionists. Not surprisingly, the Jewish community divided along class lines. Rather than deal with the radical demands of these immigrant workers, Duke installed Bonsack machines that could produce more cigarettes in a day than they could produce in a month. Most of the cigarette rollers did not remain in the area.

Yet, Rogoff points out, Durham Jews were "selective in their remembering and forgetting. The narrative that persisted in their collective memory represented the tobacco rollers as pioneering southerners, forefathers of the enduring community" (pp. 51-52). These cigarette workers were merely the vanguard of the Russian Jews who followed and reshaped and reinvigorated Durham's Jewish community as it entered the twentieth century. The newcomers, however, hearkened back to the mercantile origins of the Jewish community, continuing the trend in Jewish economic demographics that persisted until late in the century.

With the Durham-Chapel Hill area home to two outstanding major universities, Duke and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, these merchants' children, especially the generation that grew up after the Great Depression, had ample opportunities to extend their aspirations well beyond their parents' stores. As sons (and somewhat later, daughters) went to college and entered the professions, they abandoned the stores their fathers had built for them to inhabit and inherit. Durham's native son and author Eli Evans quipped in his seminal appraisal, The Provincials: A Personal History of the...