That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South

Conclusion: Loving Kindness and Its Legacies

212 > 213 to the full benefits of juridical and symbolic citizenship were perennially in question. And yet, after the Civil War, this dynamic of struggle and contestation was most pronounced in the Jim Crow South, a place where adherence to the strictures of the color line dictated the terms of belonging and where perceived Jewish difference—religious, cultural, linguistic, and historical—placed Jews in an unpredictable relationship to those volatile terms. While Jews nationwide constructed a benevolent empire that reached throughout even the smallest communities, in the South the performance of benevolence was no less than a matter of survival. Benevolence served as a means for established members of this minoritized community to control the process of meaning-making by which authentic citizens were known. The Jews of the South therefore became paragons of benevolence in large part because they needed to “take care of their own” in order to navigate the region’s precarious racial terrain. This book contributes to scholarship on racial and ethnic identity by showing that belonging in the South was not just a matter of imitating whiteness; it required a complex staging of one’s membership in an ostensibly united community of chivalrous men and respectable ladies. In the Jewish South, benevolence and honor—concepts infused simultaneously with gendered and racialized meaning—were inseparable, and immigrant Jews had to learn to navigate an unfamiliar political and cultural climate in which particular modes of etiquette and collective memory were essential. Their exceptional performance of gemilut hasadim gave southern Jews a means of proving not just their capacity to “take care of their own”; it provided irrefutable proof of their belonging in a narrative of southern transcendence. The South’s Jewish orphan homes therefore stood as exemplars of “the good work,” raising the children of poor brethren to a level of cultural citizenship unavailable to most of their parents, and training them for lives of prosperity and service to their communities. But the very process of transmitting cultural citizenship to less fortunate brethren lent itself to coercion and inequality, reinforcing rather than challenging the social norms that placed some people into the category of “citizen ” while others remained on the outside looking in. Southern Jews struggled to remain in the former category, and their “good work” 214 > 215 where mechanisms of power switch direction or work against what may appear on the surface as an actor’s own best interests. These rich sources also reveal immigrant clients’ efforts to access the trappings of respectability and to emulate privilege through carefully choreographed consumption and elite outward appearances, evincing the complexity of maximizing one’s civic entitlements in the context of poverty and social alienation. Indigent immigrant clients’ negotiations with their social workers provide valuable insights into the logic by which southern Jews used benevolence to navigate a shifting and treacherous social terrain. Ultimately, the complex dialectic of benevolent uplift teaches us about the multifarious ways in which individuals understand themselves as members of communities, exposing the sometimes subtle ways in which interethnic Jewish differences mapped onto the racial landscapes of the South. Regional ideals of cultural citizenship and the surrounding epistemologies of race in which they were embedded inflected the delivery of loving kindness to impoverished brethren and shaped the way these immigrant newcomers negotiated the terms of their belonging. Their stories remind us that the path to becoming a true citizen was never a straightforward matter of sacrificing “Old World” ways for new. Rather, historical subjects strained under the weight of their region’s multilayered folkways, often making significant sacrifices, to prove themselves worthy of full inclusion in the dominant culture. And today we witness the persistence of these benevolent legacies, and the significance of collective memory to the formation of exemplary citizens. This page intentionally left blank ...