Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish History, and: Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History (review)

The study of the history of southern Jews seems to have reached a critical mass recently, after a slow start. In 1976, Richmond hosted a conference on southern Jewish history that resulted in the refounding of the Southern Jewish Historical Society. The Society began to publish its journal Southern Jewish History in 1998. There are now museums and collections dedicated to southern Jewry in Charleston, Atlanta, Jackson, Boca Raton, Miami, Gainesville, Baltimore, and Tulsa; as well as the massive Mississippi enterprise called the Goldring-Woldenberg Institute of Jewish Life, with headquarters in Jackson and museums in Natchez and Utica; and there are probably many more. The McKissick Museum's stunning show A Portion of the People (2002), with its beautiful and scholarly companion volume edited by Theodore and Dale Rosengarten, is one of the most recent developments in this scholarship.¹

A cultural historian could speculate on why this is—George Tindall's idea of seeing life pass before your eyes as you are drowning in the cultural mainstream comes to mind.² For me it has obvious parallels in the study of southern art. There was a groundbreaking show at the Corcoran in 1960, and then nothing much until 1983 when the Virginia Museum in Richmond hosted a much more ambitious show. But the South was still pretty much terra incognita to art historians. By 1995, however, when William H. Gerdts was writing the introduction to Greenville County Museum of Art: The Southern Collection, he was able to say that his library housed, "by region, more substantial studies of southern art . . . than of any other region."³ The field now has its own momentum, and there are major museums of southern art in Augusta, GA, and New Orleans, and others, like the Greenville County Museum (SC), have strong collections.

These two anthologies are obviously intended to be textbooks, but their contents and organizing principles are quite different. Dixie Diaspora assembles a group of previously published pieces dating from 1983 to 2002 and organizes them thematically (Jews and Judaism, Small Town Life, Business and Governance, Interaction, and Identity), with brief introductions for each section and a bibliographical essay. Jewish Roots contains mostly new articles, organized chronologically, with an introductory overview of southern Jewish history, a thematic bibliography, and an introduction by Eli Evans that is so good I was sorely tempted simply to quote it extensively and just get out of the way. The usual disclaimers about the uneven quality of anthologies apply here but only marginally. Some articles are inevitably stronger than others, but both volumes are very good indeed.

If I had to choose only one of these books, it would be Jewish Roots. Almost all of the articles are taken from major recent work in which their authors are obviously completely engaged with their fascinating subjects—Emily Bingham on the Mordecai family, Robert Rosen on Jewish Confederates, Marcie Cohen Ferris on food, Dale Rosengarten on domestic culture, to name a few. Because it is so interesting and blessedly jargon-free, it could as easily be used in a freshman seminar as in a graduate course.

I can understand the urge to organize by theme, especially for a textbook, and both organizing principles create resonances between articles, but I have a strong preference for chronology. It gave Jewish Roots a dramatic flow, and themes emerged from the reading in unexpected ways. I realize I might be the only person who will actually read both these books straight through, so this may be a trivial complaint.

I have a small objection to both books. I find bibliographical essays and bibliographies organized by theme almost completely useless. Bibliographies exist so you can look up books, and neither form of organization makes that...