Daughters of Israel, Daughters of the South: Southern Jewish Women and Identity in the Antebellum and Civil War South by Jennifer A. Stollman (review)

In Daugthers of Israel, Daughters of the South, Jennifer Stollman, Academic Director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, sets out to study a previously under-examined part of American history: Jewish women’s experience in the South before and during the Civil War (1861–1865). Stollman argues that Jewish American women “creatively subscribed to southern customs of dress, language, and regional ideologies,” (23) while privately using a cadre of strategies to retain ethnic and religious identity. These “hidden transcripts” (44) included “giving babies Hebrew names, reminding children in correspondence to observe their Judaism, and using religious signature lines,” among many others (69). Women played a central role in the synagogue, established Sunday schools (105), and through their written documents potentially created counter-narratives to anti-Semitic public thought in the South.

Stollman, however, concedes that the research topic is “exceptionally difficult, given the paucity of sources,” as most antebellum Jewish women seemingly had neither the time nor the inclination to write (28–29). Consequently, Stollman’s account is primarily based on select writings of middle- and upper-class Jewish women, which are supported by colorful clippings from cookbooks, shopping lists, expense accounts, burial lists, newspaper accounts, and marriage contracts. Yet the reader cannot help but wonder how generalizable these experiences might be in the first place because Stollman limits her study to a particular class of Jewish women. Additionally, while Stollman effectively describes southern Jewish women’s efforts to preserve Judaism and present a positive public image of their ethnoreligious group, the cumulative effect of these efforts is not addressed. How were Jewish women’s loyalty and “respectability,” for example—convincingly demonstrated through examples of fundraising, nursing, and writing—perceived by Protestant southerners (192)? Were these efforts recognized by white Anglo-Saxon southerners, and did they improve Jewish women’s everyday lives? An answer to these questions would have added depth to the monograph’s main argument.

Still, Stollman’s impressive command of the existing primary sources and secondary literature does offer an intriguing addition to the historiography of the (upper-class) Jewish American experience before 1865. Stollman clearly shows that Judaism remained a part of her subjects’ private—and sometimes public—lives in the antebellum South. Additionally, Stollman convincingly shows that wealthy southern Jewish women presented a different public image of Jews than contemporaneous anti-Semitic editorials, military orders, and cartoons. Nevertheless, the conclusion that Jewish women’s service “therefore tempered Civil War–era anti-Semitism” (222) seems to be going somewhat too far based on the evidence presented in the book.