The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontier of Texas (review)

One of Bryan Edward Stone's most significant achievements in The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontier of Texas is the story of how Jews shaped Texas, and how Texas shaped Jews. It is a book that will be of value to readers beyond its subject. Jews and non-Jews, Texans and non-Texans alike will find this work a fascinating case study of the universal questions of identity, community, frontier, and faith. By the very nature of his inquiry into their doubly unique history, Stone sets Jewish Texans apart, yet the story he tells will be familiar to anyone who has ever been a stranger in a strange land.

At the heart of this narrative is a redefinition of the frontier as something more complex than the dividing line between civilization and savagery. It is as much a psychological boundary, "an imagined space of cultural interaction where differences collide" (237), as it is a physical border. For the first Jewish Texans, the metaphor of the frontier was reminiscent of Abraham's travels and Moses's exile in the desert. The struggle to make a life in Texas, far removed from established centers of faith, actually allowed Jewish Texans to create a uniquely Jewish narrative to define themselves.

The Chosen Folks spans the history of Jewish Texas from the first Spanish crypto-Jews who fled the Inquisition for Texas, where they continued to practice their faith covertly, all the way through the Jewish role in the Civil Rights movement. Throughout that history, Stone describes the conflicted allegiances that those who wore both the Star of David and the Lone Star felt to their two identities of Texan and Jew. As individual Jewish merchants and businessmen moved to the burgeoning, predominantly Anglo communities of nineteenth-century Texas, they felt the simultaneous pulls to assimilate for the sake of survival (in a culture where being viewed as "non-white" was frequently a social liability) while still maintaining separate Jewish traditions and institutions.

Eventually, as enough Jewish immigrants moved to Texas to establish communities and permanent centers of worship, many came to view their adopted state not as a peripheral outpost of the Jewish world, but as a Promised Land of sorts. Life in Texas offered almost limitless possibilities. Many Jewish Texans were passionately patriotic, and declared their independence from both Zionism and from the unofficial American Jewish cultural capital, New York City. Yet some Jewish Texans—usually from Orthodox traditions—felt that this newfound regional loyalty was too much of a compromise. The debate about which identity, Jewish or Texan, came first fractured many Jewish communities and continued to resurge until the crisis of the Holocaust brought the two groups together.

Throughout the twentieth century, Texas Jews maintained several complex and often contradictory relationships with other ethnic groups. Stone reveals that while many Jews fought the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, others who were tied to the political and commercial communities "felt compelled to support the Klan during its rise to political power despite its supremacist agenda, and many more chose quietly not to oppose it" (123). In the 1950s and 1960s, many Jews campaigned for civil rights for African Americans, mindful of their own experiences with racial prejudice. Still, others who ran stores and restaurants perpetuated the system of segregation because they could not afford to lose white business.

Stone has supported his analysis with exhaustive historical research, drawing from Jewish archives and personal documents to local legends and popular culture. Whenever possible, the author elects to tell the stories of Jewish Texans in the words of those who experienced it. The result is a volume that validates the experiences of the Jews of the southern and western American Diaspora as just as authentic and meaningful as those anywhere else in the world.