Read an Excerpt
Homelands
Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina
By Leonard Rogoff The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2001 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1356-2
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
More or Less Southern
The more Southern the person is, the less Jewish; the more Jewish the person is, the less Southern.
—Carolyn Walker-Lipson, Shalom Y'All: The Folklore and Culture of Southern Jews
By being more "Southern"—that is, by participating in organized religious activities—Southern Jews are at the same time more "Jewish."
—John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture
The South is no one place, and there are many ways to be a Jew. The Jewish experience in the South evokes such terms as ambivalence, paradox, and contradiction. "Who is a southerner?" and "who is a Jew?" are sufficiently complex questions without the added complication of asking "who is a southern Jew?" Southerners and Jews are Americans, too, although both peoples have often found themselves outside the national mainstream.
Describing identity is an especially unstable process for southern Jews, who are highly mobile and multinational in origin. Across the four centuries of Jewish settlement in North Carolina, Jews have constantly renegotiated and reinvented identities for themselves. Identity is not a fixed, unchanging essence but is created and re-created in response to new circumstances. Given the length and variety of Jewish experience, historians now question whether a normative Judaism can be described or whether a monolithic Jewish essence can be defined. Nor is the South easy to place. From the contours of its geography to the ethnicity of its people the South has eluded easy definition. Neither is the American aspect of their identities a fixed commodity. To be an American requires not membership in a race or an ethnic group but allegiance to a democratic creed. Yet, in contrast to this Enlightenment ideal, to be an American for much of this country's history meant assimilation into white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture. Jews, however, resisted a total blending even as they melted in the American pot. Jews have been exemplary multiculturalists.
Did local Jews identify themselves as southerners? If so, at what historical point did this happen? In response to what circumstances did this occur? Did they blend their southern experience into their collective Jewish memory? Were they different from other American Jews and non-Jewish southerners?
The Durham–Chapel Hill Jewish community formed in the 1880s and 1890s when the South, emerging from Reconstruction, and Jewry, undergoing a massive immigration, were both reordering their societies. Jews wrote themselves into the southern narrative even as the South was rewriting its own past. Some Jews assimilated through intermarriage and conversion and became wholly southern, just as some native southern Christians joined the Jewish people, but the trajectory of the community as a whole was toward integration, not assimilation. A double-structured model of identity emphasizes the "interplay" between the newcomers and the host society; the immigrant group retains its ethnic difference but constantly renegotiates its relations with the larger society as it blends old and new. In building a synagogue, for example, Jews created a place to preserve their traditions and collective identity, but the synagogue also served as a "Jewish church" that established the Jews' place as small-town southerners. Jews lived comfortably with the contradictions of being both provincial southerners who were citizens and neighbors in their hometown and cosmopolitans who were members of a global Jewish community. Indeed, identity is more than double. "Home" meant Durham or Chapel Hill, but it could also mean Baltimore, Vilna, and Jerusalem.
Mark Bauman, in The Southern as American: Jewish Style argues that the regional culture affected Jews in only a "relatively marginal fashion." The southern Jewish story, he observes, is more similar to the narrative of American Jewry than to the history of white southern Protestants. Behind Bauman's question is the contentious issue of southern identity itself. Is the South merely a "regional variant" of America, distinctive only in climate and weather? Or is the South—with its history of slavery and secession, its racial codes, its languid accents, and its rich folk life—distinct among American regions? Historians and sociologists who insist on southern exceptionalism have been disputatious as they attempt to inventory the attributes that distinguish the region and its people from the American mainstream.
Jews, as a mercantile, mythically wandering people, offer a counterhistory to the southern narrative of a rooted, agrarian people. In the Jewish narrative their southern sojourn was but one scene in a long drama of migration that opened in ancient Palestine and was last set, for most, in central and eastern Europe. Despite their geographical dispersion Jews over the course of four millennia maintained rituals, language, and communal bonds that kept their ancient past ever present. Nevertheless, Jewry was undergoing a political emancipation and acculturation in the nineteenth century that was challenging its peoplehood and religious traditionalism.
In the South Jews resided among another ethnic group, white southerners, whose principal attributes, orthodox Christianity and Anglo-Saxon heritage, seemingly precluded them from membership. Southern codes of hospitality graciously welcomed Jews, but the South, as Leo Frank tragically learned, was also the most violent of Americas regions. Regional types include both the courtly southern gentleman and the night-riding Klansman. Entering a bipolar racial society, Jews found themselves straddling the color line in the southern hierarchy of place. Jews were an urban and commercial people, whereas southerners, even as they embraced industrialization, held nostalgically to the romantic mythology of the plantation ideal. Jews wandered in search of opportunity while southerners defined themselves locally in terms of soil and kinship. The southerners' "regional patriotism"—with their own flag, anthem, heroes, and holidays—was outside the historical experience of most local Jews, who were first- or second-generation immigrants.
Historiography has tended to focus on the Germans as representative figures of southern Jewry. These nineteenth-century pioneers rapidly acculturated as southerners, and the region became a bastion of a distinctly American Reform Judaism. Indeed, Classical Reform is usually taken as the normative religion of the southern Jew. As historian Lee Shai Weissbach notes, however, communities that survived into the twentieth century were mostly east European.
The question of southern-Jewish identity, Bauman notes, depends ultimately on a comparison of "sub-regional subtleties." Durham–Chapel Hill is a prototype of the east European settlements that emerged across the region with the rise of the industrial New South. Migrations constantly reconstituted the community and reconstructed its identity. In the way of context this study begins with a precommunity history that traces the isolated, transient individuals of Sephardic and German origin who came to the agrarian Old South. The Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian immigrants who came in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries held on to their Yiddishkeit (ethnic Jewishness) and their links to an international Jewry even as they established homes in the North Carolina Piedmont. Baltimore, Richmond, and New York became surrogate homelands that supplied the Durham–Chapel Hill colony with credit, merchandise, rabbis, spouses, and kosher food. Establishing a niche as mercantile middlemen, Jews integrated economically before gaining social and civic acceptance. The children of these east European immigrants who persisted in the South began constructing an identity as southern Jews.
In the past thirty years the Sunbelt has drawn southward unprecedentedly large numbers of Jews among other migrants. If Jews had once been reluctant to settle in the benighted South of racism, poverty, illiteracy, and disease, they flocked to a mythic, superior Sunbelt, the economically ascendant region with an enviable quality of life. Jews have been in the vanguard of an emerging multiethnic South. With the Sunbelt migration, southern culture is attenuating as the region becomes more like the nation.
If southern and Jew are unstable terms, so, too, is small town. Nearly one-quarter of the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants to America settled outside metropolitan areas. Much of local Jewry's identity can be explained through the small-town rather than the regional factor. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations defines small-town Jewry as having one temple and less than 150 families. A recent anthology, Jews in Small Towns: Legends and Legacies, uses a general population of twenty-five thousand as a criterion. Durham–Chapel Hill's small-town character thus needs qualification. By the 1920s Durham's population exceeded twenty-five thousand, and in 1961 a second congregation formed. The small town yielded to a mid-sized city and then to a Sunbelt metropolitan area. The Jewish community, which had numbered less than four hundred from 1890 to 1950, totaled more than thirty-three hundred in 1990. Durham and Chapel Hill are now two points of the Research Triangle metropolitan area of one million people. The area is highly representative of the changing Jewish demography as Jews move southward from the north and midwest.
Although Jewish numbers and percentages of the Durham–Chapel Hill population seem small at any moment, the number of Jews who claim southern-Jewish experience is far greater because of constant population turnover. Moreover, the combined Jewish student bodies of Duke University and the University of North Carolina often equaled the population of the established community. Added to these were soldiers who were stationed at nearby military facilities.
Durham, the New South industrial city, and Chapel Hill, the picturesque college town, differ in character and politics, but local Jewry, united by its synagogues and organizations, has always considered itself a single community Historically, Durham Jewry is larger and older, dating to the 1870s when tobacco manufacturing turned the hamlet into a city. Chapel Hills Jewish population did not become significant in number until after World War II. Suburban sprawl has virtually erased town borders, which were once eight miles apart.
CHAPTER 2
The North Carolina Background, 1585 to 1870s
Jews who settled in colonial North Carolina abandoned Jewish community for a frontier. They were exiles not only from their European homelands but also from the American Jewish communities where they had first settled. Their cosmopolitan origins and mobility crossed national borders and boundaries of identity. They were a mix of Germans and Spanish-Portuguese with recent histories in England, Holland, and the Caribbean. From the port cities of Savannah, Charleston, Newport, and New York they moved on to the frontier. Living on the margins, they maintained Jewish identity through family, mercantile, and religious links to these distant communities. Few and transient, beyond the controls of rabbis and community, they rarely persisted in North Carolina as Jews beyond a generation.
Neither for Jew nor for Gentile was colonial North Carolina a land of opportunity. With a shallow, swampy coast, the colony did not develop the mercantile port—the Savannah, Charleston, or Richmond—to draw immigrants. North Carolina was a wilderness with few navigable rivers or passable roads. The political and economic climate was no more inviting than the geographical one. Frontier anarchy prevailed. Lord proprietors left their land titles in the hands of speculators and unscrupulous agents. Pirates raided the coast. The thickly wooded backcountry was the preserve of Native Americans. The Indian Trading Path brought a few Europeans down from Virginia into the Piedmont (where Durham and Chapel Hill are located), but colonization was slow and late. North Carolina's Jewish communal history does not truly begin until an urban commercial economy developed in the mid-nineteenth century.
Although lacking community, Jews were present from the colony's founding. In 1585 North Carolina became home for the first Jewish settler in a British colony in the New World when Joachim Gans, a native of Prague, arrived on Sir Walter Raleigh's second expedition to Roanoke Island. A metallurgist, Gans had revolutionized England's copper industry. Returning to England, Gans in 1589 was taken to court after he declared before a clergyman—in both Hebrew and English—that he denied the divinity of Jesus. Gans was a prototype of Jewish settlers for nearly four centuries in his economic mobility, his cosmopolitan origins, and his outsider status as a Jew.
North Carolina welcomed Jews ambivalently as the colony, and later the state, wrestled with the contradictions of being a society founded on both republican and Christian principles. When John Locke composed the "Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina" in 1669, he had expressly opened the colony to "Jews, heathens, and other dissenters." Nonetheless, Locke's constitution, which was never enacted, welcomed nonbelievers with the expectation that they would find Christ's truth. Protestantism was upheld as the religion best suited for a free people. Although the royal charter enfranchised the Church of England, dissenters flourished. Quakers dominated politics in the late-seventeenth century, but in the eighteenth century the migration of Scotch Highlanders, Scotch-Irish, and Germans from Virginia and Pennsylvania brought a swelter of Protestant sects to North Carolina. German Lutherans and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians spread across the Piedmont. Methodist circuit preachers conducted revivals. By 1775 the Baptists emerged as the largest denomination. With its sectarianism North Carolina remained inhospitable to non-Protestants. The state's 1776 constitution granted liberty of worship, but a religious test limited office to Protestants. Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina offered more tolerant havens.
For Jews the deterrents of religious prejudice and political disqualification were less significant than the pull of economic opportunity. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jews were commonly identified as a class with commerce, and Jews and Christians alike justified the Jews' emancipation for their "economic utility" to the state. In 1750 Lord Cuming proposed a bizarre scheme to settle three hundred thousand Jews in the North Carolina mountains in the hope that they would generate enough trade for the Crown to repay the national debt. Colonial records suggest a far humbler migration.
North Carolina's early Jews were emissaries from distant commercial centers and were not distinctly regional. Jewish merchants in such port cities as Edenton, New Bern, and Wilmington were part of a coastal network that extended from Newport to Savannah to the West Indies. Their names—Gomez, Lopez, Rivera, Levy—were prominent in colonial commerce. This network, secured by family ties, was a colonial extension of the Jewish communities of Amsterdam and London. North Carolina's contribution to the transatlantic trade consisted of lumber, tobacco, rum, whale oil, and slaves. The well-known Newport merchant Aaron Lopez launched some thirty-seven ships to North Carolina between 1761 and 1775 and maintained agents and partners along the coast. As was typical of Jews nationally in the colonial and early Republic eras, Lopez's network involved Jews and non-Jews alike. Although Jews did not establish themselves as planters, as they did in Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina, some North Carolina Jews speculated in timber lands. Jews owned and traded slaves.
North Carolina's early Jews did not have a specifically southern regional identity, and their civic status reflected the European situation. Economic integration was a first step in emancipating and secularizing Jews. Early North Carolina records suggest that Jews aspired to exercise their rights as citizens. In the eighteenth century occasional Jewish-sounding names, an unreliable indicator of Jewish origin, appeared in court records, militia musters, Masonic rolls, and land grants. A 1702 petitioner protested against illegal ballots from blacks, sailors, servants, strangers, and Jews. In 1740 Aaron Moses witnessed a will in coastal Perquimans County. Joseph Laney, identified as a Jew, was listed on documents from 1759 until after the Revolution. The notorious Tory David Fanning wrote that two Jewish rebels, Silvedoor and Rapely, challenged him when he attempted to rally North Carolinians to the British cause.
Several Jewish mercantile families settled in coastal Wilmington in the late 1730s, but this community did not endure. As Wilmington grew into a seaport by the 1790s, more families arrived. They included Sephardic mercantile agents from Newport, New York, and Charleston and a few poorer artisans and petty tradesmen, some of German origin. A "Jewish rabbi," the Reverend Jacob Abroo, was reported to have died in New Bern in 1790. The 1790 federal census counted less than one hundred Jews in the state. In 1826 Isaac Harby, the Charleston author, estimated that four hundred Jews resided in North Carolina, but this figure has no factual basis. North Carolina Jewry was too small and transient to constitute a community.
Maintaining family, trade, and religious links to urban commercial centers, North Carolina's Jews were typical of Jews on the frontier in their mobility and the impermanence of their settlement. This pattern was not exclusively southern. North Carolina's Jewish development, for example, parallels that of Connecticut, which had a brief, sparse colonial mercantile settlement linked to Newport and New York. As Jacob Marcus observes of Connecticut Jewry, Jews in a "monolithic" Christian religious and social milieu had "no future." Jewish settlements expired, sometimes reviving with new migrations, only to die again. The choice was to remain in the hinterlands and assimilate or return to an urban Jewish center.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Homelands by Leonard Rogoff. Copyright © 2001 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
