A Shtetl Grew in Bessemer - Southern Jewish Historical Society

4 SOUTHERN JEWISH HISTORY
In Bessemer and other small towns across the American
South, the migration of eastern European Jews had a vital impact
on the life and longevity of the town. Often their migration sustained
the Jewish life of these towns already begun by the earlier
arrival of German Jews. In some cases the influx of eastern European
Jews actually created new centers of Judaism where none
had existed before. As historian Lee Shai Weissbach indicates,
only “27 per cent of the triple-digit Southern Jewish communities
of the late 1920s had substantial Jewish populations before the era
of East European migration began,” and “viable Jewish communities”
in these towns could not have been launched without the
immigrants from eastern Europe. 9 In Bessemer’s case, while the
origins of some of the earliest Jewish immigrants are unclear, both
German and eastern European Jews arrived by the late 1880s and
proceeded to work together to found Temple Beth-El and to sustain
Jewish life in the city for eight decades. This cooperation and
blurring of denominational boundaries illustrates new patterns
just now appearing in the historiography. 10
Jewish arrival and persistence in Bessemer were also affected
by and predicated on their acceptance by the majority Christian
society and the terms of assimilation that such acceptance necessitated.
Thus, these immigrants also participated in the “defining
experience” of all American Jewry: the need for acculturation on
the one side and the desire to retain ethnic/religious identity on
the other. 11 Bessemer’s Jews performed this balancing act extremely
well.
The reasons why Jewish immigrants settled in Bessemer
are both logical and consistent with those of other southern Jewish
populations. In the 1880s Bessemer was a boomtown. Although
always in neighboring Birmingham’s shadow, in the beginning
there were plans for Bessemer that could have made it a major
rival to the older city. Recognizing that the area surrounding
Bessemer was rich in the three essential elements necessary
to produce iron (iron ore, coal, and limestone), Henry DeBardeleben
and David Roberts officially organized the Bessemer Land
and Improvement Company on July 28, 1886. DeBardeleben
projected