Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

One Significant Example
The Need to Remember \\ 235
During the quarter of a century after the American Revolutionary War, the largest
Jewish community in the nation resided in Charleston, South Carolina. It was the
slave South, and the Jewish families who settled there assumed a white privilege
and, for the most part, the perspective of the region. In fact, by 1850 well over
half of those for whom records remained listed their place of birth as South
Carolina. It was a community settled first by Sephardic Jews (from southern
Europe) and thereafter by Ashkenazic Jews (from central Europe). In a social
milieu that afforded them economic integration and an ease of social interaction,
they came to resemble their Gentile neighbors in one important respect: roughly
87 percent of non-Jewish whites owned slaves by 1830 as compared to 83 percent
of Jewish households. 14
Yet Charleston's was not entirely a conventional community. The Reform tradition
in Judaism had its birth in the city among those who came of age in the
1820s. Counted among the leaders was Isaac Nunes Cardozo, the younger brother
of Jacob Nunes Cardozo, a noted journalist and economics writer, and the son
of David Cardozo, a local rabbi or teacher. Isaac Cardozo served as Vice President
of the Reform Society for a number of years, and delivered a key speech on the
importance of reform. Some sources describe the younger Cardozo as a prominent
businessman and expert on economics; others make no mention of his occupation;
still others insisted he worked as a weigher in the Charleston Customs House for
almost a quarter of a century. Whatever his employment status, Isaac found comfort
in the bosom of a community at ease with itself. 15
Next to religion, education anchored Jewish life in Charleston. That Isaac
might value learning is not at all surprising given his father's occupation, his
brother's stature, and the Charleston community's embrace of education.
Generally, education was reserved for elites, and academies serviced the select few,
who through accident of birth entered this privileged world. Charleston's Jews
were not oblivious to such privilege, but their academies seemed to service a
broader cross section of co-religionists. In this regard, education became part of a
more progressive force in the community, occasioning the training of boys and
girls, separately, and together. 16
Sometimes the training that the young and old received occurred outside the
sanctioned space of the classroom. Most noted were the interracial affairs of the
heart that led writers such as de Tocqueville to comment on the significance of
race in the America he encountered. In his treatise on American democracy he
observed, "Among the Americans of the South, Nature sometimes, reclaiming her
rights, does for a moment establish equality between white and Black." 17 The historical
record is dotted with the names of men and women who entered such relationships.
Moreover, some of these affairs assumed the quality of a marriage—
long, respectful, and emotionally and materially satisfying. Savannah resident
Moses Nunes, for example, took the unusual steps of preserving for prosperity the