Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

74 // JASON H. SILVERMAN
with sorrow, pines under restraint and discomfort, boils with revenge and
ever cherishes the desire for liberty. His passions and feelings in some
respects may not be as fervid and as delicate as those of the white, nor his
intellect as acute; but passions and feelings he has, and in some respects,
they are more violent and consequently more dangerous, from the very circumstances
that his mind is comparatively weak and unenlightened.
Considering the character of the slave, and the peculiar passions which,
generated by nature, are strengthened and stimulated by his condition, he
is prone to revolt in the near future of things and ever ready to conquer the
liberty where a probable chance presents itself. 2
Benjamin and his southern Jewish brethren, of course, were a small ethnic and
religious minority in a land where the small slaveowning minority ruled. Indeed,
out of a population of roughly 9 million in the South, there were around 20,000
Jews, constituting approximately 0.2 percent of the total southern white population.
Of those, about 25 percent, or 5,000 Jews, owned slaves. If one accepts
that almost 400,000 southerners owned slaves, then almost 5 percent of the white
population owned slaves; and 1.25 percent of the slaveowners were Jews. But the
owners of record were certainly not the only white southerners to be intimately
involved with slavery, as a number of recent scholars have maintained. According
to the census figures, a family in I860 averaged five members. Thus, to obtain a
more accurate picture of the number of southerners directly involved with slavery
requires multiplying the number of titular owners by the average family size. The
result, almost 2 million people, represents almost one-quarter of the white population
(the same percentage as the southern Jews). 3
Although perhaps not as successful as a Judah P. Benjamin, several thousand
Jews of the Old South did own slaves and many others tangentially supported the
institution. Theirs is certainly a story that bears telling within the historical context
and perspective of the Old South.
"There is no American Jewish history," wrote the historian Lloycl Gartner,
"that does not include assimilation." Defining assimilation not as the end to
Jewish identity nor its diffusion but rather as a social process whereby a minority
assumes the values and practices of the majority, Gartner very accurately
describes the Jewish experience in the antebellum South. Not surprisingly, during
their first century of existence in the South, from the mid-eighteenth century,
Jews constituted an insignificant part of the population and the economy.
Different in religion and ethnicity the Jews were a highly vulnerable minority
within an increasingly clearly defined aristocratic region. Many southern Jews,
particularly those in the urban areas of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans,
actively sought entrance into the mythical southern aristocracy by erroneously
claiming to be descendants of the noble Jews of Spain and Portugal, the
Sephardim. This status, they hoped, would admit them into the planter class of