Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Law of the Land Is the Law \\ 77
Although Cardozo was undeniably describing the social status of a minuscule
number of southern Jews, nevertheless, no native white southerner could have
expressed the myth and nobility of the Lost Cause any more passionately. 8
And a very few Jews did indeed become prominent slaveowning planters in
the Old South. Besides Judah P. Benjamin, Major Raphael J. Moses, who would
become chief commissary officer of General Longstreet's Corps during the Civil
War, owned a plantation with approximately fifty slaves near Columbus, Georgia.
Charlestonian Nathan Nathans owned an impressive plantation on the Cooper
River; other Jewish South Carolinians were Isaiah Moses who owned thirty-five
slaves; Mordecai Cohen, who owned twenty-seven; and Isaac Lyons, Barnet
Cohen, and Chapman Levy, all of whom maintained sizeable slave holdings.
Various members of the Mordecai family owned plantations in Virginia and
North Carolina. Moses Levy's plantation, Parthenope, was an impressive spread in
Florida, a fitting image of anyone's romantic notion of the Old South. Joining
Benjamin in Louisiana was J. Levy of Ascension Parish, who owned some forty
slaves. Yet it must always be remembered that as successful as these Jewish
planters were by southern standards, they represented a very tiny percentage of
the 20,000 Jews who resided in the South before the Civil War and who could,
or would, ever aspire to own a slave. 9
For the successful urban Jews of the Old South, the situation was not unlike
that of their rural counterparts. Prominent Jewish residents of Richmond,
Virginia, for example, owned slaves as status symbols. The census of 1820 reveals
that those few Jews who could afford slaves averaged three bondsmen per household.
The most extensive slave holdings were by Jacob Mordecai, who also maintained
a Henrico County farm. The Virginia Cardozos of neighboring Powhatan
County also owned a farm that utilized slave labor. For most Richmond slaveowning
Jews, however, slaves were used for domestic purposes or were hired out. 10
The census returns of New Orleans indicate a similar pattern for the small
number of affluent Jewish denizens of the Crescent City. In 1820 the six Jews who
could be identified owned some twenty-three slaves. Ten years later although only
twenty-two Jews could be identified (more than half of whom did not own slaves),
ten of the group owned a total of seventy-five slaves. And in 1840 when sixty-two
Jews were listed (a distinctly small number), they held a total of 348 slaves. These
census returns, while underestimating the number of Jews in the area, are still a
clear indicator that some Jews in New Orleans, like non-Jews, equated growing
economic success and prosperity with slaveowning in the hopes of acquiring complete
social acceptance. 11
Even in Mobile, Alabama, which housed a much smaller, newer, and poorer
Jewish population, some Jews purchased slaves in anticipation of becoming
assimilated. The seventy-two identifiable Jews in the 1850 census owned a total
of ninety slaves. For a few Jewish immigrants in Alabama, much like other fellow
southerners, the road to success was paved by slave labor. 12
On the whole, the Jews of Charleston, South Carolina, supported the institu-