Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Law of the Land Is the Law \\ 83
southerners established strong bonds of commonality with their Christian peers.
"It was," as historian Louis Schmier has written, "usually sufficient to silence the
loudest prejudiced voice, for such war experiences assured local non-Jewish residents
that among them were men, Jews notwithstanding, who had defended and
would continue to defend the South against the desecration of its soil and the
deprivation of its liberty. In both a wartime and postwar South, struggling for an
identity by glorifying its past and honoring its struggle, that was no small recommendation
for accepting the Jews into their midst, for reassessing malicious
stereotypes of Jews, and for preparing the way for those Jews who in the following
decades were to immigrate to the South." 24
The Jews of the Old South were neither the victors nor the vanquished. And,
in fact, slavery played a more prominent role in the existence of antebellum southern
Jewish life than the Jews themselves played in the emergence and maintenance
of slavery. The historical rise and fall of American slavery would not have
been affected at all were there no Jews living in the South; and, whatever minuscule
part the Jews played in the historical drama would more than have been compensated
for by other non-Jewish whites. That the Jews benefited, as did every
other southern white, from the existence and labor of Black slaves is undeniable.
But, southern Jews, like southerners in general, hovered between myth and reality.
"They assumed a certain distance from the racial question," one scholar wrote,
"but made every effort to see that religious and economic freedoms were not
harmed by an overt distaste for the system.. .and a too visible reaction against the
entire oppressive nature of Southern society. This was in keeping, after all, with
the notion that Southern gentlemen—both Jew and Christian—were required to
maintain a proper and correct attitude at all times. This was to be the proper
response even if their make-believe could not hide the glaring inequalities around
them." In the South, much of whose history has been shrouded in myth, the Jews
were neither myth makers nor myth breakers. But one thing is for certain: in the
building, maintaining, and enhancing of that myth, southern Jews were inconsequential
at best and invisible at worst. They were, to borrow from Ralph Ellison,
just barely inside "the groove of history." 25
NOTES
I wish to express my deep appreciation to Thomas H. Appleton, Jr. and David
Brion Davis for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. Eli N. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate (New York, 1988), p.
33. The subject of Jewish and other ethnic slaveowners will be covered in depth in my
extended work, a study of immigration and ethnicity in Southern history, currently in
preparation.
2. Evans, Judah P. Benjamin, pp. 38-39.