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Reviews
| Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas. By Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth D. Roseman. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007. xvii + 308 pp. Maps, photos, graphs, and index. $34.95 (cloth).
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Even though the community comprises barely more than one-half of one percent of the state's population, the phrase "Texas Jew" is no oxymoron. In their new volume, Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas, Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth D. Roseman admirably demonstrate the key role Jews played in shaping Texas's politics, economy, and culture from the earliest days of statehood in the late 1840s. |
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Presented as a series of essays written by scholars, journalists, lawyers, rabbis, and relatives of prominent Jewish Texans, Weiner and Roseman have produced a work of popular history that nevertheless raises fascinating questions for scholars. The book's twenty-one essays suggest that cultural isolation forced Texas's pioneer Jews, often the only members of their faith in their frontier communities, to pursue "blending in without becoming absorbed," as Weiner suggests (p. 3). In frontier towns the lack of a minyan (the ten adult men needed to form a congregation under Jewish tradition) led to a deemphasis of religious practice even as mid-nineteenth-century Jewish Texans retained an interest in their culture and history. |
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As various authors note, Texas Jews began significantly influencing the state's history in the post–Civil War period as they arrived with a wave of other immigrants following the spread of railroads in the late nineteenth century. Not congregated in ethnic ghettos, Jews found the freedom to form their own identities. Newcomers such as the Sanger brothers, pre–Civil War immigrants to Texas who became owners of popular department stores across the state, embraced southern and Texan identities first, with their Jewishness being second. Like their peers in other southern states, the Sanger brothers loyally served in the Confederate Army and forged close ties with the Gentile majority through reliable volunteerism. |
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Only with the rise of Texas cities in the early twentieth century and the development of the first sizeable Jewish communities did Jews confidently assert a more distinct cultural identity, constructing beautiful and sometimes elaborate synagogues, forming B'nai B'rith chapters, and as Stuart Rockoff proves in a groundbreaking essay ("Zionism in Early Texas"), giving birth in the early twentieth century to vibrant Zionist organizations in rising metropolises like San Antonio and Houston, far from the movement's epicenters in Europe and the American Northeast. |
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Much of the last half of Weiner and Roseman's volume centers on colorful, compelling biographical sketches of prominent Jewish entrepreneurs and politicians. Such stories should appeal to general readers. Scholars, however, may sometimes wish the authors had been more ambitious. |
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Lone Stars raises many provocative questions but declines to answer them. For instance, in a state where economic and political privilege rested on white identity, did Jewish Texans see themselves as racial peers of their Anglo-Gentile neighbors? Throughout the book, Gentile Texans are treated as an undifferentiated mass, but historians and ethnographers might want more information on the subtle differences in the Jewish relationship with African Americans, white mainline and fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, and Hispanics. |
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Since Weiner and Roseman did not aim this book at an academic audience, the failure to fully explore these questions is not a flaw, however, but a call for scholars to examine the issues this book raises. Lone Stars does not represent a definitive word on the still-young field of Jewish Texas history, but a solid foundation for future research.
Michael Phillips
Collin County Community College
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