|
|
|
Reviews
| Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish History. Edited by Mark K. Bauman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. vi + 480 pp. Tables, notes, and bibliography. $65.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper).
|
|
Despite a quarter century of extensive research on southern Jewish life, the subject has remained "an exotic aside" (p. 1) even to scholars of American Jewry. Dixie Diaspora, a marvelous collection of essays that combines erudition with keen sensitivity to place and culture, aims to integrate the subfield into mainstream American Jewish history. |
1
|
|
The study of southern Jews has gained momentum only in the last generation. Two watersheds were the publication of Eli Evans's The Provincials in 1973 and the reorganization of the Southern Jewish Historical Society in 1976. The "discovery" that Jews have lived in the South in every historical epoch, from the colonial settlements of Charleston and New Orleans, has encouraged feelings of belonging that come with long residence in one place. |
2
|
|
But there has always been a vulnerable underbelly to the oft-told tale of acceptance and achievement of southern Jews. Jewish integration into southern society has been largely determined by white skin privilege. In a region rife with inequality between whites and blacks, Jews were naturally inclined to "eat Rome's fare" and accept the racial status quo. |
3
|
|
Dixie Diaspora succeeds in capturing this multifaceted story, bringing together sixteen articles that illuminate major themes in southern Jewish history, although some motifs are national. Mark Greenberg's history of Savannah's eighteenth-century Jews, for example, introduces the well-known dynamic of conflict and cooperation between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim. In back-to-back studies of immigrant men who "make good" as merchants on southern frontiers, Elliott Ashkenazi and Cantor Brown demonstrate the difficulties faced by Jewish pioneers who had to learn when to exercise caution and when courage. |
4
|
|
Gary Zola analyzes why modern Reform Judaism was so warmly embraced in the South. The Pittsburgh Platform, he reports, "spoke to Southerners, who had become accustomed to living as a distinct minority, far from any center of Jewish life and culture" (p. 44). In lucid, vigorous prose, Hollace Weiner portrays Texas rabbis as "mixers" (p. 55), ethnic brokers expected to mediate not only between Gentiles and Jews but also between Reform and Orthodox Jews. |
5
|
|
Over roughly the past decade, a lively if sometimes acrimonious debate has emerged, with Mark Bauman as a major player, about just how distinctive the southern Jew is, or if the type exists at all. The issue is directly joined in Lee Shai Weissbach's incisive essay on Jewish life in small towns. Moving beyond nostalgia and away from southern exceptionalism, Weissbach finds—as does Deborah Weiner in central Appalachian coal towns—survival mechanisms shared by Jewish immigrants elsewhere: chain migration, ethnic clustering, women as tradition bearers and wage earners, and the role of eastern European Jews in reinforcing Orthodoxy and encouraging Zionism. |
6
|
|
If students of the Jewish South have split between the "southern school" and disciples of the "small town" thesis, Stephen Whitfield proposes a metaphor that permits compromise. Jewish, American, and southern identities, he argues, are braided like challah, irrevocably entwined. While noting that in the absence of urban density, southern Jews typically have emulated their white neighbors, Whitfield notes that Jews also have "represented forces of change" and "agents of modernization" in the Sunbelt South. "The legacy of Southern Jewry," he argues, "consists of venturousness as well as tradition, iconoclasm as well as filiopietism, resistance as well as compliance" (pp. 446–47). |
7
|
|
Other pieces collected here reveal less agreeable patterns. Social acceptance frequently led to intermarriage and assimilation. Nativists and bigots painted Jews as aliens and Antichrists. Most troubling of all, southern Jews could also be motivated by racism. Howard Rabinowitz, Joshua Rothman, Clive Webb, and Leonard Rogoff all bravely tackle such "cringeful" topics as anti-Semitism, miscegenation, Jewish acquiescence in racial oppression, and the ambiguous "color" of diaspora Jews. |
8
|
Dixie Diaspora is a ready-made text for courses on southern Jewish history. The good news is that instructors have not one but two anthologies to put on their reading lists. In the interests of full disclosure, I contributed a chapter to the "other" collection, Jewish Roots in Southern Soil (2006), a volume of new essays edited by Marcie Ferris and Mark Greenberg. I am pleased to report that the two books are perfectly complementary. While Jewish Roots provides a slice of where southern Jewish scholarship is today, Dixie Diaspora demonstrates how we got here.
Dale Rosengarten
College of Charleston
|
9
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|