Chapter One Introduction More or Less Southern The more Southern the person is, the less Jewish; the more Jewish the person is, the less Southern . --Carolyn Walker-Lipson, Shalom Y'All: The Folklore and Culture of Southern Jews By being more "Southern"--that is, by participating in organized religious activities--Southern Jews are at the same time more "Jewish." --John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture The South is no one place, and there are many ways to be a Jew. The Jewish experience in the South evokes such terms as ambivalence, Paradox, and contradiction . "Who is a southerner?" and "who is a Jew?" are sufficiently complex questions without the added complication of asking "who is a southern Jew?" Southerners and Jews are Americans, too, although both peoples have often found themselves outside the national mainstream. Describing identity is an especially unstable process for southern Jews, who are highly mobile and multinational in origin. Across the four centuries of Jewish settlement in North Carolina, Jews have constantly renegotiated and reinvented identities for themselves. Identity is not a fixed, unchanging essence but is created and re-created in response to new circumstances. Given the length and variety of Jewish experience, historians now question whether a normative Judaism can be described or whether a monolithic Jewish essence can be defined. Nor is the South easy to place. From the contours of its geography to the ethnicity of its people the South has eluded easy definition. Neither is the American aspect of their identities a fixed commodity. To be an American requires not membership in a race or an ethnic group but allegiance to a democratic creed. Yet, in contrast to this Enlightenment ideal, to be an American for much of this country's history meant assimilation into white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture. Jews, however, resisted a total blending even as they melted in the American pot. Jews have been exemplary multiculturalists. Did local Jews identify themselves as southerners? If so, at what historical point did this happen? In response to what circumstances did this occur? Did they blend their southern experience into their collective Jewish memory? Were they different from other American Jews and non-Jewish southerners? The Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish community formed in the 1880s and 1890s when the South, emerging from Reconstruction, and Jewry, undergoing a massive immigration, were both reordering their societies. Jews wrote themselves into the southern narrative even as the South was rewriting its own past. Some Jews assimilated through intermarriage and conversion and became wholly southern, just as some native southern Christians joined the Jewish people, but the trajectory of the community as a whole was toward integration, not assimilation. A double-structured model of identity emphasizes the "interplay" between the newcomers and the host society; the immigrant group retains its ethnic difference but constantly renegotiates its relations with the larger society as it blends old and new. In building a synagogue, for example, Jews created a place to preserve their traditions and collective identity, but the synagogue also served as a "Jewish church" that established the Jews' place as small-town southerners. Jews lived comfortably with the contradictions of being both provincial southerners who were citizens and neighbors in their hometown and cosmopolitans who were members of a global Jewish community. Indeed, identity is more than double. "Home" meant Durham or Chapel Hill, but it could also mean Baltimore, Vilna, and Jerusalem. Mark Bauman, in The Southern as American: Jewish Style argues that the regional culture affected Jews in only a "relatively marginal fashion." The southern Jewish story, he observes, is more similar to the narrative of American Jewry than to the history of white southern Protestants. Behind Bauman's question is the contentious issue of southern identity itself. Is the South merely a "regional variant" of America, distinctive only in climate and weather? Or is the South--with its history of slavery and secession, its racial codes, its languid accents, and its rich folk life--distinct among American regions? Historians and sociologists who insist on southern exceptionalism have been disputatious as they attempt to inventory the attributes that distinguish the region and its people from the American mainstream. Jews, as a mercantile, mythically wandering people, offer a counterhistory to the southern narrative of a rooted, agrarian people. In the Jewish narrative their southern sojourn was but one scene in a long drama of migration that opened in ancient Palestine and was last set, for most, in central and eastern Europe. Despite their geographical dispersion Jews over the course of four millennia maintained rituals, language, and communal bonds that kept their ancient past ever present. Nevertheless, Jewry was undergoing a political emancipation and acculturation in the nineteenth century that was challenging its peoplehood and religious traditionalism. In the South Jews resided among another ethnic group, white southerners, whose principal attributes, orthodox Christianity and Anglo-Saxon heritage, seemingly precluded them from membership. Southern codes of hospitality graciously welcomed Jews, but the South, as Leo Frank tragically learned, was also the most violent of America's regions. Regional types include both the courtly southern gentleman and the night-riding Klansman. Entering a bipolar racial society, Jews found themselves straddling the color line in the southern hierarchy of place. Jews were an urban and commercial people, whereas southerners, even as they embraced industrialization, held nostalgically to the romantic mythology of the plantation ideal. Jews wandered in search of opportunity while southerners defined themselves locally in terms of soil and kinship. The southerners' "regional patriotism"--with their own flag, anthem, heroes, and holidays --was outside the historical experience of most local Jews, who were first- or second-generation immigrants. Historiography has tended to focus on the Germans as representative figures of southern Jewry. These nineteenth-century pioneers rapidly acculturated as southerners, and the region became a bastion of a distinctly American Reform Judaism. Indeed, Classical Reform is usually taken as the normative religion of the southern Jew. As historian Lee Shai Weissbach notes, however, communities that survived into the twentieth century were mostly east European. The question of southern-Jewish identity, Bauman notes, depends ultimately on a comparison of "sub-regional subtleties." Durham-Chapel Hill is a prototype of the east European settlements that emerged across the region with the rise of the industrial New South. Migrations constantly reconstituted the community and reconstructed its identity. In the way of context this study begins with a precommunity history that traces the isolated, transient individuals of Sephardic and German origin who came to the agrarian Old South. The Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian immigrants who came in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries held on to their Yiddishkeit (ethnic Jewishness) and their links to an international Jewry even as they established homes in the North Carolina Piedmont. Baltimore, Richmond, and New York became surrogate homelands that supplied the Durham-Chapel Hill colony with credit, merchandise, rabbis, spouses, and kosher food. Establishing a niche as mercantile middlemen, Jews integrated economically before gaining social and civic acceptance. The children of these east European immigrants who persisted in the South began constructing an identity as southern Jews. In the past thirty years the Sunbelt has drawn southward unprecedentedly large numbers of Jews among other migrants. If Jews had once been reluctant to settle in the benighted South of racism, poverty, illiteracy, and disease, they flocked to a mythic, superior Sunbelt, the economically ascendant region with an enviable quality of life. Jews have been in the vanguard of an emerging multiethnic South. With the Sunbelt migration, southern culture is attenuating as the region becomes more like the nation. If southern and Jew are unstable terms, so, too, is small town . Nearly one-quarter of the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants to America settled outside metropolitan areas. Much of local Jewry's identity can be explained through the small-town rather than the regional factor. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations defines small-town Jewry as having one temple and less than 150 families. A recent anthology, Jews in Small Towns: Legends and Legacies, uses a general population of twenty-five thousand as a criterion. Durham-Chapel Hill's small-town character thus needs qualification. By the 1920s Durham's population exceeded twenty-five thousand, and in 1961 a second congregation formed. The small town yielded to a mid-sized city and then to a Sunbelt metropolitan area. The Jewish community, which had numbered less than four hundred from 1890 to 1950, totaled more than thirty-three hundred in 1990. Durham and Chapel Hill are now two points of the Research Triangle metropolitan area of one million people. The area is highly representative of the changing Jewish demography as Jews move southward from the north and midwest. Although Jewish numbers and percentages of the Durham-Chapel Hill population seem small at any moment, the number of Jews who claim southern-Jewish experience is far greater because of constant population turnover. Moreover, the combined Jewish student bodies of Duke University and the University of North Carolina often equaled the population of the established community. Added to these were soldiers who were stationed at nearby military facilities. Durham, the New South industrial city, and Chapel Hill, the picturesque college town, differ in character and politics, but local Jewry, united by its synagogues and organizations, has always considered itself a single community. Historically, Durham Jewry is larger and older, dating to the 1870s when tobacco manufacturing turned the hamlet into a city. Chapel Hill's Jewish population did not become significant in number until after World War II. Suburban sprawl has virtually erased town borders, which were once eight miles apart. Excerpted from Homelands by Leonard Rogoff. Copyright © 2001 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
