Nadene Goldfoot
I was shocked when doing genealogy of my husband when I found that his mother's father came from the southern United States while my husband was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Herman B. Cohen, born in April 1889, was born in Belzoni , Humphreys, Mississippi ! He was a bookmaker and diamond broker. I had no idea that we Jews had ever settled in the South! To make matters even more surprising, I found that his great grandfather, Seigmond "Simmon" Cohen, MD. born January 1, 1867, was born in Goldsboro, Wayne, North Carolina and he died in Houston, Texas. Well, I could see that a doctor might have lived in the South. Danny's great great grandfather, Robert W. Cohen, born in April 1843, had been born in Prussia, and his wife, Sophie, was born in Germany. So they had immigrated and moved to the South in 1862. That was way before the majority of Jews came to the USA that I knew about. Why? Robert was a merchant.
Young people probably have not ever heard of Prussia before. It was a former German state. Jews lived there before the state was even formed. In 1648 they lived in limited areas. By 1812 they were accepted as citizens. By 1847 they finally were given "rights." Not all rights were given to Jews until 1918, end of World War I, so it isn't surprising that many Jews from Prussia got out of there and came to the Golden Medina of the USA where they might be treated humanely.
Thousands of Jewish immigrants chose to settle in the more rural Southern United States forming tight-knit religious communities and creating a unique cultural identity. Jewish immigrants came to the South from various countries, backgrounds and religious traditions within Judaism. Major Jewish communities include Memphis, Tennessee; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Wilmington, North Carolina. Jews participated in many important events in Southern history, such as the Civil War, the World Wars, and the civil rights movement.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the USA, (1809-1865) had several Jewish friends, the closest being Abraham Jonas. Lincoln's intercession resulted in the immediate revocation of an order issued by General Grant in 1862 expelling Jews from the military department of Tennessee.
Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the USA, was from Missouri. His partner in a haberdashery store was Jewish. They were good friends. He later cited as decisive in his recognition of Israel, the Jewish state, the advice of his former business partner, Eddie Jacobson, a Jew whom Truman absolutely trusted. Missouri typically is categorized as both a Midwestern and a southern state. The region was split on Union and Confederate issues during the Civil War. A small region of the state is called Little Dixie for the influx of southerners that settled there.
Many early Jewish settlers were traveling peddlers, which facilitated greater mobility and enabled them to save up money and eventually start their own businesses. Although some traveled extensively across the United States, others concentrated their trade in certain areas and contributed to the Jewish communities that began to build up in the South. In contrast to the Jewish immigrants arriving in Northern cities, such as New York, who were crowded into Jewish neighborhoods and ghettos, Southern Jews enjoyed a greater degree of prosperity and tolerance, mainly because they were better able to integrate into the smaller Southern communities.
Some department stores started this way. Meier & Franks in Portland, Oregon was started by Jewish peddlers. Here's Meier & Franks as it started and what it grew to be. You certainly know the department store Kohl’s. But you may not know it was founded by European Jewish immigrants. Of course you’ve heard of Sears, but did you know German Jewish immigrant Julius Rosenwald took over the struggling company in 1893 and turned it into a huge success story? And there’s the German Jewish immigrant brothers Isaac, Louis and Benjamin Stern, whose Stern’s department stores were leaders in the business for so many years.
Anyone who has seen the film Miracle on 34th Street knows of the great department store battle between Macy’s and Gimbels – but they may not know that Bavarian Jew Adam Gimbel pioneered department store franchising by opening up 30 stores by 1910, and that the Jewish German immigrant Straus family took over Macy’s early on, and then duked it out with Gimbel for shopping supremacy. Neiman Marcus is out of Dallas, Texas, known for their luxury department store.
Herbert Marcus Sr., a former buyer with Dallas' Sanger Brothers department store, had left his previous job to found a new business with his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman and her husband, Abraham Lincoln Neiman, then employees of Sanger Brothers competitor A. Harris and Co. In 1907 the trio had $25,000 from the successful sales-promotion firm they had built in Atlanta, Georgia, and two potential investments of funds.
For the small group that we are, we're not trying to take over the country, just wanting to provide for our family. Jews tend to be creative and hard working people, striving to do better. We've had to use our minds to survive, not our backs. Look where it got Samson! Blinded and grinding wheat with his back.
Additionally, because they made up such a small percentage of the population, they appeared to pose little threat to locals. Instead, animosity was directed at other marginalized groups, mainly African Americans, but it was also directed at Catholics, Indigenous people and members of other ethnic groups.
Southern and Jewish culture have often intersected due to the rich and diverse immigrant background of Jews in the South. As with many immigrant groups throughout American history, feelings of identity differed depending on the region and on the extent to which immigrants assimilated to the surrounding culture. Studies have been done examining how Jewish and Southern identity intersect and sometimes come into conflict.
Due to the different "historical experiences and distinctive cultural patterns" that exist in the Southern United States, Southern Jews differ significantly from Jews living in the North. They experience a type of bicultural identity as a result of adopting many of the customs, practices, and values of Southern life. Southern accents influence Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation and Southern cultural practices regarding gatherings and celebrations can be seen in Jewish events such as weddings, funerals, and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.
Additionally, Southern Jews make up a smaller proportion of their community's population than their Northern counterparts.
Additionally, they have enjoyed more affluence than Northern Jews, who often belonged to the poor, working class. Southern Jews on the other hand were mostly businessmen or professional workers; "Virtually no Jews had blue collar jobs." They came to the region because they knew it would be a place in which they could prosper economically.
I notice that they were immigrants who came much earlier, more of the Reformed German Jews than Jews who settled in New York and the New England states that came from more orthodox backgrounds of Eastern Europe.
Southern Jews mainly faced discrimination and antisemitism in times of social unrest and economic or political upheaval, such as during the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the civil rights movement.
North Carolina saw Jews there as early as the mid 1700s. John Henry was elected to the N.C. legislature in 1808, and he was Jewish, but it wasn't until 1868 (after the Civil War) that Jews were given the right to hold public office in the state. The 1st synagogue, Temple Israel, was in Wilmington of the Reformed movement in 1856.
Mississippi saw Jews there as early as 1699. Despite the Black Code enforced from 1724, Jews settled in Biloxi and Natchez by 1750. Authorities forbade Jews to vote. The code prohibited slaves from publicly practicing any religion other than the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Catholic religion (article 3), including the practice of the Protestant faith (article 5). The code extends the punishment of pagan slave conventicles to masters who allow such behavior.
Mississippi became a state in 1817 and about 100 Jews lived there, most being peddlers or storekeepers from Alsace and Germany. The 1st synagogue was B'nai Israel built in 1840.
Texas saw Jews in 1821 when Samuel Isaacs landed in Austin. Like the other states, they engaged in commerce and the professions and served in the government. Henry Castro brought Jews from France and Germany to Texas in 1842. They held services in 1854 in Houston. 103 Jews served the in the Civil War being in both the North and South. I found I had a 2nd-3rd cousin living in Houston who was born in South Africa. Our joint family came from Telsiai, Lithuania, and my ancestor made the decision to immigrate to the USA, while his cousin went to South Africa, and only lately immigrated to Houston. Our birthdays were only a few days apart. My grandparents were part of the later immigration period to the USA. So Houston has Jews from both immigration groups of the Reformed and the Orthodox.
Between 1850-1870 German Jews came to Texas and settled. Then from 1880-1914, Jews came from Eastern Europe as part of a plan called The Galveston Scheme that intended to divert immigrants from New York area. That must be how my ancestor wound up in Oregon. Jews have served in both houses of the Texas legislature. Austin itself had 5,000 Jews in 1990. Houston had 42,000.
Louisiana's Judah Philip. Benjamin (1811-1884) Jewish of West Indian birth, became a lawyer in Louisiana, elected to state legislature in 1842 serving in US Senate but withdrew when his state seceded from the Union, named attorney general of the Confederacy, then secretary of war which he resigned, became its secretary of state. After the war, moved to England. The Black Code was in force from 1728 to 1803, but the 1st synagogue was built in 1828 in New Orleans, another in 1845. More than 200 Louisiana Jews served in the Confederate armies during the Civil War. Not only Benjamin but 2 other Jews, Michael Hahn and Benjamin F. Jonas were in the US Senate.
As America’s first large wave of Jewish immigrants in the 19th century, German Jews built some of the country’s signature Jewish institutions based on their traditions, education, and cultural ideals. Their experience laid the foundation for what it meant to become an American Jew in the course of the next 200 years. In the 19th century, “Germans” constituted one of the largest groups of immigrants arriving in the United States, but they were more diverse in their background than that designation suggests. Roughly 5.5 million people arrived from German-speaking lands in this period, some 140,000 of them Jewish.
These “German” Jews came from many parts of central Europe, including the southern German states, the Prussian province of Posen, and Bohemia, then part of the Habsburg monarchy. They fit no singular profile in terms of geography or politics, and in many ways, the German part of their identities first crystallized within the American context. Today, some 46 million US residents are descended from German-speaking immigrants.
Resource;
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_in_the_Southern_United_States#:~:text=Major%20Jewish%20communities%20include%20Memphis,and%20the%20civil%20rights%20movement.
https://wc.rootsweb.com/trees/123625/I67213/samuel-isaacks/individual
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Noir#:~:text=The%20code%20prohibited%20slaves%20from,masters%20who%20allow%20such%20behavior.
https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/sarna/americanjewishcultureandscholarship/Jews%20and%20the%20Civil%20War.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neiman_Marcus
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