Jew and Gentile in the New South

There is very little real anti-Semitism in the South. There is even a solid tradition of philo-Semitism, the explanation of which lies in the very character of Southern Protestantism itself—in the Anglo-Calvinist devotion to the Old Testament and the Hebrew prophets, and the lack of emphasis on the Easter story which has been so closely connected with European anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless, segregation of a curious sort between Jew and Gentile does exist there. It is confined to the cities and larger towns, and to precisely those middle-class and proprietary circles in which Jews and Gentiles have an identity of interests—“Friction occurs,” Shmarya Levin used to say, “where planes meet.” [ . . . ]

There is a touching naivety in the small-town Southerner’s respect for the Jewishness of the Jew in his community. It springs from the Southern Protestant’s own attachment to Biblical Judaism, which is manifested in the basic tenets of the several denominations: “The Open Bible on the Altar” (and no other adornment) of the Presbyterians; the Methodists’ “Faith without works is dead” (“Good deeds save from Death”); and the Baptists’ lack of a formal creed, their congregational autonomy, and their intense individualism. As in Judaism, no special holiday (not excepting Christmas) is considered as important as the weekly Sabbath; and the blue laws of the “Still Sabbath” are only paralleled among Orthodox Jews and the Puritans of Colonial New England—the latter, along with the rural South of modern times, being the heirs of the Sabbatarian Protestant sects of the British Isles. [ . . . ]

The small-town Southerner takes it for granted that to be a Jew is to be a religious Jew, that his friend the storekeeper fully possesses that Hebraic tradition handed down through the centuries for which the Southern Christian has so deep a respect. As the Jew in a small Southern town goes about his business of selling dry goods or ready-to-wear clothing, he rarely suspects the symbolic role he enacts for the Gentile society roundabout him—he represents the unbroken tie with sacred history and the prophets of the Bible, he is the “living witness” to the “Second Coming of Christ,” the link between the beginning and the end of things. [ . . . ]

It was inevitable that the Jews of the South, belonging to a single proprietary class of small capitalists—ready-to-wear, credit jewelry, textile manufacture and distribution, textile machinery, chemicals, cotton waste, metal scrap, mill agents, jobbers, wholesalers and traveling salesmen—should similarly try to align themselves with the new society. It was part of their effort to win the prestige that ordinarily follows wealth, and also to break with their immigrant past. The new society would seem to be the American group or class to which they naturally belonged. From the old aristocracy, with its fourth-generation requirements, they were naturally barred, though hardly more so than the “common people” of the South, or the newly emerged middle class. For wealth played a small part in the self-constituted aristocracy of the South; birth, so-called, was everything.

But it was inevitable also that, in his efforts to join the new society, made up as it was largely of social climbers, the Jew should be rebuffed. No hatred of the Jew was involved; the country club set was trying to evolve a homogeneous group, from which the Jews were barred by definition.

Anti-Semitic attitudes that cropped up in the process were no more than a rationalization of the desire to mix only with the “right kind of people,” meaning people like themselves. The Northern manager brought this attitude with him as part of his baggage. The Southern social climber, left to his own devices, might conceivably have been less set in the matter of excluding Jews. He had his own problem; he was running away from his own impoverished past; the Jew was the least of his worries. [ . . . ]

As a member of a middle class of proprietors and professionals, the Southern Jew naturally seeks the society of his economic opposite numbers in the Gentile middle class. Apart from this “natural” tendency, there is his desire for koved, the status that such social contacts bring him in his own group. “He has many Christian friends,” the middle-class Jew of the South says admiringly—and he does not mean Christian mill workers or service station attendants. A friendship with someone below his own economic level would probably do him more harm than good. Moreover, the Southern Jew of the city lives in constant fear of someone’s passing an anti-Semitic remark “to his face.” In polite middle-class circles, this danger is reduced to a minimum. Below “the top” he is not sure, and refuses to risk it. His friend Tom may be “all right,” but he can never be sure of Tom’s luncheon companion or the untried visitor to Tom’s home.

But when the Jew seeks his outside social contacts at the top of urban-Gentile society, he is up against the most highly selective members of the entire middle class. The Gentile who establishes “restricted” residential areas and exclusive country clubs is trying to break with his own rural or mountain background or is a Northerner for whom these are accepted things. He has no patience with “climbers” of another group (any more than the wealthy German Jew had for his poorer and less assimilated Lithuanian or Polish brother); they cannot add to his status, and they may diminish it.

This spirit of exclusiveness on the part of the Gentile middle class was responded to by Southern Jews with their own country clubs—and their own kind of exclusiveness. The pattern has been fairly consistent. First there is a long period of trying to get into a Gentile country club. Occasionally a solitary Jew is admitted and the others become hopeful and wait some more. Eventually they give up and build a club of their own.