East European Immigrants and the Image of Jews in the Small-Town South

Abstract

East European Immigrants and the Image of Jews in the Small-Town South Lee Shai Weissbach (bio) In accounts of the Jewish experience in the smaller cities and towns of the South, the story of immigrants from Eastern Europe has received far less attention that it deserves. Rather, it has been the story of Jewish pioneers from the states of Central Europe that has figured most promi-nently in shaping the image of small-town Southern Jewry. To some extent, this is understandable, for it was the so-called German Jews who founded the best-known smaller Jewish communities of the South in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was they who constituted almost the entire population of these communities for several decades. To cite but one example, in 1880 individuals from Central European places of birth such as Bavaria, Prussia, or Alsace headed 33 of the 43 identifiable Jewish households in Alexandria, Louisiana, while American-born children of Central European parents headed another six. By contrast, Russian-born Jews headed only three of Alexandria’s identifiable Jewish households, while a Sephardic Jew from the island of St. Thomas headed another. 1 German Jews have dominated the image of small-town Southern Jewry not only because they arrived early but also because, sensing that they could be highly integrated into American society without totally abandoning their Judaism, they eagerly adopted an Americanized lifestyle and moved into the mainstream of local activity. Throughout the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Jews of Central European background were playing prominent roles in the public life of small towns throughout the South, even as Jews from Eastern Europe, steeped in the culture of the shtetl, were beginning to arrive in their midst. In Lexington, Kentucky, for example, German Jews headed both chambers of the city council at one point in the 1880s, and in 1890 the Munich-born president of congregation Beth Tefilloh in Brunswick, Georgia, also [End Page 231] presided over the city’s Board of Alderman. In 1900 Jacob Trieber, who was born near Breslau in Germany and settled in Helena, Arkansas, became the first Jew appointed to a federal judgeship, and by the turn of the century Mississippi had seen at least seven different Jewish mayors of small towns, all undoubtedly of Central European origin. By 1917 two members of the German-Jewish congregation Anshe Emeth in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had been elected mayor of their town. 2 In business, also, German Jews achieved a high profile. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, department stores founded by Jews from Central Europe were among the most important mercantile establishments in one small Southern town after another. Examples include S. Waxelbaum and Son in Macon, Georgia; J. Weisman and Company in Marshall, Texas; Weil Brothers and Bauer in Alexandria, Louisiana; Heinemann’s Department Store in Jonesboro, Arkansas; M. M. Ullman and Company in Natchez, Mississippi; Simon Switzer’s The Valley in Vicksburg; and Winner and Klein in Meridian. 3 Just as the stories of German-Jewish pioneers and notables have been fundamental in shaping the image of small-town Southern Jewry, so too has the Reform movement. This is because the oldest congregations in the South’s small communities tended to adopt Reform Judaism quite early in the movement’s history and because these congregations, founded and supported by rapidly acculturating Central Europeans, frequently dominated local Jewish life for many decades. The ubiquity of Reform congregations in the small towns of the South around the turn of the century is indeed quite striking. A survey of the 81 towns in the South that had total populations of under 50,000 and Jewish populations of at least 100 but less than 1,000 around 1907 reveals that in 44 of these towns there was a synagogue affiliated with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (since 1873 the umbrella organization of Reform Judaism) and that in another 15 towns there was [End Page 232] an unaffiliated synagogue that can be identified with Reform on the basis of its practices or its name (the Greensboro Hebrew Reformed Congregation in North Carolina, for example). 4 In other words, around the turn of the...