Southern Jewish history. (In Pursuit of ...).

Rosengarten, Dale

What began eight years ago as a modest oral history program at the College of Charleston has blossomed into a major traveling exhibit with the ambition of revolutionizing how American Jews think about their history. "A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life" chronicles the long, eventful saga of Jews in the American South--anticipating the 350th anniversary of Jews in America in 2004.

The exhibit title comes from a letter written in 1816 by Charleston-born Isaac Harby, journalist, playwright, and leader of the Reformed Society of Israelites, to Secretary of State James Monroe. Protesting the removal of the American consul to Tunis, Mordecai Manual Noah, because he was a Jew, Harby reminded the future president, "They [the Jews] are by no means to be considered as a Religious sect, tolerated by the government; they constitute a portion of the People."

In the context of the show, "a portion of the people" has an ironic twist. The acceptance Jews enjoyed in South Carolina and the ease with which they integrated into society came at a price. For while Carolina was the first political entity to treat Jews as equals, it also was the only colony on the American mainland whose charter sanctioned racial slavery. Jews were equal--to other white people. Along with Huguenots and diverse groups of Christian dissenters, they bolstered the number of whites in a colony and state with a black majority. Subscribing to the dominant morality, Jews accepted slavery, as well as other distinctively southern institutions such as states' rights and dueling.

Becoming "a portion of the people" also meant that southern Jews might assimilate into the mainstream and marry out of Judaism altogether. Indeed, few descendants of Carolina's first families are still Jewish, though most are proud of their Jewish lineage. The drama of the exhibit lies in the simultaneous efforts Jews have made to become a part of southern society and to sustain their Jewish identity.

"A Portion of the People" has come a long way--from the tidal flats and foothills of South Carolina to the bright lights of New York City, where the exhibit, co-sponsored by Yeshiva University Museum and the American Jewish Historical Society, is on view through July 20, 2003 at the Center for Jewish History. In September 2003, it moves to the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina--not a Jewish museum, but named for a major Jewish contributor. (Yeshiva is the only Jewish museum on the show's two-year tour.)

When the project began in 1995, each of its three sponsors had its own agenda and goals. Founders of the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina, led by the late state senator Isadore Lourie, were driven by a profound sense of loss for the small-town Jews who were passing from the scene. They wanted their stories recorded, their memories preserved. The College of Charleston wanted to expand its Jewish archives and develop its Jewish Studies program. The University of South Carolina's McKissick Museum aimed to mount a nationally traveling exhibition about a neglected aspect of the state's cultural landscape.

The curators of "A Portion of the People" set out to dispel myths. They aimed first to convince an uninformed public that there are indeed Jews in the South, and second to contest the stereotype of Jewish immigrants as men in black hats and women in babushkas who traveled in steerage and arrived at Ellis Island around 1900. Contrary to public opinion, not all of America's earliest Jews settled in Newport and New York.

The exhibition challenges the accepted wisdom that Jews came to America in three waves: first, exiles from Spain and Portugal; second, German-speaking people from Central Europe; and finally, Eastern Europeans fleeing persecution and pogroms. Historian Oscar Handlin disputed this formulation more than fifty years ago, but the notion persists despite evidence that all three strands were woven among Jewish arrivals in every era. The tendency of early settlers, regardless of where their families came from, to identify with Spanish and Portuguese ancestry--to "Sephardize" themselves, in Jonathan D. Sarna's phrase--has been a recurring path to upward mobility.

"A Portion of the People" reassesses the South's significance in American Jewish history. How many people know that, two hundred years ago, more Jews lived in Charleston than anywhere else in North America? Or that South Carolina claims the first professing Jew elected to office in the Western world, the first Jewish patriot to die in the American Revolution, the first Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Societies, and the first dissidents to attempt to reform Judaism in the United States?

Working with a panel of distinguished scholars, the curatorial team made a risky decision at the outset: to try to tell the southern Jewish story from beginning to end, to cover three centuries of history in less than three thousand square feet of exhibition space. Only then could the narrative do justice to the adaptation Jews have made in the South and their passionate allegiance to the region, the drift toward Reform Judaism and the surprising resurgence of Orthodoxy, and the self-aware Jewish identity that continues to evolve.

"A Portion of the People" is studded with exciting objects, many never before seen in public. On exhibit is an original edition of Carolina's Fundamental Constitutions of 1669, drafted by philosopher John Locke; a Masonic patent signed by two of the four Jewish founders of Scottish Rite Masonry in Charleston; and a miniature portrait of Sarah Moses Levy, ca. 1798, wearing a miniature of her son Chapman Levy, also on display. Isaac Harby's manuscript prayer book and the cash book from his academy epitomize Charleston's Jewish intelligentsia of the early 1800s. An album quilt made for Eleanor Israel Solomons in the early 1850s, on the occasion of her move from Georgetown, South Carolina, to Savannah, Georgia, consists of sixty-three blocks sewn by friends and relations, and includes a seven-pointed star stitched by Eleanor's slave woman, Rinah. A doll house sukkah dating from 1925, originally decked with pine straw and Christmas-tree lights, demonstrates the creole southern-Jewish culture. A football jersey emblazoned with the words "Jew Boy" speaks to the intimate yet uneasy bonds between Christian and Jew.

The exhibition, to quote cultural historian Jenna Weissman Joselit, is "of and for the people." It is also about the people. Historical characters represent the tensions of their age. Abraham Mendes Seixas, president of congregation Beth Elohim and brother of Gershom Mendes Seixas, the best-known Jewish religious leader in the country when the nation was still young, was a dealer in slaves and warden of the work house. Poet and teacher Penina Moise wrote lyrics for the first hymnal published by a Jewish congregation in America. Franklin J. Moses, Jr., was the Christian son of a Jewish father, a loyal Confederate during the Civil War, and "scalawag" governor of South Carolina during Reconstruction. In a later era, "A Portion of the People" pictures Charleston-born Anita Pollitzer, champion of women's suffrage and equal rights; Reuben Siegel of Anderson, who boxed for Clemson University under the name "Jew Boy Siegel"; and Ben Bodne of Charleston, who married a daughter of deli owner Elihu Mazo, made millions delivering oil, and bought the Algonquin Hotel in New York.

Audio segments, selected from the Jewish Heritage Collection's archives of more than three hundred interviews, bring the first-person singular into play. Visitors can listen to short stories about the creative and sometimes painful compromises southern Jews have made. The exhibit's final gallery features a portfolio of new work by photographer Bill Aron that captures major developments of the past fifty years.

Several publications accompany "A Portion of the People." A full-color catalogue, published by the University of South Carolina Press [ed. Theodore Rosengarten and Dale Rosengarten-Ed.] showcases objects, explores core themes, and provides a narrative history of southern Jewish life. With a preface by Eli N. Evans and essays by Theodore Rosengarten, Deborah Dash Moore, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Jack Bass, and Dale Rosengarten, the book addresses how Jews have coped with unbounded freedom, while more than half the population was held in slavery. *

An educator's guide, produced by McKissick Museum, outlines classroom activities for students in upper elementary grades through high school. A kit for teachers, available from the museum (www.cla.sc.edu/MCKS), includes the educator's guide, a gallery guide, a Jewish heritage tour brochure, posters reproducing the exhibition's main text panels, and an hour-long video documentary called "Land of Promise." Additional resources are accessible on the Jewish Heritage Collection's web site at the College of Charleston (www.cofc.edu/~jhc).

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* Editor's Note: A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life is reviewed in this issue of American Jewish History.

"A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life," organized by McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina, in association with the College of Charleston and the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina

Through July 20, 2003

Yeshiva University Museum

15 West 16th Street

New York, New York 10011

212-294-8330

September 14-November 30, 2003

Levine Museum of the New South

200 East 7th Street

Charlotte, North Carolina 28202

704-333-1887

Dale Rosengarten, curator of "A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life" and co-editor of the book by the same name, is director of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston Libraries. Her publications include Row Upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry, the catalogue of a traveling exhibition that opened at McKissick Museum in 1986 and seventeen years later is still on the road.