Being Jewish in the Deep South means 'polite unpleasantness'

“That’s from the Late Unpleasantness,” said the guide, gesturing to the Civil War memorial. We nodded politely.

We were on a jitney, a horse-drawn open carriage, in Beaufort, South Carolina, a town of early -morning mists and ghostly white mansions familiar from films like The Big Chill and Forrest Gump.

Everyone is polite in the South, even about unpleasantnesses, both late and more recent.

In the Old South, the Jews, as usual, fell somewhere in between. They were Jews in an intensely Christian world. They were white enough to be free in a society divided by skin colour. They were merchants and middlemen in a commercial society whose rulers pretended to European-style aristocracy, and had the plantations to prove it.

Before industrialisation and the Civil War, the South dominated the American economy. In the early 1800s, more Jews arrived in Southern port cities like Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina than in Boston or New York.

Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston was founded in 1749 by Sephardim who had come to Charleston from London. In 1824, their assimilation into white American society prompted the formation of the Reformed Society of the Israelites.

Alexander Hamilton

They adopted ideas from German Reform, and claim to have influenced it; the result was a unique hybrid. Today, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim claims to be the oldest Reform synagogue in America.

Charleston then formed one point in a triangular trade linking Boston and the Caribbean with the ports of Britain. The Sephardi merchants dealt in spirits, sugar and slaves. Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers, came from this business and grew up in the Caribbean islands of St Croix and Nevis, which were then controlled by Denmark. He probably had Jewish antecedents. He certainly attended Jewish school.

Lin-Mañuel Miranda’s rap musical Hamilton doesn’t mention Hamilton’s possible Jewish ancestry. Miranda’s opening lines introduce Hamilton as a “bastard, orphan, son of a whore / And a Scotsman”. The listener must decide whether these disgraces are listed in order of shamefulness or in reverse.

Hamilton’s real mother ran a shop, but sexist insults are what pass for authenticity in rap. Though non-white actors play the lead roles in Hamilton, their hero was in fact a white man who held slaves.

Beth Elohim

That said, sticklers for historical detail will be pleased to know that Hamilton was indeed the illegitimate son of a Scotsman. Not that this was much of a handicap in Colonial America. At least 21 of the 50 signers of the Declaration of Independence had Scottish roots. Sounds like a Scottish conspiracy to me.

Such are the ambiguities of America’s racial values, past and present. Jewish Americans tend not to boast about it, but the first Jewish senator in America was not David Levy Yulee. Nor was Oscar Straus, who was appointed Secretary of Labor in 1906, the first Jewish cabinet minister. He was Judah P Benjamin, but he played for the wrong side.

Benjamin was born to Sephardim from London on St Croix in 1811, and followed Alexander Hamilton’s commercial path to Charleston.

When the Confederate states seceded in 1861, their president, Jefferson Davis, appointed Benjamin as their Attorney General, and then their Secretary of War.

In 1862, he became Secretary of State, and spent much effort trying to persuade the British and French governments to recognise the Confederacy. He failed, and after 1865 retired to London, where he became a successful lawyer.

Today’s America is a place where Jews, to quote Randi Weingarten, the head of the teachers’ union, are “part of the ownership class”.

In America, this implies more than owning your own house. The traces of slavery are as unavoidable as the memorials to white soldiers in the South. The repressed past bubbles up in the language. The rap slang of “owning” someone has lately entered mainstream parlance. Such polite people, so much unpleasantness.