The New South

But when Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion Shari Rabin went back to the text, she found it was not exactly a shining example of religious toleration. While the Fundamental Constitutions did promise that the Anglican church dissenters wouldn’t be ostracized, it wasn’t in the interest of allowing them freedom and self-expression. “They’re all going to be treated nicely,” she explains, “in the hopes that this will make them become Anglicans.”

This anecdote appears in Rabin’s book, The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025), which tells a far more complex story than has been previously depicted. Most histories of Jews in America tend to concentrate on the Northeast; in turn, many histories of the South overlook Jews, who are historically a small minority. Rabin’s account begins in 1492 with Spain and Portugal expelling Jews whose descendants would eventually settle in Charleston and ends in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement. In between, The Jewish South looks at the ways Jews were both included and held apart from Southern society—and how Jews themselves responded.

Like Jews everywhere, Jews in the South had a range of attitudes and beliefs. They had different levels of religious observance; sometimes quarreled bitterly about politics; and held office in both the Republican and Democratic parties. “It was important to me to think about Jewish history in the South capaciously and to not reproduce narrow expectations of what a Jewish person was or is or looked like,” Rabin says. “I wanted to make space for different kinds of Jewish histories than the ones we expect.”

Though she relied on existing work about Jews in the South for The Jewish South, Rabin also conducted archival research. One of her most interesting finds, discovered with the help of student research assistant Sarah Naiman ’23, was a collection of amnesty petitions filed by Jews after the Civil War who were seeking to recover their United States citizenship.

“There was this whole cache of documents written in May and June of 1865 laying out their cases, explaining why they had supported the Confederacy and why they had stayed there,” Rabin explains. “There has been this assumption in Southern Jewish history that Jews in the South were Confederates and were loyal to the region they lived in. But you find in this set a lot more ambivalence—people saying, ‘I didn’t like the Confederacy, but I didn’t want to abandon my interests.’ And there’s one extraordinary example of a person saying, ‘I regret everything. I should have left.’”

In Rabin’s account, Jews had no special relationship to slavery. They didn’t necessarily operate the slave trade (which is an old antisemitic conspiracy theory), but they did, like many other upwardly mobile Southerners, rely on enslaved laborers to run their households. Many didn’t feel any moral ambivalence about this; it was a way, as Rabin puts it, to participate in whiteness and both display and achieve economic success. There is evidence that a small number of those enslaved Black people identified as Jews.

Still, Jews were reminded of their otherness during some periods more than others. Rabin found accounts of the murder of three Jewish merchants by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, though she cautions that there may have been other factors at play besides antisemitism. “They’re seen as outsiders,” she says. “They’re seen as foreign; they’re seen as aligned with Republican anti-racist politics. As merchants, they have complicated financial relationships with both white and Black Southerners. So it’s a swirling array of factors that contribute to the murders.”

Rabin also notes that when white supremacists felt more threatened, they tended to focus their attacks on Jews; for example, in the 1950s and ’60s, at the start of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a rash of bombings of synagogues and Jewish community centers, in large part because many associated Jews with the movement for Black civil rights. 

In the future, Rabin hopes historians will continue to mine the archives to learn more about Jews in the South and how they lived. “There’s a vast array of stories to be told,” she says. “The Jewish South is my telling from the material that I found. I hope that it provides an unexpected view of the South that is also an unexpected view of Jewish history and ultimately of American history more broadly.”

Chair of Jewish Studies Shari Rabin is a scholar of modern Judaism and American religions. She earned a master’s in philosophy and a doctorate in religious studies at Yale University and is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press).

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