The silencing of slavery

“She wanted to know whether I lived on a plantation, whether I owned slaves. She couldn’t believe that I was Jewish, because there are no Jews in Alabama.”¹

I gathered similar reactions when I found myself among the Jewish circles of Long Island in New York. My friends were surprised to learn of the existence of Jews in the South. The tone was condescending, as if Jews could only live in New York, Chicago, or Florida. These representations are older. Carolyn Lipson Walker speaks of a “wild world” in reference to the South, drawing on the work of Louis Schmier: either Southern Jews live in terrible conditions, or they live in an excessively romantic manner largely shaped by film and literature.

And when Max Friedmann invited his family from Cincinnati to a bar-mitzvah in 1937 in Birmingham (Alabama), his brothers and sisters thought they had come to this bar-mitzvah to watch a lynching on Saturday night in downtown Birmingham. Some were terrified. They all believed it was going to happen.²

Within the Jewish diaspora itself, then, the strangeness and ignorance between the Jewish worlds of the South and the North appear considerable, thus mirroring the representations held by the entire population of these two great regions. Some of my interlocutors arriving in the South wonder about this region, about its ways of doing things, its rhythm, its drawling accent, its very discreet ways of being Jewish. But it is around the question of Black Americans that the differences are mainly established.

Slavery is not a question discussed publicly. This question currently arouses, in the United States and within Jewish circles, a great deal of embarrassment for historical, ideological, and identity-related reasons. The dispute, even though it dates back more than a century, weighs heavily between the Jewish abolitionists — few in number to speak out during the fight against slavery in the South — and the supporters of slavery, the pro-slavery camp.³

These divisions, moreover, reproduce the respective geographic positions of the Southern and Northern groups, the divisions within these groups, their exegesis of the Bible (Exodus, Leviticus), and their socioeconomic status.

This difficulty became apparent during one of the most recent exhibitions, From Alsace to America, mounted in Jackson (Mississippi) by the team of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in the summer of 1998. This event, in which many families of Alsatian and German origin took part, drew 70,000 visitors. The absence of any reference to slavery in this very beautiful exhibition is notable.

Indeed, many documents were shown on religious life as well as on the stages of migration and of the migrants’ integration into the South: departure, lists of migrants on the ships, house interiors, the cotton merchant’s office, synagogues, Shabbath evening, marriage, and family histories. Videos recorded the testimonies of families of Alsatian or German origin, the difference at times being barely marked. Nothing conflictual is staged. Nor is any mention made of slavery.

Silence also reigns over mixed-race Jewish families. A few Jewish children may be of mixed race. Such cases are nonetheless extremely rare. The archivist Cathy Kahn of New Orleans, of Alsatian descent, explains that when she was a child, in 1930, she noticed that some mixed-race children bore the same name as her relative, Isidore Dantziger. Isidore Dantziger, the slave census indicates, owned three Black women slaves in 1860, three women aged respectively 64, 42, and 40.⁴ One may hypothesize that mixed-race children were born afterward or that Isidore maintained a relationship with a mixed-race woman. “The children were believed dead,” my interlocutor told me.⁵ Other causes explain the difficulty of broaching the problem of relations between Jews and African Americans.

Slavery remains a subject that is difficult to mention within the various Jewish communities and families. In the course of my interviews with families originally from Alsace or southern Germany, a small number of them knew, wanted to know, or remembered that their ancestors had owned slaves. These indications are recorded only in the census lists of slaveholders and in notarized bills of sale.

The archives of the Jewish communities — those of New Orleans, Gates of Prayer founded in 1850, Touro Synagogue founded in 1848 — are silent, as are those of the Jewish community of Beth Or in Montgomery (Alabama), founded in 1858. Nor is the Civil War and its effects recorded; yet Montgomery was, in 1861, the capital of the Confederate States.

Slavery is mentioned as a necessity, a system into which the migrant inserts himself. He may well be deeply shocked by the mistreatment, the hunting down of runaway slaves. But he does not oppose slavery and adopts it when his financial means allow. The slaves are often domestic servants, “nannies,” or employees, and they count in the life of the family and in the upbringing of the children.

The Black population very frequently makes up the clientele of Jewish merchants or peddlers, on account of the credit extended, the modest prices in many Jewish businesses, and the warm welcome that Black customers receive there. On the plantations, it was customary, after selling goods to the owner, to ask permission to do business with the Black people on the property. The peddlers then exchanged goods for molasses, cotton, and sugar, which they would later resell.⁶

As for relations between Whites and Jews, the comment of a member of a family rooted in the South for four generations is entirely explicit: “My grandfather,” explains Metz Kahn, “used to say: ‘Every night I pray for the Blacks, because if there were no Blacks they would be going after the Jews’” (“Every night I pray for the blacks because if there were not Blacks, they would be picking on Jews”).⁷ This form of humor denounces, indirectly but clearly, the bigotry that reigned in the South up until the 1960s.

Slavery came to an end in the course of the Civil War with the proclamation of the emancipation of the slaves, on 1 January 1863: “All persons held in bondage in a State or part of a State in rebellion against the United States shall be from this day forth and forever free.” The 13th Amendment declaring the emancipation of the slaves was passed by Congress on 31 January 1865.⁸ The reception of the declaration was mixed, according to Claude Fohlen.⁹ The planters of Louisiana, a state freed by Northern forces in 1862, had always been haunted by the dread of slave revolts. In her diary, on 8 May 1862, Clara Solomon, a young Jewish woman of Sephardic origin living in New Orleans, expressed herself thus, after the prisons had been opened and the Black inmates freed from them: “I dread the Blacks more than the Yankees, and an uprising is my permanent horror.” This reflection perfectly conveys the Southern mentality of that era.

The position of Jewish émigrés: an ambivalent involvement in the system

The paternalistic relationship between Jews and slaves, as it is described in the memoirs written by the slaves themselves, is confirmed by the oral testimony coming from the descendants of these families. The latter insist on the fact that when Jews owned a few slaves — always in small number — they generally treated them correctly. This is confirmed in other Southern states as well. The historian Leonard Rogoff, in his work on the relations between Jews and African Americans in Durham (North Carolina), stresses that the history of the Jews, made up of poverty and discrimination, made them sensitive to the situation of Black people, but that they expressed this with caution.¹⁰

The descendants of the notary Abel Dreyfous also explain that, slaves being too expensive, Irish servant women were preferred to them. The register of notarized acts of his practice records thirteen bills of sale for slaves in 1845. Between 1851 and 1852, fourteen bills of sale for slaves, four of them in favor of Jewish families. This notable, highly esteemed in the city, took part in slaveholding society. But neither his correspondence nor the biography of his son, Félix Jonathan Dreyfous, mentions this “peculiar institution.”

The Jews tried to soften the cruelest aspects of segregation, but they displayed, above all, their attachment to the states that had taken them in. During the communities’ anniversary dinners, loyalty “to the father and the grandfather and the lost cause” is clearly proclaimed.¹¹

By owning slaves, the Jews reveal their wish to perpetuate the Southern norms of the antebellum period. The Jews were therefore not perceived as a threat to established models. Being a slaveowner contributed to the consolidation of the Jews’ status.¹² The Jewish immigrants of German origin held pragmatic positions. Oscar Solomon Straus, settled in Georgia, put it thus: “As a young boy raised in the South, I never questioned the right or wrong of slavery. I regarded that institution as forming part of most of the traditions and institutions.”¹³ This institution was adopted by the small minority of Jewish migrants who prospered in the wholesale and retail trade of clothing, in commerce, lumber, and cotton in the various states where they had settled. I was able to verify this more precisely by consulting the slave censuses of the Special Collection of the states of Louisiana and Alabama.¹⁴

In Alabama, the success of great merchants such as the Weill family, originally from Oberlustadt in the Palatinate and settled in Opelika, became effective only after the Civil War, in 1865. However, in Montgomery, the census of 1860 already records slaveholding families: Abraham, 36 years old, originally from Oberlustadt (Palatinate), owned two slaves, and Isaac Abraham, six. The latter worked as a merchant and held 9,000 acres (3,600 hectares). E. C. Hausman, 38 years old, a clothing merchant, held 20,000 acres, that is, 8,000 hectares of private and professional property. He was originally from Saverne and owned five slaves. The criteria of wealth were often constituted by the number of acres in personal property, in the company’s real estate, and in the number of slaves. A certain B. G. Levy owned 45 slaves, of whom 28 were children. He was a cotton merchant. According to my informants, this man sold construction lumber. One may imagine that he owned a plantation and worked as a merchant.

According to this same census,¹⁵ in Alabama, out of a population of 2,000 Jews, recorded in 1859, fourteen Jewish owners possessed seventy-five slaves, in 1860. They were owners of stores or wholesale dealers in goods.¹⁶ Their property varied between 10,000 and 40,000 acres. For a great majority of them, these were families of German origin; only three were of Alsatian origin, allied with families from the Palatinate.

In Louisiana, the Code noir (Black Code) of 1724, which dealt with the regulation of slaves, prohibited any settlement of Jews in Louisiana. Merchants, traders, and trappers did business in Louisiana, but their settlement really began only at the start of the 19th century. Slaveholders made up a small proportion of the Jewish population. In 1850, 32 slaveholders owned 113 slaves. In 1860, of the 8,000 Jews counted in Louisiana, 96 Jewish owners possessed a total of 225 slaves. The slaves there were employed as domestic servants or rendered services in the stores. Thus, in 1860, the Bavarian Gustave Bier, a jeweler, married to Estelle Godchaux, originally from Riedseltz (Haut-Rhin), owned five slaves. Philip Sartorius, a merchant, owned one slave. Léon Godchaux, owner of clothing stores, was listed in the census of slaveholders in New Orleans and had one slave with three children.¹⁷ M. Heine, related to Heinrich Heine, one slave; N. Newman, two; Theo Danzinger, three.

It was shocking to mistreat them, as Julius Weis indicates in his autobiography. Others considered that they could not refuse a system that surrounded them and in which they were a minority. The post–Civil War period was a time of suffering, destruction, poverty, and hunger for the families studied, when everything had to be rebuilt. But it does not seem, judging by some of our interlocutors, that their relations with their Black servants were altered. The families kept their Black employees over several generations. The latter even followed them in their wanderings, to St. Louis, or to California, only to flee once the journey was made. Many stayed put, hardly knowing where to go. The migrants then had to pay their employees.¹⁸

Other families are uneasy when this subject is raised, given the difficult current climate between Jews and Black people.

Selected pages from Anny Bloch-Raymond, Des berges du Rhin aux rives du Mississippi : histoire et récits de migrants juifs (From the Banks of the Rhine to the Shores of the Mississippi: History and Accounts of Jewish Migrants), (Michel Houdiard éditeur, 2009, repr. 2010)

With the kind permission of the publisher Michel Houdiard.

Notes