One must revisit Medgar Evers’ 1963 murder to find stain on Jackson eclipsing this year’s firebombing of Temple Beth Israel.
Family calling authorities after heinous antisemitism, not while outrage could have been avoided, is as unfathomable as parenting producing University of Mississippi fraternity brothers photographed holding guns before a bullet-ridden Emmitt Till historical marker — homelife yielding such progeny.
Depravity rivaling Nazi excesses reflects medieval Europe rather than contemporary concepts cherishing human rights and tolerance. People possessed by prejudice require remedial education.
Nicholas Lemann’s “Returning” provides excellent opening. Lemann — New Orleans native, Dean Emeritus at Columbia Journalism School — contributes critical insights into the crucial contributions of Jewish settlers in the Deep South to antebellum and postbellum economic expansion.
Perpetuators of ethnic violence embody Emerson’s aphorism, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”
“[Anybody] who was Jewish, even very fortunate people … who operated at the highest possible level, knew that someone who claimed to believe there was no antisemitism in the United States … had to be either disingenuous, self-deluded, or willfully ignorant. The best-off Jews, let alone ordinary Jews, … could not stay in fancy resort hotels, could not buy real estate in many neighborhoods, could not be hired at many companies, and had strictly limited access to the leading universities and to the professions.”
Prejudice exploded after less privileged coreligionists arrived. The dynamic was akin to well-educated, well-mannered Gentiles being deemed malnourished, uncouth rednecks.
“Before 1880 there were 300,000 Jews in the United States, most of them German. Between 1880 and 1920, another 2.5 million Jews arrived, overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe. They weren’t just far more numerous than the German Jews, they were more observant, more concentrated in urban slums, and much poorer.
…[Emigration] from Eastern Europe had recategorized the German Jews in the minds of Gentiles …[The] German Jews imagined that they could maintain their own category….[The] intra-Jewish distinction that was so obvious to them wasn’t to the non-Jewish world.”
Mary McCarthy addressed oversimplified stereotype in “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood” (1957), examining her St. Paul Catholic paternal family, Seattle Presbyterian maternal grandfather, and Seattle Jewish maternal grandmother. The latter’s sister was paradigmatic.
“Aunt Eva … was a typical wealthy widow of Jewish high society. She traveled a good deal, with a … smart set who had connections in Portland, San Francisco, New York, and even Paris; she gambled and went to resorts and fashionable hotels in season; when she was in Seattle, she was an habituée of the Jewish country club, where they golfed in the daytime and played bridge for very high stakes at night. The scale of living of these people … was far beyond anything conceived of by the local Christian haute bourgeoisie, which was unaware of their existence.”
Lemann references repeated mistreatment of Jewish Mississippians, redolent of Eastern European pogroms:
“A group of white terrorists, one of a long line in the South in the post-Civil War years, who called themselves Whitecaps, were notable for being not just racist like all the rest, but also antisemitic…. The Whitecaps’ fervent wish was ‘that … under no circumstances will the negro be allowed to cultivate a Jew’s or syndicate’s land.’ If peaceful means would not achieve these goals, then it would be necessary to use violent ones — in the case of Jews, ‘force them to abandon our country and confiscate their lands for the benefit of the white farmers.’
… “[The] Whitecaps were active in the town of Summit, Mississippi, where Father’s mother’s family came from… One of the Whitecaps’ chief targets was a man named Hiller, a Jewish immigrant from Alsace who had acquired a string of small farms through mortgage foreclosure. He was my relative by marriage. The Whitecaps burned down 27workers’ houses on his farms, which sent a message to the rest of the workers that they’d better leave. Most did. Hiller sold out to a Gentile and moved to New Orleans.”
Lemann contemplates the inevitable consequence of ignoring ethnic exclusion in Imperial Germany — from which his paternal forebears emigrated to Louisiana and Mississippi.
“What now seem like ominous early warnings might not have been the obviously loudest sound in the political and intellectual cacophony of late-19th-century Germany, especially if they were exactly what you most didn’t want to hear.”
Lemann’s look into his Deep South Jewish roots is instructive for Mississippians interested in encouraging excellence. “Returning” is recommended to anyone aspiring higher.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
