Southern Jews and Reconstruction

Dixie

Here’s another fascinating excerpt from Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights on how southern Jews reacted to the demise of the Confederacy and Reconstruction:

“Notwithstanding the general response of southern Jews, a number of individuals expressed vehement opposition to the new social order. According to David Yulee, the Reconstructionist policies of the Republican Party were an unwarranted assault upon the proud people of the South that would provoke “a conflict that will end in the extermination of one of the races.” Outrage at the enforced imposition of equal rights for African-Americans was shared by many southern Jews. J.H. Levy of Savannah wrote to his daughters in March 1868 that federal troops would not listen to local leaders, their sole purpose being “to direct and change” the region “to negro ascendancy making in time the south unfit for white people, should we not be fortunate enough to succeed so that common sense & common decency reverse the country from disgrace.” “Our political situation here is now altogether frightful,” Meyer Goldman’s son wrote to a friend in October 1874. “It seems that negroes are streaming into Louisiana from other states far and wide, and are building up here the so-called ‘Republican Party,’ and are also stirring up much trouble.” Almost every office in the state government, exclaimed Goldman, was occupied by an African-American, and those whites who did hold power were the most base and corrupt of their kind. The situation had become so intolerable that he was closing his law practice and moving north to Louisville, Kentucky.

Other Jews were determined to stand and fight. Driven by anger and resentment, they engaged in acts of terrorist violence against the Republican state governments. A small number of southern Jews, for instance, enlisted in the Ku Klux Klan. Others, including Edwin Moise and H.H. De Leon, were members of the Red Shirts, and organization that used violence to restore Democratic rule in South Carolina.

Jews actively contributed to the Lost Cause. Like their Gentile neighbors, they constructed elaborate memorials to the Confederate dead. The soldiers’ section of the Jewish cemetery in Richmond offered such solemn celebration, its railings adorned with swords and sabers, wreathed with laurel. Seventeen years of Civil War and Reconstruction only served to strengthen the emotional bond that southern Jews felt for their adopted homeland. Their sense of loyalty to the southern social order remained unshakeable. Newspaper editor Herbert Ezekiel was not alone in his assertion that there was a special kinship between the Jewish people and the South. As he argued, the fate of the former Confederates was akin to that of God’s chosen people, an oppressed minority who had suffered unjustly at the hands of a tyrannical majority. “Like Jews have often been, they were crushed by irresistable odds, but the cause is still alive. … its sacredness will be inviolable so long as the sun shines in this fair land of ours.”

The spectacle of Jewish Klansmen and Red Shirts engaging in terrorism to restore white supremacy in the South, as well as Jews venerating the Lost Cause, is another reason for us to pause and reflect more deeply on the cause of our racial and cultural decline.

“As the northern rabbi Phillip Bernstein observed after a fact-finding mission across the southeastern states in October 1936, “Everywhere we met Jews, the most amazing Jews – Jews so different from those I know in the industrial North. In their languid drawls, their intense southern patriotism, their contempt for ‘nigger lovers,’ they are … obviously a product of their environment.”

If Southern Jews assimilated to the culture of the South and became products of their environment, could it be possible that the Jews and Catholics who settled in the Northeastern states assimilated to the dominant Northeastern culture of “Radicalism”?

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
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30 Comments

  1. Without doubt, Yankee Jews and Catholics assimilated the Puritan radicalism into their culture.

    Puritans, not Jews, are the scourge of North America, I rue the day they were permitted to come here.

  2. At that time there was no Israel and Jews had to make do where they found success, in a system that was good for them. A response to this article from Facebook:

    The Civil rights act of 1964 was pushed by Jews including some who later also pushed what some call the Immigration act of 1965, but most call the Hart Cellars act. Look up who Hart and Cellar are. Look up Norbet Schlei,Arnold Aroson, Jack Greenberg and others. All powerful lobby. Most of the folk involved in pushing these two anti – white and anti-Southern acts were Jews. The Civil rights act of 1964 says by law that you must hire blacks, Mexicans and non whites. The Immigration act limited the amount of White immigrants in favor of non whites. I can’t find any two more damaging acts post War for Southern Independence than these two acts…which were almost completely designs pushed, and with the help of Northeast Yankees in congress, the presidency, and another Scalawag President brought into law.

    There is no ignoring the Jewish question with regards to Southern Freedom no matter how much some think it is an advantage to try. Why? Because one of the key problems we face happen to be from prominent Jews in high places. They don’t want one of their huge money bases ( the South ) to leave. Nor do they want there military ranks to dwindle as Southerners are over 40% of the military. It is a real issue and problem.

    Base hatred should always be avoided and I agree with that, but if you are not going to do battle with our enemies. Why fight at all? Do some of you believe the North East Yankees run the empire? No. It should be obvious what does and much of it isn’t white and controls more than it’s share of the money and the narrative.

    You have to ask yourself today; How many Southern Jews to you know who would truly support the South over Israel if it comes to a conflict of ideology or support? A Jewish state vs a Southern State?

  3. At that time there was no Israel

    Reminds me of the guy that said the RCC struck a bargain with the natives where they didn’t have to convert. Stawp poastin’ ahistorical noansense, shitbirds.

  4. Puritans, not Jews, are the scourge of North America, I rue the day they were permitted to come here.

    Blogger “Race History Evolution” has a lot of posts that provide info that undermines the Puritan theory of 20th Century American radicalism. Just search for “puritans” and “wasps.”

  5. @No-mensch

    Exactly what is “ahistorical” about Vox’s statement? Your people’s little serpents’-nest wasn’t stolen from Palestine until 1948. Anytime someone on here makes the slightest criticism of Israel, Jews, or their behavior, you immediately, perhaps involuntarily, make vigorous defense to the contrary. It’s quite transparent.

  6. Mosin

    “I have never identified with the Puritans! First of all, they were Calvinists. Their numerous errors made them weak, subject to corruption, and in a few generations they became Transcendental, materialistic, Talmudistic practical agnostics.”

    True. All true. But I’m still getting the impression that you thought the Puritans were practitioners of Biblical, Orthodox Christianity who later got corrupted by the Transcendentalists and Unitarians. It is my contention that the Puritans were a fanatical cult with false beliefs about the Bible from the start. The Puritans were a seed of poison that mutated into a flesh-eating monster. As Brutus succinctly observed, Amurrrica today is what it was always meant to be – and it still has so much more ground to cover. The Puritans paved that road and set the course. The United States of America is what you get when the founding stock (from both 1620 and 1776) is a bunch of lunatic, anti-social radicals with an axe to grind against damn near everyone. I haven’t read any books on the matter, but I’d like to know what the South thought it was getting out of an alliance with those animals in the North in the Amurrican Revoloooshen.

    “They were not the only northern colonisers with Christian intentions.”

    The Puritans had Christian intentions in the same way the Southern Baptist Convention has Christian intentions in making Fred Luter its President. Are those intentions pure? Are those intentions holy? Are those intentions grounded in the words of the Bible and traditional orthodox Christianity? Or are those intentions grounded in terrifically arrogant self-righteousness (in the case of the Puritans) and anti-white political correctness (in the case of the SBC)? Your intentions aren’t Christian when you substitute your own subjective, worldly views for what the Bible actually says and what Christendom always stood for.

    “Extremism in defence of the orthodox faith is never a vice.”

    But the kind of extremism the Puritans engaged in wasn’t in defense of orthodox Christian faith. On the contrary, the Puritans defied not just the Anglican Church, but their own nation (England). While they did this under the ruse that they were the true defenders of orthodox faith, their actions once they got to Massachusetts speak for themselves. You’ve got Winthrop’s “Shining City on a Hill.” You’ve got the Salem witch trial. You’ve got their “oppressor-oppressed” mindset which naturally mutated into anti-Europeanism and anti-Christianity. Insofar as the Puritans had Orthodox Christian beliefs, those beliefs are rendered irrelevant by their fundamental beliefs mentioned above – beliefs which are grounded on nothing more than feel-good lunacy. It is this inherently self-destructive, feel-good lunacy that defines Northern culture – and hence, by extension, Americanism.

    Dissolve the Union.

  7. Vox Validus,

    “Do some of you believe the North East Yankees run the empire?”

    The criticisms of Yankees are not a matter of who runs the American empire. The question is this: Which group of people created the conditions in the 1600s and 1700s that allowed for anti-white and anti-Christian evils of the American empire to flourish during the 1800s, 1900s, and today? If we all agree that America was a failed empire from the start, than who created that damn empire in the first place, and what insane ideas/reasoning compelled them to create it? The answer is not Joos. The answer is Northerners/Yankees. Who founded the North? The motherfucking Puritans.

    fnn,

    I looked up the blogger you mentioned, and I’m not convinced. Even if we assume the Puritans had noble intentions – and I for one don’t believe they did – it doesn’t matter anyway because their ideology mutated into the only thing it could have mutated into, which is self-destructive moralistic crusading that aims to liberate the world under the great pretense of universal human equality. Among other things, this means white genocide. As far as the equality-zealots are concerned, the existence of their own race, the white race, means true equality can’t be achieved. In that case, it doesn’t matter what the Joos have planned, because if we whites don’t clearly identify the traitors among us, than we’re finished. Call this a submission to a divide-and-conquer strategy all you want, but it is is what it is. Whites slaughtered each other in two world wars, and that was when we were racially-conscious. What exactly is so wrong with identifying and fighting the traitors among you who seek to take you down with their sinking ship?

  8. “Who founded the North? The motherfucking Puritans.”

    Don’t you mean who founded Boston and some of New England? It was Quakers (and Dutch and Germans and Swedes) who founded Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and it was the Dutch (along with some Huguenots) and then the English (most of whom were Anglicans) who founded New York.

    You need to learn some history.

  9. Rudel,

    If your point is that Puritans weren’t technically the only white group that founded the North, than that goes without saying. But it was the Puritans who arrived here first in 1620. They set the tone for Northern culture, and the other white groups who founded other Northern cities didn’t deviate from that much. The American Revolution was ginned up in Massachusetts (remember the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and Paul Revere’s mythical ride?) and was fought mostly in the North until after 1778. Even today in 2013, while my home state, Michigan, is not spearheading radical liberal change, Michigan always goes along with whatever the Northeast is doing. The Northeast leads, and the other Northerners follow suit like good little Yankees. I wish this wasn’t the case, but it is what it is.

    Also, the reason I’m bashing Puritans and Yankees even though I’m a Yankee myself is because I’m in a “BURN ALL BURN!” mindset when it comes to the United States of America. Greg Hood was so right: America today is a filthy lie, the most vile and despicable fiction ever foisted upon decent people. Such a fiction should be cast into the fire and partitioned into however many different regions.

  10. “But it was the Puritans who arrived here first in 1620. They set the tone for Northern culture, and the other white groups who founded other Northern cities didn’t deviate from that much. “

    I thoroughly disagree. The far more populous Philadelphia and New York were nothing like Boston and were founded by different ethnic groups contemporaneously as New Amsterdam. Massachusetts persecuted Quakers and hanged several for heresy. Baltimore was a Southern city, and the majority of the Revolutionary War was fought in the Middle Atlantic states and ultimately in the South.

  11. I am constantly astounded by head up their ass southerners who wish to blame the North for all the nations problems. Now we get the nonsense that Yankee Puritanism caused the Civil War. The Civil war was caused by southerners who wanted to preserve their idiotic slave system forever. They ignored the peril of dividing the country into two incompatible states that the various European powers could play off against each other – and still do. It was the South that wanted to bring more and more slave territories into the Union. It was the South that fired on Fort Sumter.

    Yes, northern abolitionists were foolhardy idiots bleeding for blacks. But it was the ever so wise South that built its entire economy around the worthless black bastards. If the South had thought long term, it would have hired expensive white labor instead. The South wanted to live in the past and paid the price. Goodbye to the South and good riddance.

  12. Dan Poole….you are writing some good post. I have made the same point in other areas where Southern Nationalism is the discussion. My point on who runs America now is not Yankees but certain Jews in high places. On a delusional man would even contend it. Agree with you on the Puritans and the Calvinist also and that America failed right as the start and it was also a terrible idea to begin with. I have had Southern Nationalist tell me that we will never be able to leave the Union without Jewish help. If that is true. Count me out of that revolution and that sort of thinking.

  13. Rudel,

    “The far more populous Philadelphia and New York were nothing like Boston”

    When they were originally founded, Philly and NY may have been nothing like BAHston, but by the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1789 – and certainly by the Civil War in 1861 – the North basically had a homogeneous culture, and if nothing else Northern culture was radically different than Southern culture. The Northern people were also ethnically different from the Southern people (Northerners were the melting pot, Southerners were British muts). And of course there were massive religious differences to the point where the South thought the North was full of atheists.

    The bottom line is that by the 19th century, the Northern and Southern states had their own common ethnicity, religion, history, and philosophy. They were, in every sense of the word, their own distinct nations. They never should have been united under the same flag. For awhile it looked like the North-South marriage might work, hence the era of good feelings. But after 1820, it became evident this was a marriage doomed to failure.

    I’m not arguing here that the South had particularly compelling reasons to secede. You’ve heard all the arguments from Hunter and PP as to why slavery was the Holy Grail of economic systems. I AM arguing, however, that Northern/Yankee culture is indeed as morally rotten as the Southern Nationalists say it is. For the longest time I denied it. It’s not cool being told that your people suck and that your entire history is a long series of immoral experiments and anti-white disasters. But once I learned to let go and accept that I’m a serf, and particularly after I attended the 2013 Amren conference and talked to certain people face to face, I came to see what the Southern Nationalists see in regards to Northerners/Yankees.

    Also, now that I accept that I had the unfortunate experience of being born into a military-economic empire/civic nationalist nightmare that hates me and people like me for being white, and that swears by creeds which are thoroughly repugnant to everything I stand for both as a traditional Protestant Christian and as a morally decent human being, I seek the dissolution of this despicable “nation.”

    Vox Validus,

    I agree with you that Southern Nationalists have a bad habit of focusing exclusively on Northerners as the sole cause of the awful state of European-Americans here in 2013. I’m not arguing that Northerners are the sole cause of our problems today. Nor do I think Northerners have a genetic defect which causes us to become social and cultural darkseekers, devouring everything in our path as Robert Neville down there in the South resists futilely (yes, I just made that analogy).

    That said, I think its extremely important for us pro-whites in the North to acknowledge the morally bankrupt history of Yankee culture that way we can move forward securing the existence of our people and a future for our children. Jared Taylor has spent the last 20 years of his life trying to redefine Americanism, and its failed. He basically said as much at the Amren conference. So what’s the solution? Its either a white ethnostate which would unite all whites in North America under the same flag (whatever that flag is) and which would also welcome whites from around the world. Or its the partition of the United States into different ethnostates based on the particular regions ethnicity, religion, history, and philosophy. 313Chris and I talked about this before on another thread, and here’s what I think it would look like:

    1. Yankee Land (the Northeast and the Upper Midwest)

    2. Dixie (the South and the lower Midwest)

    3. Middle America (Plains States, including the Dakotas, and the Rocky Mountain States)

    4. Texas (minus the Southern counties that the Mexicans have effectively recolonized)

    5. West Coast (Yankee West; Small country; Might not be sustainable).

    Oh, and there’s also the Southwest, but I’m no longer counting that because it’d belong to Mexico anyway. As 313Chris said before, this region of the former USA would resemble an African war zone.

    Anyway, I’m coming at all this from a pro-white perspective, not a pro-Southern perspective. I’m not down with the whole “Southern by the grace of God” thing because its just a different form of jingoism. Nor do I see a compelling reason to defend slavery when the system was anti-white in the long run. But I’m definitely anti-Northern/Yankee for all the reasons I explained before, and I don’t think those positions are unreasonable from a pro-white perspective.

  14. This article is two years old, but I feel the need to revive it. For one thing, THE NORTH we must remember in 1860 was divided into three basic regions. New York and New England, all of New York north and west of Albany to the Pennsylvania line near Erie was an extension of New England. Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey were the Middle States. The Northwest was Ohio, Indiana, Illinois Michigan and Wisconsin.

    At the Constitutional Convention, when the United States of America was born for the second time the Founders looked around them at the Three Regions of the United States. They were most fond of the Middle States, which was a Polyglot of religions and ethnicities, not one religion or ethnicity was truly dominant. This region did not have the Rock Ribbed Puritan Conservatism of New England or the Planter Culture of Virginia. The founders decided that this would be the model for the United States. A completely artificial culture built upon ideas, not upon anything organic. The basis for this new culture would be Jefferson’s Land Ordinance.

    The Land Ordinance of 1784 which Jefferson wrote followed by the Ordinance of 1785 and 1787 had stipulated that slavery would not be allowed in what became the Northwest Territory ie no planter culture. The six mile square survey system eliminated land disputes and was similar to the New England Town system but on a much larger scale.

    What happened was that in the states west of Appalachia you had three cultural streams, the New England culture that settled along the Great Lakes and in scattered colonies throughout, poor Southern farmers along the River valleys and the polyglot culture of the Middle States throughout.

  15. The New England settlements, being compact and micromanaged became major cities. Their wealth and higher education allowed them to control the new states both economically and educationally, although they were numerically a minority.

    This new American Culture that was born largely in the Ohio Valley became a culture of the common man meaning it was devoid of anything exemplary or special. The equivelent of cultural sausage, pour every culture and run it through a sausage grinder and you end up with a mediocre product.

  16. In 1860 what you had in the North was a Liberal Political Elite, largely funded by wealthy men in Boston and New York, ruling over the people. You also had large urban centers. Throw into this situation the Jews. The Jews of the South who had economic and political power were too scattered in the South’s many small towns to become a harmful cancer.

    The Jews of the North, largely coming after 1815, came to large cities where they found themselves segregated and completely out of power. Influenced by the French Revolution, they set about to develop a competing society. They came into the Middle Cities and new cities of the Northwest where they were just another group.

    After the War Between The States, this Northern Liberal Political Elite was largely overthrown by Conservatives who adopted a policy of benign neglect toward Negroes. A segment of the mostly common white population had as a result of Reconstruction developed a form of race consciousness. The Jews, seeing this discredited Abolitionist Social Justice Warrior group decides to use them as a wrecking ball.

  17. The Jews in the North first seized control of financial concerns and the Newspaper Industry then used their wealth to fund educational establishments. At these educational establishments, they push the lies of the old discredited liberals. They also import European Jewish revolutionaries and their ideas. This is the Jewish Establishment largely a Germanic/Jewish one.

    Another group of Jews comes in from 1870-1924 from Russia/Eastern Eur.The Jewish establishment doesn’t like them so they are kept out of their schools, synagogues and other things. So these Jews take what was left over. They take over crime and entertainment. By 1930, these Jews are wealthy enough to force the Jewish Establishment to begin to accept them, intermarry with them, etc.

    Thus by 1930, the Jew finds himself the creator of a new totally Jewish cultural construct in the Northern States.

  18. The Gentile Establishment, largely made up of old New England families, had taken heavy casualties during the War that they did not recover from. Their lower rate of reproduction saw their numbers decrease with every year and their institutions were slowly seized by the Jews.

    There were those in the Gentile Establishment who opposed both the Racial Equality Abolitionists and the Jews such as Madison Grant, but they were largely academics with no sense of how to organize. Industrialists such as Henry Ford, who had become concerned with this Jewish poison unfortunately was forced to choose between Ford Motor Company and telling the truth about the Jews and he chose Ford.

    The common population in the North, which outside of New England was a cultural goulash, had no leadership and busied themselves fighting about stupid things like Protestant vs Catholic.

    THIS WAS WHY THE SOUTH FOUGHT IN 1861. THE SOUTHERN LEADERS UNDERSTOOD THAT BEING ASSIMILATED INTO THE AMERICAN CULTURE WAS JUST AS BAD AS MISCEGENATION AND WOULD EVENTUALLY RESULT IN IT SO THEY RESISTED. SO SHOULD WE

  19. If Southern Jews assimilated to the culture of the South and became products of their environment, could it be possible that the Jews and Catholics who settled in the Northeastern states assimilated to the dominant Northeastern culture of “Radicalism”?

    A brilliant premise, Sir. In fact, the whole article here, is substance where there has only been a gap.

  20. ‘Jews actively contributed to the Lost Cause. Like their Gentile neighbors, they constructed elaborate memorials to the Confederate dead.’

    From my Tarheel point of view, this is very true.

  21. ‘“As the northern rabbi Phillip Bernstein observed after a fact-finding mission across the southeastern states in October 1936, “Everywhere we met Jews, the most amazing Jews – Jews so different from those I know in the industrial North. In their languid drawls, their intense southern patriotism, their contempt for ‘nigger lovers,’ they are … obviously a product of their environment.”

    This, Sir, is one of those truths that only you seem willing to expose – a truth that discomfits the holy hell out of Jews, today, just as much as it does those who do not like them.

  22. ‘The spectacle of Jewish Klansmen and Red Shirts engaging in terrorism to restore white supremacy in the South, as well as Jews venerating the Lost Cause, is another reason for us to pause and reflect more deeply on the cause of our racial and cultural decline.’

    Sir, though the first part of the statement is clear, the question you pose is not.

    What do you mean by that question?

  23. Are you trying to say that, once The South, after WWII, slowly began to surrender it’s identity, this fragmented the formerly united white parts?

    I can say this : in Raleigh, it was fashion, when I was a child, to lean norhtern, and, with the passage of time, that ‘leaning’ has just become a wholsesale embracal of Northern identity.

    Raleighites, as has been impresst upon me since my return home, look down on most of the rest of the state – particularly the rural parts, which, because we have not ceded much of our ole-timey ways, are seen through a prism of horror.

    Some childhood WASP friends, in Raleigh, are flustered beyond belief why I would love the traditional South, and why I would wish to live there.

    For the overwhelming majority of WASP Raleighites, they live kind of like in an American army garrision in Kabul, Afghanistan, and, when they leave, it is to drive frantically down to the beach, being sure NOT to stop and experience life in the smaller towns.

  24. @Rudel…

    ‘The far more populous Philadelphia and New York were nothing like Boston and were founded by different ethnic groups contemporaneously as New Amsterdam. Massachusetts persecuted Quakers and hanged several for heresy. Baltimore was a Southern city, and the majority of the Revolutionary War was fought in the Middle Atlantic states and ultimately in the South.’

    A very insightful comment.

  25. @Billy Ray Jenkins…

    ‘This article is two years old, but I feel the need to revive it. For one thing, THE NORTH we must remember in 1860 was divided into three basic regions. New York and New England, all of New York north and west of Albany to the Pennsylvania line near Erie was an extension of New England. Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey were the Middle States. The Northwest was Ohio, Indiana, Illinois Michigan and Wisconsin.’

    Thank you for that. It was an important thought to add.

  26. ‘@Billy Ray Jenkins…

    ‘ 1860 what you had in the North was a Liberal Political Elite, largely funded by wealthy men in Boston and New York, ruling over the people. You also had large urban centers. Throw into this situation the Jews. The Jews of the South who had economic and political power were too scattered in the South’s many small towns to become a harmful cancer.’

    Sir, this is very true, but, i must question the conclusion. Jews were ‘scattered’ in North Carolina, but, as Mr. Griffin has pointed out, they felt a great sense of belonging and loyalty to this culture.

    Eastern North Carolina was replete with Jewish communities in small towns, most of them with sizable synagogues.

    The Jews of the North, largely coming after 1815, came to large cities where they found themselves segregated and completely out of power. Influenced by the French Revolution, they set about to develop a competing society. They came into the Middle Cities and new cities of the Northwest where they were just another group.’

    Yes, that statement on the ‘Jews of The North’ is very true.

    I had said something similarly in recent days, in the discussion of New York City as being a ‘Jewish town’.

    It became so as the 20th century unfolded. it was not so before that – it was owned and run by WASPS.

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