Talk:Jews in the Southern United States

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 September 2018 and 6 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Yszhang.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:23, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 31 August 2020 and 16 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Cmchan99, Emsla. Peer reviewers: Emadeux, Martamae.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:23, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:History of the Jews in Abkhazia which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 05:13, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

False statement / white supremacist Pseudo-history

The section on the Civil War makes the false claim that "Jews were not considered to be white, and so it was their own precarious racial status and as well as their extensive history of persecution that caused them to adopt pro-slavery attitudes and participate in slavery and the poor treatment of African Americans." On the contrary, Jews of European descent were considered white in the South and this is why they were allowed to own enslaved Black people. Census records are available for many white Sephardi Jews who lived in the South, including slave owners, and they are always listed as "White" on the Census documents. White Jews of European descent were also considered legally white under the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted granting citizenship to "free white persons". European Jews (eg, Spanish & Portuguese Sephardi Jews and Ashkenazi German Jews) were considered legally white. Even Sephardi Moroccan Jews such as Moses Elias Levy were considered legally white, are listed as White on census documents, and were allowed to own slaves as "free white persons". Whether or not they were a socially lower rung of whiteness (as were the Irish, the Italians, etc) is a separate question that doesn't render white Jews in the antebellum South "non-white". I would also say that the claim that white Jews were somehow forced to own Black slaves and support racism is offensive, as if white Jewish people had zero agency and were helplessly coerced into being racist. I think this is an example of white fragility being written into Wikipedia in a way that denies and minimizes racism, thus to be racist. Black Jews and other Jews of color, who have genuinely never been considered "white" for any legal or social purposes, are also erased from these pseudo-historical narratives. Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 19:35, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

I second this assessment. Not only does this section seem to misrepresent the section of Jews & the Civil War: A Reader to which it *seems* to be referring, it is entirely ahistorical and non-informative. What facts can a reader glean from this section? Absolutely none. There is not a single factual or historical statement, just some armchair psychologizing about what long-dead people may or may not have thought/felt.

Returning to the misrepresentation of the source: I read what I assume to be the relevant section of Jews & the Civil War which is cited as the source for this section, available on archive.org beginning at page 108: https://archive.org/details/jewscivilwarread0000unse/page/108/mode/2up

Nowhere is some fear of being labeled "non-white" given as a reason for Southern Jews supporting/failing to criticize slavery.

Given that this section asserts very few facts and that, where it does assert a fact, that fact is incorrect, I have just gone ahead and deleted it. If somebody wants to restore it, they should provide a better source. 2601:644:8E7F:1F30:F8B4:7BC0:5F48:E11D (talk) 00:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Southern United States and the cotton industry

I came across the Shlenker House in Vicksburg, Mississippi through article creation, and I read that the Shlenker family had ties to the cotton industry in Mississippi (starting with 19th-century German Jewish immigrant, Jacob Shlenker). Was there a community in the late 19th-century of Jewish immigrants in the Southern U.S. working in the cotton industry or in cotton apparel manufacturing (as I am not currently seeing any reference to that in this article)? PigeonChickenFish (talk) 09:33, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

References