• The "Theoretical Jew" Versus the "Southern Jew":Black Perceptions of Jewish Whiteness in the Nineteenth-Century American South
• Jacob Morrow-Spitzer (bio)

In the mid-1880s, women's suffragist and civil rights activist Orra Langhorne penned an oft-repeated comparison in the Virginia-based periodical Southern Workman: "The history of the African in our land," she wrote, "both in bondage and in the struggle for civil rights presents a constant analogy to that of the Hebrew race."¹ In an earlier article she had explained:

The Jews, a wandering and barbarous people … in striking analogy with the story of the Negroes in America … [were] enslaved, and suffered even a more cruel bondage than the African … The history of the Negro-American since he became a free man forms part of our national annals, and the analogy with the record of the Hebrew wanderers in alien lands has been continued.²

Just as writers like Langhorne made note of the comparable histories between Jews and Black Americans, Black southerners formed opinions about the past and present Jewish people to make sense of slavery and racism with rhetoric from the Jewish experience.

Throughout the nineteenth-century, enslaved and free Black Americans appropriated and repurposed aspects of Jewish history—from biblical bondage in Egypt, to exile in Babylon, to centuries of oppression in Europe, and sometimes to Jewish mobility in America—to describe and comprehend their own experiences as enslaved and oppressed people navigating identities of liberation. Analogies and resonances between the Black and Jewish struggles for freedom were so ubiquitous during the years of slavery and the decades that followed that readers could find them anywhere from poems, sermons, songs, and opinion pieces of Black civil rights activists to the writing of the most famed Black intellectuals like Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass. W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that [End Page 31] "Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites."³ Although Black writers, pastors, poets, and scholars varied in their methods and doctrines of liberation, many directly or indirectly turned toward the history of the Jewish people to recount, rationalize and elucidate a better future for Black Americans.

Yet even as this invocation of the Jewish experience became increasingly prominent in the writings of Black intellectuals and Black southerners, a newer, distinct description of the Jewish people emerged, particularly in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. According to this alternative depiction, Jewish southerners used their white skin to acculturate into the white economic and political fabric of the era, a process that confounded many of their Black customers, constituents, neighbors, and onlookers. During this period of Jewish mobility in the postwar South, Black people still decidedly saw the Jew as distinct from other whites, while simultaneously assigning white cultural and political roles to Jewish southerners. The discordance between the oppressed and empathetic Jew of the "text" and the white Jew in modern corporeal form spurred the creation of a new image of Jews in the South.

Ideas about Jews and Jewish experiences in the Black South changed during this period of tightening racial divisions. This article suggests a typology for understanding the overlaps, paradoxes, and implications of this phenomenon: the "theoretical Jew" versus the "southern Jew." In Black writing and oration, the theoretical Jew represented an unrooted people navigating persecution in Black proverbial understandings of the Exodus story, postbiblical mobility and folklore about the Jewish experience, while the southern Jew represented a rooted agent of abuse toward the Black population through economic, social, and political measures.⁴ Likewise, to Black Americans, the southern Jew was positioned within the broader white hegemony of the region as structural white supremacy became legally solidified into the early twentieth-century.

In the contrast between these two Jewish types, Black Americans expressed their disappointment in Jews in the South, who, based on the theoretical Jew's oppressed past, they expected to aid their fight [End Page 32] against institutional racism. The southern Jew, then, reflected the anger and frustration felt by Black Americans as white hegemony and white supremacy became...

• “理论犹太人”与“南方犹太人”：19 世纪美国南部黑人对犹太白人的看法
• 雅各布·莫罗-斯皮策 (bio)

在 1880 年代中期，妇女选举权主义者和民权活动家 Orra Langhorne 在弗吉尼亚的期刊《南方工人》中反复进行了比较：“我们土地上的非洲人的历史，”她写道，“无论是在奴役还是在争取公民权利的斗争总是与希伯来人的斗争相似。” ¹在之前的一篇文章中，她解释说：

犹太人，一个流浪的野蛮民族……与美国黑人的故事有着惊人的类比……[被]奴役，并遭受比非洲人更残酷的奴役……黑人成为自由人后的历史构成我们国家史册的一部分，与希伯来流浪者在异国他乡的记录的类比一直在继续。²

正如朗霍恩（Langhorne）等作家注意到犹太人和美国黑人之间的可比历史一样，南方黑人形成了对过去和现在的犹太人的看法，以从犹太人的经历中理解奴隶制和种族主义。

在整个 19 世纪，被奴役和自由的美国黑人挪用和重新利用犹太历史的各个方面——从埃及的圣经奴役到巴比伦的流放，再到欧洲几个世纪的压迫，有时到美国的犹太人流动——来描述和理解他们的自己作为被奴役和被压迫​​的人在解放身份中航行的经历。在奴隶制年代和随后的几十年里，黑人和犹太人争取自由的斗争之间的类比和共鸣无处不在，以至于读者可以在任何地方找到它们，从黑人民权活动家的诗歌、布道、歌曲和观点文章到撰写最著名的黑人知识分子，如布克·T·华盛顿、艾达·B·威尔斯和弗雷德里克·道格拉斯。例如，WEB Du Bois 在《黑人之魂》中写道[End Page 31] “解放是通往应许之地的关键，在疲倦的以色列人眼中，这片土地比以往任何时候都更加美丽。” ³尽管黑人作家、牧师、诗人和学者的解放方法和学说各不相同，但许多人直接或间接地转向犹太人的历史，以叙述、合理化和阐明美国黑人的更美好未来。

然而，即使在黑人知识分子和黑人南方人的著作中，这种对犹太人经验的引用变得越来越突出，对犹太人的一种更新的、独特的描述也出现了，尤其是在 19 世纪的最后 25 年。根据这种另类的描述，犹太南方人用他们的白皮肤来适应那个时代的白人经济和政治结构，这一过程让他们的许多黑人顾客、选民、邻居和旁观者感到困惑。在战后南方犹太人流动的这段时期，黑人仍然坚定地将犹太人与其他白人区别开来，同时将白人文化和政治角色分配给犹太南方人。“文本”中受压迫和善解人意的犹太人之间的不和谐

在这个种族分裂加剧的时期，关于黑人南方的犹太人和犹太人经历的观念发生了变化。本文提出了一种类型学，用于理解这种现象的重叠、悖论和影响：“理论犹太人”与“南方犹太人”。在黑人的写作和演讲中，理论上的犹太人代表了一个无根的人，他们在黑人对出埃及记故事的众所周知的理解、圣经后的流动性和关于犹太人经历的民间传说中受到迫害，而南方犹太人则代表了一个根深蒂固的代理人，通过经济、社会和政治措施。⁴同样，对于美国黑人来说，南方的犹太人随着结构性白人至上主义在法律上巩固到 20 世纪初期，它被定位在该地区更广泛的白人霸权中。

在这两种犹太人类型之间的对比中，美国黑人表达了他们对南方犹太人的失望，他们基于理论上的犹太人受压迫的过去，他们希望帮助他们[End Page 32]反对制度性种族主义。然后，南方犹太人反映了美国黑人在白人霸权和白人至上成为...时所感受到的愤怒和沮丧。