Today the Palmetto State celebrates this heritage. The Daughters of the Confederacy run the Confederate Museum in Charleston and the Confederate flag flies over the state’s capital, it is not really surprising. Organizations like The League of the South call for the independence of the old South, along with the repeal of affirmative action, attacks on immigration, the revitalization of Anglo-Celtic culture, and the return to a white Christian state.
A heritage less celebrated is that of South Carolina’s Jews. Incidents of open anti Semitism still occur especially in schools, This sort of thing may go on elsewhere but no with the kind of vigor enriched by leaders of the state’s dominant Republican party.
With all this, Jews have lived in South Carolina from its founding as well as playing leading roles in the Confederacy. Jews became white and absorbed South Carolinian hatred. Among the 
prominent soldiers of the Confederacy were Gen. E. W. Moise and Dr. Marx E. Cohen. Franklin J. Moses, Jr., with the a rank of Colonel in the Confederate Army, lowered the United States flag from over Fort Sumter in 1862, the official act beginning the Civil War. After the war. Moses switched sides, becoming a radical republican and getting support from South Carolina’s new black citizens.
Later, from 1872-74, he served as governor of South Carolina where he was seen as a Radical Republican, even supporting the integrating of the University of South Carolina. His tenure was marked by rampant corruption and bribery.When Moses was nominated by the Republicans to be the candidate for governor, an opposition within the Republican party organized to block his election. Nonetheless, with overwhelming black support he was the 75th governor of South Carolina. In 1874, Governor Moses was indicted for misappropriation of state funds, but he called for three companies of the black militia in Columbia to prevent his arrest. The court ruled that Moses could not be prosecuted while governor and could be charged only through impeachment.
South Carolina was a microcosm of the nation after WWII and the Holocaust. in Europe, The class of Jewish merchants had begat a generation of lawyers, doctors, accountants, and college teachers, who shifted the Jewish economic niche away from retail business. Jews abandoned the old neighborhoods and moved to the suburbs – a migration that coincided with the first stirrings of the civil rights movement.
+Since World War II, more than a dozen Jews have been elected as mayors of South Carolina towns and cities. One example from the Plametto State was Solomon Blatt. Blatt came from Barnwell, a town whose most distinguished person was General Johnson Hagood, later governor of South Carolina. Soon after Hagood’s election, one of his constituents asked him if he wished to be called “General” or “Governor”. “Call me General,” Hagood said, with a twinkle in his eye, “I fought for that and begged for the other.” by General Sherman felt that the town should be burnt to the ground since it carried the name of one of the most prominent politicians who had demanded South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union.
Six decades later, Solomon Blatt served for 30 years in the state legislature, from 1937 to 1973, ending his final term as Speaker of the South Carolina House in 1970. Blatt was a white racist, architect of the state’s massive effort to maintina Jim Crow, and a White Citizens’ Council advocate. This Jew ardently defended literacy tests, black disenfranchisement, and, as an attorney, defended police officers accused of murdering blacks. His book States’ Rights: The Law of the Land laid a legal foundation for segregation. Ironically, Strom Thurmond was elected Governor of South Carolina in 1946, with the promise of weakening the power of a group of politicians from Barnwell, which Thurmond dubbed the Barnwell Ring, led by Solomon Blatt as House Speaker. Later,when Blatt retired as speaker of the South Carolina House, and in 1974 voted for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Black expectations of Jews were high, but not of Southern Jews who passed for white. Martin Luther King, Jr. praised: “the contribution that the Jewish people have made toward the Negro’s struggle for freedom,” but Dr. King meant northern Jews. . He repeatedly expressed disappointment with Southern Jews, a community that Clive Webb, a historian, defended saying that Dr. . King had unrealistic expectations because he “underestimated the extreme danger to which were exposed” “The desegregation crisis sparked the largest explosion of anti-Semitism in southern history,” Synagogues across the South were fire bombed without regard as to whether the rabbi or congregation had ever identified with civil-rights. The White Citizens’ Councils pressed Jews onto their executive committees. A role all to familiar from the role of Josephus sacrificing his Jewish heritage when joined the Romans at Jotapata or the kapos who led their fellow Jews to the gas chambers. The difference here was that the Jewish community of the South chose to pass as white rather than defend the rights of African Americans. Southern Jews petitioned national Jewish defense agencies to defer to local community sentiments on integration. One Little Rock Jew called upon “these rabid organizations…to shut up,” adding, “Let us work out our own problems down here”. Such attitudes were typical. Even Southern Jews who had spoken and acted at personal risk wished that Jewish Freedom Riders would just go away or that northern activist rabbis would take the next plane home. In Atlanta Blacks targeted Rich’s Department Store since, as Julian Bond put it, there was an expectation that Dick Rich would be “more sympathetic because he was Jewish” , Rich at first resisted black demands, fearing a white economic backlash. Webb reveals Rich to be a deeply conflicted man who had a personal history in support of social justice. Rich’s had already been the first major Atlanta department store to integrate its drinking fountains and extend credit to blacks. Webb notes that rarely were Jewish merchants unsympathetic to the protesters or hostile to change even as they resisted demands. Certainly their prime concern was their economic self-preservation, and they were targeted by black protestors and segregationists alike. “We knew that they were scared,” one black Alabama student activist acknowledged.
Passing for white never reached the extremes of Christian racist fellow travelers. There was never a Jewish segregationist organization like the New Orleans Association of Catholic Laymen. A previous study by Alfred Hero Jr. had found segregationist Jews tended to be unidentified with Jewishness. In contrast, Webb cites the examples of three highly visible segregationist Jews—Solomon Blatt of South Carolina, Sol Tepper of Alabama, and Charles Bloch of Georgia. All were native Southerners from small towns in the Deep South, and all were proud Jews. Blatt, who served as speaker of the South Carolina legislature from 1937-1973, was an architect of the state’s massive resistance. Attorney Bloch was a White Citizens’ Council advocate, who ardently defended literacy tests, black disenfranchisement, and police officers accused of murdering blacks. His book States’ Rights: The Law of the Land laid a legal foundation for segregation. (Bloch’s legal nemesis was his fellow Jewish Georgian, civil-rights attorney Morris Abram.) Neither Bloch nor Tepper were representative, Webb notes. Blatt, by contrast, spoke proudly of the state’s racial progress when he retired as speaker of the South Carolina House, and in 1974 voted for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
By the end of 20th century, Jewish populations in most small towns across the South had dwindled. As of 2013, South Carolina’s Jewish population is approximately 13,570 people. The heritage of this state is as abysmal as that of Germany without the record of post Hitler Germany as a beacon of social justice.
One friend of mine at Thanksgiving dinner asked why couldn’t we just view the Palmetto state as a place for change where immigration will heal the mental illness of racism? I am not confident that the white Jews of affluent suburbs or the managers at Boeing’s union free plant will be on the right side of that battle.
This is not a state where Jews should be proud to live unless we are willing to be seen as the enemies of the white folks.
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